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Barry, David – By the Fall of 1922
By the fall of 1922, with the new Campbellford High School under construction, Hastings parents, likewise anxious to provide the rising generation a chance to secure a secondary school education, mused about establishing their own high school. But with high schools already established in Norwood, and Warkworth, and with another about to be opened in Campbellford, support for the idea fizzled out. Clouding deliberations now, on the question of where to send their teens to obtain their secondary education, was the Hastings bridge, forever the metaphoric divide between the residents living on the north, or Peterborough County side of the village, and the residents living on the south, or Northumberland County side of the village. But this time the compromise was quite different.
In the fall of 1923, some twenty students from the north side of the bridge chose to continue their education at the Norwood High School, while some ten of their counterparts from the less populated south side of the bridge, the likes of, Helen, Raymond and Francis Jones, Kathleen and Marion Clapper, Dorothy Johnson, Cliff Baker, James Stevenson, Walter Richardson, William Whitred, and Florence Doughty chose the new Campbellford High School. This group trekked to the Hastings train station every morning to catch the early train to Campbellford, in order to attend classes, and then back home on the late afternoon train. So successful was this experiment, many of the Hastings, and Campbellford teens established life-long friendships, and in many cases, especially for the young men of the village, it was at Campbellford High School that they met their life long partners. So concerned about the situation, Hasting’s poet, “Big Al” Sciver was driven to write a short poem, a warning he dedicated to all the young women of Hastings.
Come all you young women from Hastings
You had better come to life
Or you will all be old maids forever
You will never be a wife.
Those girls who come from Campbellford
With their roguish wining smile
Are grabbing off the local boys
They got you beat a mile. -
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