Fort Vancouver Historic Structures Report

Furnishings

a. Schoolroom. The inventories of "articles in use" in the schoolroom are in many respects highly informative, because they list in great detail items such as books, tables, and lamps; but they make no mention of desks, inkstands, chairs, slate pencils, and many other articles that certainly were essential for the operation of a school. Thus either the school was closed at the time and the items listed were simply stored, perhaps in the Owyhee Church or perhaps elsewhere, or much "country made" furniture was not inventoried and many classroom supplies were not Company-owned but provided by the parents or sponsors of the pupils.

Certainly the inventories do not provide enough information to permit one to visualize the appearance of the furnished classroom of an active school. Two available photographs of schoolrooms at other Hudson's Bay Company posts are not of much assistance, because they are of rather recent date (Plates LXIV and LXV); but they do serve to illustrate how fairly large classes could be accommodated in rather small rooms. They also show that styles of desks apparently did not change greatly over a long span of years.

The inventory of "articles in use" taken at Fort Vancouver in the spring of 1845 included the following items:

Under a separate heading from the schoolroom, the 1845 inventory of "articles in use " contained a long list of schoolbooks. It appears to have been rather carelessly copied from the list of books in the 1844 inventory, with which it is identical except for spelling and punctuation. The 1845 list is reproduced below exactly as written, except that doubtful words have been given as they appear in the 1844 list, which is extremely legible. Additional information added in brackets is re produced from the Columbia requisition for Outfit 1841 (signed by John McLoughlin at Fort Colvile, April 18, 1838), by which a number of the books were ordered:

If the school was in active operation in 1845-46, the schoolroom undoubtedly contained, in addition to the Company-owned items listed above, a number of accessories and supplies belonging to the individual students. Among such articles offered for sale in the Sale Shop during the 1840s were black lead pencils, slate pencils, and small slates, in addition to an assortment of schoolbooks, copy slips, and "slips on boards." [72]

b. Dormitory. The historical record seems to contain no information on the furnishings of the room in which the master and some of the boys slept. From what Chaplain Beaver wrote, however, one can judge that the accommodations were crowded and extremely plain. They undoubtedly were similar to those in the unlined garret at Fort Victoria where the bunks of the schoolboys were "bare boards, covered with an Indian mat and a blanket, and a second blanket as a covering." One bowl and jug sufficed as washing facilities for the entire dormitory.

c. Kitchen and bedroom or bedrooms. No information whatever appears to be available concerning the furnishings of any additional rooms that may have been in the Owyhee Church. Probably one of these rooms was a kitchen, which would have been furnished in the same manner as the kitchen to the Big House but on a much reduced scale. Not know ing for certain who lived in the building, it is virtually impossible to make an assumption concerning the furnishings of the bedroom or bedrooms other than that they must have been equally as sparse as or even more sparse than those in the Bachelors' Quarters.