Naming the West : Stories Davisburg Community

Davisburg Community Senior Story 1

The Bow and Highwood rivers join just further east, just five or six miles. What happened is when land was sold to farmers it was sold in quarter sections. There was a little corner of a quarter section of the land that the man on the south side of the river owned. This little corner, chunk of land, over the years, was actually used for where the communities used to get together, and part of the entertainment that the community had was to go down to the river and that was where they held their picnics and swam.
There was a rock there that people called the beaver's head, because it was shaped like a beaver head. That is where people would swim, and we would jump off the beaver's head and into the water. Over a period of time this… The farmer couldn't do anything with this land, so it had no real use. So back in the… I believe in around the late fifties, the farmer allowed a church to build a camp there for his congregation and for children to take advantage of and then over a period of time it was sold privately to a gentleman and he set up a campground there, and he called it Nature's Hide-Away.
Is it still a campground today?
Yes, it is indeed. So that's where the community used to meet, and a great deal of our time was spent down there. The other place the community spent a lot of time was down by the bridge that goes across the Highwood river. I'm sure some of you have been down there. And that's were the kids used… where the hockey games were held, the ice was, I guess, particularly good at that time. And there were hockey games held there and that's where we had skating parties, and things like that.
The community has always been together. Right from the days the very first settlers came here, there was always a community. And those communities – all the people would get together and do things like go to church at the church that you see down here on 96th street, or go to the school. The school was built in the 1880's and they would go to the school at that time too. So there always was a community. If that [the school] wasn't available, they would get together in someone's house and everybody would drive over in their horse and buggies and have fun. Birthday parties were very similar to what we have nowadays, actually. We got birthday cakes and it was more community though. It wasn't just children that came to the parties, because their moms and dads came too because that was the only way for the children to get there and it was too far for them to go back home. So it was generally a family birthday party, where everybody came.
Did you know that there used to be an airport out here?