I see in the news that the Garth Homer Centre in Victoria has moved into the old S.J. Willis School building while their new facility is being built.

That brings back memories of when I attended ‘S.J.’ for Grades 7-9. That was back in the Jurassic Age, you understand. Not happy memories, by any means, but Jr. High was unique to me for other reasons.

Even at that age I was into history and having heard that S.J. was perched on the same hillside as the former provincial jail intrigued the heck out of me. I spent many a lunch hour roaming the grounds on both sides of Topaze Avenue, looking for evidences of the old prison.

The school joke for us students (inmates) was, of course, that things hadn’t really changed. (I said my memories of S.J. aren’t altogether fond ones.) —*BC Archives*

Other than a concrete pad in the trees, likely that of an outbuilding, and the one-storey blockhouse that sat (sits) beside the entrance driveway, then used by Canada Customs as a warehouse, there was little visible evidence of what had been known as Heartbreak Hill.

Last year, Belinda and I spent an hour following up on a tip from a guard at Wilkinson Road Jail, the successor to the Hillside Jail, that the four men executed at S.J. were buried near what was the prison’s market garden. That’s the lower level cornering Blanshard St. and Hillside Ave.

I didn’t know that when I was searching while attending S.J., of course.

We quickly narrowed it down to a small ledge between the rocky ridge on which the school sits and the old garden, now a playing field. At least, so I surmise, it being highly unlikely that they’d bury bodies in the veggie garden.

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I just read somewhere that the four sweetest words in the English language are, “I told you so.”

Heaven forbid that I should stoop so low! Even when I’m right and they’re wrong. But, to be serious:

When it was officially announced that the Cowichan Valley’s iconic Kinsol Trestle spanning the Koksilah River on the Trans Canada Trail (the old CNR grade) was going to be demolished, I was appalled. Sure, it was semi-derelict after two decades of neglect, and blocked to traffic because of damage from two arson attempts.

But even in that sad state, it was magnificent!

Opening day on the refurbished Kinsol Trestle. —*Author’s Photo*

Because a bridge crossing of the Koksilah River was essential to the highly popular TCT, the idea behind the demolition was to replace it with a span utilizing three timbers for every five of the original. As a friend, who worked in construction, snorted, “It’s going to look like a scaffold!”

To make a long story short, the provincial and regional powers-that-be were encouraged (with difficulty!) to blink and, several million dollars later, the Kinsol Trestle stands tall and proud. As indeed it should—according to the latest stats, it receives 300.000 visitors a year!

How many visitors, do you suppose, would have been drawn to the proposed replacement that we real trestle supporters sarcastically called a “stick bridge?”

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