Eight cars are parked outside the Log Building, which at this time had two side extensions. This photo is believed to have been taken in the 1920s. The building was built in 1892 from hand-hewn logs from the Fairview area. At the time of this photo, it was located where the Osoyoos Elementary School now stands. (Osoyoos and District Museum and Archives)

This week’s photo features the Log Building that played numerous roles in Osoyoos’ history and is now found in the Quonset portion of the Osoyoos and District Museum and Archives.

The building was constructed with hand-hewn logs in 1892 and was originally located where Osoyoos Elementary School sits today.

It first served as a government office, magistrate’s office, jail, constable’s quarters and living quarters for the agent.

When the government office was moved to Fairview near Oliver in 1899, the Log Building took on other uses. In 1917, part of the building became a one-room schoolhouse.

“The school was needed for the children of the three families who comprised the population of Osoyoos at the time – the Richters, the Frasers and the Jermyns,” according to a description from the museum. “At the time, a minimum of 10 students was necessary to open a school in the area, but there were not enough school-aged children among the three families to reach that requirement.”

To reach the minimum of 10, the Hobbs family moved from Kruger Mountain into the living quarters at the log building.

The Presbyterians were the first of several churches to use the building for Sunday services. The Lutherans, Anglicans, Pentecostals, and United Church later used the building until they built their own churches.

When the school moved to the present town hall location in 1932, the log building continued to be used by local organizations as a meeting hall.

It was sold in the 1940s and in the late 1940s it served as a private residence.

After being relocated to Main Street in 1961, where the planning office is now located, it subsequently became part of the museum in 1963.

When the museum moved to the old curling rink in 1975, the log building was dismantled, moved and reassembled in the Quonset. The log building in the museum is only a portion of the original.

When the museum moves to its new location at the Home Building Centre on Main Street in 2020, the plan is to move the log building into its new home there.

Your memories:

Last week we featured a photo of the four businesses on Main Street around 1939 and several readers shared memories of them.

Don Brunner, who was born in 1937, remembers as a young child going to supper one night with his mother and two sisters to Albert English’s restaurant, one of the buildings. In those years, it was rare to eat out.

“I don’t know why, but it stuck in my memory that Albert English’s restaurant was a really big deal for us kids to go to,” Brunner recalls.

It was located next to the garage on the corner, and on the other side was Carlson’s grocery store, which Brunner remembers in its subsequent incarnation as a Red and White.

The Pioneer Meat Market was at the end of the buildings, but Brunner remembers it in its later location where Shoppers Drug Mart is now.

That stretch, where Shoppers is now, had the only board sidewalk in town, Brunner said. Sidewalks in the rest of the town were dirt.

Ruth Schiller, who came to Osoyoos at age 14 from Hanover, Germany before the Second World War, also remembers very well the buildings in last week’s photo. And she remembers Brunner, who was only a toddler, very well too.

Schiller worked as a teenager at Carlson’s and she said she and Mrs. Carlson used to dread a visit by Brunner’s mother and her three children. Mrs. Brunner didn’t control her children, said Schiller, and little Don especially ran wild through the store, pulling items off shelves.

“Mrs. Carlson called them ‘heathen kids,’” Schiller recalls.

Brunner, now 80, was born in his grandmother’s house in what was called “Happy Hollow,” at the bottom of the hill on what is now 89th Street.

He lived, however, close to what is now the waterslides on Lakeshore Drive. While his father served in the army, his mother had several cows, and she took the milk and delivered it in town.

Brunner said he was too young to milk the cows, but he would bring them in for their twice-a-day milking.

His mother delivered the milk in her old Ford Model A, taking it to customers’ doors and selling it for 10 cents a quart.

With rationing in effect, Mrs. Brunner would trade coupons for booze and other things for the gas coupons she needed to do her milk deliveries.

Brunner has lived in Osoyoos all his life except when he worked in the oil industry and spent part of the year working in Alberta. He’s seen Osoyoos evolve from a little village of dirt streets and a few buildings.

“The town kept growing, but it was slow for a long time, because there was never anything here except the fruit and the tourist season,” he said. “And the tourists weren’t even here in the beginning.”

He remembers one of the periods of biggest change was in the 1960s and 1970s. He worked for the Town of Osoyoos during some of that time, operating a backhoe.

Do you have memories of the Log Building? Please comment at OsoyoosTimes.com or on Facebook. You can reach Editor Richard McGuire by email at [email protected] or by phone at 250-495-7225.

RICHARD McGUIRE

Osoyoos Times