This weekend we feature the writings and interview of Brenda Shaw – local historian and writer:
INTERVIEW WITH LAWRENCE HILL
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1983 AT HIS HOME IN OSOYOOS CONDUCTED BY PENNY-LYNN GALBRAITH AND BRENDA SHAW
Lawrence Hill was great uncle to Brenda Shaw…
his sister Bessie was her grandmother.
Lawrence Hill was the youngest of ten children. By the time he came along, three of his older sisters, Bessie, Nora and Mary (Chubb), had already left home and married. Then there were Grace, Dora (who now lives at Winfield), Gertrude and Ruth, and finally Bill, Jess, and Lawrence. Their parents were William Walter Hill and Rachel Wilhemina Vieux, known as Mettie.
William was born in Wisconsin in 1861 (he died in 1933 in Penticton and is buried there). Rachel (Mettie) was born in 1870 in Eagle Point near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She was about ten years younger than her husband, and she died in 1952 and is buried in Oliver. Mettie’s mother had a “stopping place” at Little Falls on the Chippewa River. William was on a log drive down the river, and stopped in for a meal. That’s how he met his wife. William and Mettie were married in 1885.
William’s family were railroaders, even his father. William himself was a policeman in Barnesville, Minnesota before moving to Alberta (Forestburg) in 1904 to homestead. He shipped out two head of oxen and two horses, Tom and Gerry. The family came in wagons, and lived in tents until the father got the sod house built. The livestock was shipped to Strome, the nearest railroad station. The family lived near Alliance, and knew the Fred Schumann’s.
All the Hill daughters were born in the States. The boys were born in Alberta, Lawrence in 1912, in their sod house. The house was two stories high and the walls were three feet thick. They moved into a regular wood house when Lawrence was about three.
William leased the homestead out and moved his family to Tacoma Washington, where they stayed about a year. Lawrence started school there. After that William went back to Alberta and sold the homestead, and then moved his family to Oliver as he had heard there was a new town starting. Bruce Skelton and Fitz (Hazel Dawson) had been telling the Hill’s about Oliver and the family arrived here in 1919.
William bought property on Main Street (where the Credit Union now stands) and opened a confectionary and restaurant. Mettie Hill and the girls still at home ran the restaurant. The camps were going at that time, and there were a lot people around. The family lived up on the hill at first (next to Norton’s), and then eventually built behind the restaurant. The house was later moved to Osoyoos where it still remains.
Lawrence said his mother should have had a medal. She fed many hungry workers without charge. Some of them stayed up to a week. He saw as many as fifteen people eating at a time and none of them being able to pay but most helped out with chores. Times were hard and money scarce. He said his mother could never turn away a hungry person no matter what.
The family ate most of its meals at the restaurant as well, what with the mother and the girls there all the time. Ma ran the restaurant until 1946 or so and then finally sold out because she was getting old. She retired in her new house down below. Lawrence says White’s Meat Market bought the place from his mother and opened meat lockers.
Mr. Hil always had a car. He had been on the school board and council in Alberta, but didn’t get involved in that sort of thing out here. He was of United Church background and Ma Hill was Catholic. Because her husband was not Catholic, Mrs. Hill never followed it up.
William was a plasterer by trade after he quit farming. He plastered the United Church here. He had two places (orchards), one right across from Tait’s which George Kilback bought off of him and another by Bitterman’s.
Lawrence went to school in the old red schoolhouse. Beatrice Collen (before she was Collen) was his teacher. The school had two rooms and Charlie Mitchell was principal and teacher in the other. Old Charlie was a mean son-of-a-gun. He used to lose his head and throw stuff. Once he threw a big blackboard compass at Lloyd Fairweather and just missed Lloyd’s head. The point of the compass went right through the blackboard and the hole was still there years later for anyone to see.
