The banner photograph on the Lake Country Museum and Archives website shows the starting line-up of fifteen cyclists about to begin a grueling thirty-five mile race from Vernon to Kelowna. Three young Lake Country men participated: Lawrence (Larry) Evans and Harold Thomson of Oyama and Hugh Bernau...
Next week is Heritage Week. Take the following quiz to test your local historical knowledge. 1. What year did the Oyama canal open? 2. What was the name of the first post office in Winfield? 3. Which brothers developed the town site of Okanagan Centre? 4. Who ran “The Store” in Okanagan Centre...
Before the navigation canal was built in 1908, a creek drained Wood Lake into Long (Kalamalka) Lake. Wood Lake was initially four feet higher than Kalamalka, perhaps five or six feet higher during the spring freshet. In some years the water gushed down the creek making passage across the isthmus...
Oyama was a wonderful place to grow up during the Depression. This dance troupe performed at a Kalamalka Women’s Institute garden party held on the grounds of the Prickards about 1939. By all reports it was a wonderful setting, featuring an amazing peony hedge and overlooking Kalamalka Lake. The...
In the pre-WWII years, Oyama boys were numerous enough to field a hockey team that played against Vernon and perhaps other teams. They practised and played on a community hockey rink on the flat land formerly occupied by the Sterling and Pitcairn Packing House (just north of the canal bridge on...
The Lake Country Museum and Archives received this wonderful photograph from Mary Bailey (née Ellison). Through Gladys Trewhitt’s album on Oyama history we have identified all of the folks in the photo. The photograph was taken on August 12, 1958, marking the centenary of the creation of the...
Oyama High School, under the leadership of coach Clause Bissell, had a great record on the soccer pitch. Their greatest rival was the Mackie Prep School in the Coldstream and in 1943 the Oyama team was victorious, winning the prestigious Silver Pheasants trophy for North Okanagan junior boys...
The stretch of Highway 97 has been completed, directing through traffic from the lakeshore (now Pelmewash Parkway) to higher levels. This is not the first or last change in route for the Kelowna to Vernon road. The road was originally completed in 1875 and was known as the Vernon to Mission road,...
Soccer was a popular sport in the Central Okanagan while Claude Bissell was teacher and coach, first at Oyama High School and later in Rutland. This photograph of the Okanagan Zone Soccer Champions shows the Rutland team about to leave by bus for Penticton where they caught the overnight train to...
Pelmewash Parkway is about to be devoted entirely to local traffic, providing Lake Country with the wonderful asset of seven kilometres of lakeshore for all manner of recreation. This seems to be an opportune time to discuss the origin and possible meaning of the name “Pelmewash.” I confess that...
“The Railroad” was the name used on the earliest colonial maps, before the settlement in Lake Country, to refer to the isthmus at Oyama. The term certainly did not refer to any European-made feature; it had to refer to either a natural or an Okanagan Indian structure. What was it? Until the late...
How did one travel from the Okanagan to the coast in the first decades of the twentieth century? Crossing the coastal mountains was no easy task. The Dewdney Trail, connecting the South Okanagan to Hope, had been built during the Gold Rush, and for years supplies came into the Valley by pack train...