OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response a column titled 'Abandoned Craighurst school was once a bustling community hub,' published Oct. 27.
I would like to add to Deb Exel's story of the Craighurst schoolhouse. Her detailed account of its settler history is excellent. In addition, it is a beautiful building.
I am one of the artists who occupied the building after it was closed in the early 1960s.
It went to auction in 1963 and I believe it was purchased by a local businessman, who in turn sold to it to the sculptors Emmanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wynn Wood. He had retired from the Ontario College of Art to Thunder Bay where their daughter and late Orillia resident Qennefer Browne was living.
They had missed the schoolhouse auction by a day, but had hoped to make a studio there. They died shortly after purchasing the building and it sat empty, except for their sculptures and plasters.
Qennefer opened the building to Leo Kamen, a photographer and sculptor, to live and work there in the 1970s. He famously hosted two small festivals of dance and music (The Dog Days) and later opened the Kamen Gallery in downtown Toronto.
When he left in 1980, I took over the building and built a pottery studio there with a small gallery. Over the years, both the pottery and gallery expanded to fill the space and in 1999 I bought the building from Qennefer.
Many renovations were performed over those years and it proved to be a structure with good bones.
We hosted dozens of exhibitions over the 38 years I was in the building and sold the work of many local artists and artisans, as well as my own.
Tons of clay were mixed out back to be made into pots and hundreds of firings took place in the gas kiln in the old wood shed. It was a wonderful place to work.
When I sold it in 2018, it was intended to become a part of a commercial sector to be developed on that corner in Craighurst. I believe the building has since changed hands twice and its future remains uncertain.
Hartley Woodside
Oro-Medonte
