Agnes Campbell MacDougal had spent most of her life singing in Victoria’s First Presbyterian choir. In 1920, she and her sea-captain husband moved to Harper’s Camp. The piano came with them.
Horsefly has been doing arts on the fly since before anyone named it.
The Piano and the Chanties
Ben Gruhs expanded the Corner House to ten rooms around 1921, and after that there was always music in it. The large log living room, hung with bear skins and moose antlers, filled up with neighbours on any excuse. John Wawn, a few cabins down, had been a sailor and brought his guitar and a repertoire of sea chanties. Agnes sang Scottish songs in her beautiful alto. A local Scotsman named Neil Robertson had a tenor that sat right alongside it. Someone else always had a mouth organ, sometimes an accordion. The repertoire ran from Strauss waltzes to hymns, whatever the current hit happened to be worked in somewhere. Greta MacDougal, who would later marry John Parminter, grew up in that living room. She was still surprised, decades later, by how much talent Horsefly could hold.
The First Note
Before the piano, there was Annie Moore. Horsefly’s first schoolteacher had studied guitar alongside her teaching certificate, and in 1910 she boarded with Mrs. Harry Walters, whose boys were among her first students. In the evenings she pulled out the guitar at Mrs. Walters’ parties and got the community singing. In 1911 she married Albert Patenaude, a rancher from the Woodjam, and became Annie Moore Patenaude, but the parties at Mrs. Walters’ kept going.
Flour Sacks and the 24th of May
By the twenties, Horsefly had a theatre company. Grace Campbell Cessford directed. She was Agnes MacDougal’s sister; both had grown up Campbell in Victoria. Winters were for rehearsing, often crowded into the Corner House living room to save the wood in the hall. The 24th of May was opening night: two performances, followed by a dance each night.
Costumes came from flour sacks, dyed and ruffled into shape. For a play called “Sunshine,” Greta MacDougal opened the show dancing in a yellow flour-sack skirt her mother had hooped with bent wire, with a matching parasol. Her cousin Irma Cessford, later Pegues, played the piano. To tour to Williams Lake, the cast piled into the back of an open truck, straw on the floor, every coat they owned piled on top. They played to full houses.
Joe Williams and the Saturday Night
When there was no play, there was a dance. Joe Williams was always there with his fiddle. Ben Gruhs called the square dances: Buffalo Gal, Lady Around Lady and the Gent Go Slow. Through the Depression years, nobody had money and everybody needed to get out of the house. People brought what they could: sandwiches made from ground moose meat and pickles, coffee from the kitchen. It didn’t cost anybody very much. As Greta Parminter put it: “This was a great place to weather the Depression, in Horsefly.”
Arts on the Fly is back in town this July. Agnes MacDougal brought the piano in 1920. Annie Moore had the guitar a decade before that. Joe Williams was always there with the fiddle. It takes real work to put on a festival. It always did. What’s never taken any convincing is the crowd.
Sources
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Greta (MacDougal) Parminter, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 23-1, August 1979.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Ida (Patenaude) Zirnhelt, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 20-2, May 4, 1978.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Glenn Walters, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 1-6, July 19, 1977.