Bethesda Sunday School - Pt. 2

Bethseda Sunday School played multiple roles in the life of the community. It allowed individuals such as Mae Hearn to express her deep religious beliefs and it offered her an opportunity to impart those beliefs to her children. While the music and the lessons must have been a welcome diversion from the steady work of the week for the younger people, I am certain that the chance to meet and to socialize with other young people was especially welcome. On occasion the young people put on plays and Lois remembers Norman McCully whose family owned a large farm near the four-mile bush, and Percy Switzer whose family farm overlooked a wonderful sweep of land in the Trout Creek valley, acting in those plays. Often, Norman adlibbed his lines, much to the consternation of Percy whose obvious discomfort only added to the delight of the audience. In the 1930's Stella McLeod, who lived with her sister Lulu and her brothers Roy and Fred on land also overlooking the Trout Creek valley, began a girls' club. The club met monthly and it was the members of this club who did the spring cleaning of the Sunday School. I don't know of any pictures taken of the group, but possibly, this picture of the young women who attended Helen Laing's wedding includes members of the club. In this picture in the back row are Anna Dunbar, Mary Shrubsole (whose family lived at the bottom of hill in the Trout Creek Valley), Stella McLeod, Hazel Stewart who married a Kemp and whose grandmother was the midwife who attended the births of many children in the area, and Margaret Dunbar the sister of Anna. In the front row are Lois Hearn, Isobel Snoddy who married Ted Murray, Marie Ballantyne who married Earl Boyes, a man who figures prominently in this story, Annabel Aitcheson, and Mabel Tyler.