Another time Charlie threw a book at Arie Ripley and hit her on the arm almost breaking it. Lawrence only attended school until somewhere around grade eight. He left Oliver when he was sixteen and went up to Quesnel, where he worked driving truck for a Chinese fellow (Lee Chong Co.), delivering goods out to Barkerville. He was in Quesnel from 1929 to 1931.
Lawrence also remembers when Harry Fairweather had the Oliver Hotel brought up from New Westminster. It came up in pieces and Harry was in the process of putting it together. Harry often supplied the boys from the Reserve with liquor and one night Lawrence remembers that Harry must have run out of booze because the fellas from the Reserve were in a foul mood and began throwing large boulders into the hotel. Harry did not have the roof on yet and by morning there was quite a good supply of very large rocks sitting on the floor of the Hotel.
Lawrence had a nickname, Half-Pint. “Old Fat Johnson called me that. I never grew until I was about seventeen or eighteen. I was small for my age and could wear my sisters’ shoes. My sisters used to tell me I’d better get an education because I’d never be big enough to earn a living.”
The Japanese built the railroad into Oliver and Lawrence used to chum with Musija Mada, one of the crew.
For entertainment in Oliver there were sleigh rides and skating in winter. They went to dances at the old community hall. And horses; Lawrence always had a horse. As kids, they would walk through the siphon, entering up by the school and coming out on the Indian Reserve. “We had a lot of fun scaring one another, telling someone the water was coming.” Most of the syphon was underground and the part from the edge of the community park to the top at the Indian Reserve was above ground.
Sylvia Rose Worley, called “Dood” from the time she was little, came over from the Kootenays to work in the packing house here. She was visiting friends in town when Lawrence was home from the Cariboo and he met her. In the dirty thirties Oliver looked like the end of the world to Dood but there was a job at least.
On August 25, 1934 Lawrence and Dood went down across the line and were married in Okanogan, Washington. She wore a plain blue dress and a hat. In those days you could just go down and get married; you didn’t need a license or anything.
About four car loads of people went down for the wedding. They all stayed overnight at the hotel in Okanogan and in the morning the hotel management gave the lot of them breakfast on the house.
From 1932 to 1935 Lawrence was selling cars for the Grand Forks garage in Penticton. He bought an old 1925 Maxwell from the garage and in 1935 moved up to Barkerville. He and Dood had bought a big police dog in Oroville, Misty, and they all got in the car and went off to the Cariboo. They had 75 cents left when they got there.
Lawrence wanted to get on at the Cariboo Gold Quartz Mine in Barkerville. Anyone who wanted work had to show up at the mine in the morning and hope he would be picked for work that day. There would be 200 men sitting around on a big pile of timbers, waiting to be picked to work. For a while Lawrence got a job hauling slab wood at
$2.00 and $3.00 a load, but he wanted regular work. He finally went in after the other men were gone and talked the mine manager into giving him a job.
Lawrence worked in that mine until it closed in 1936. From there he went to Trail selling cars, and then got on with the railroad. He worked with the railroad until 1950. He wasn’t able to go overseas during the Second World War because his job on the railroad was frozen but he did join up with the Canadian Mounted Rifles.
In 1935, February 22, daughter Lorraine was born to Lawrence and Dood. Lorraine married Bob May and had three children: Colin, Blair and Corey-Lou. Bob and Lorraine are both deceased.
Lawrence transferred with the railroad in 1948 to Penticton. In 1950 he went back to selling cars and did that until he retired. He worked for the Pontiac dealer and was sales manager for fifteen years. When the dealership sold out to Loewen, Lawrence quit after six months and opened his own car lot. He and Dood also had a motel in Okanagan Falls – Skaha Bungalows – and he commuted to Penticton daily.
The Hills bought the motel in 1962 and sold it in 1972. They lived at the motel while Lawrence had car lots in Penticton and Oliver. After they retired they moved to a house in Osoyoos. Dood got sick and went into a Care Home where she passed away in 1995. Lawrence sold the house and moved into an apt until he became very ill and ended up in the Oliver hospital where he passed away in 1997.