Dear Editor:

I grew up in Osoyoos and I still have family there.  I spent some time as a kid in the Haynes House and with the Fraser family, who were incredible people.

I do love Osoyoos and have spent a lot of time there, so I just wanted to write about why the Haynes House matters to me.

I have read with interest some of the commentary since word first broke last week that the Haynes House would be demolished.

I understand that the house was in pretty sad shape and I guess we will need to move on.

But I would like to recite a couple of stories about the place.

Judge John Carmichael Haynes was a colonial figure.

We might disagree with some things he did. But he is a central figure in B.C.’s gold rush history, in the foundation of Osoyoos, and in the establishment of the international customs and border crossing.

Several members of the Haynes family ended up marrying First Nations people who lived in this area and that became a part of our wonderful joint heritage.

We’re still sorting through what happened in the 1800s when the house was built, but we can’t ignore it. Those are the town’s historical fault lines.

I know the Osoyoos Times carried letters and articles about a debate about the Haynes legacy just last spring. It got people riled up.

As they say, the past is never dead, it’s not even past.

Here’s another story.

The Fraser family, who later bought the house  made it a centre for music, the visual arts, history, habitat protection and the preservation of public lands and waterfront so that we could enjoy those things today.

Haynes Point might get a name change, but it would not have been protected without the people who lived in that house.

Hundreds of piano students learned how to play piano from Dorothy Fraser in that old house and they are now living all over this province.

I had a note last week from Sue Dahlo, who grew up in Rock Creek and studied with Dorothy.

“For me she was a mentor, a teacher but also a friend,” writes Sue. “Not only was it the home of the Haynes family, but it was the home of a great lady of the Southern Okanagan, Dorothy Fraser.”

Anyone who visited learned things in that house. It might be about First Nations history, or local fauna and flora, or making music or art. You learned that a town needed a newspaper and that women as well as men could be writers and organizers and leaders.

The Frasers were enthusiasts and the house was alive with ideas about how to make a small town a richer place to live. Many of us benefitted from that.

As Osoyoos also grapples with the possible loss of its high school, it is asking, “What do you need to survive and prosper as a town?”

Each generation answers that question in its own way.

Maybe part of the answer is preserving history, through the museum, through the stories of pioneers and elders and by respecting the past with all its inconvenient truths.

We may be losing the Haynes House, but we can’t turn our backs on what it represents. It is our story.

By the way, I grew up in Osoyoos and currently live in Vancouver.

Thank you.

Greg Dickson

Vancouver, B.C.