Page 166-8 in The Aylmer Road, an illustrated history, by Diane Aldred, Aylmer Heritage Association, 1994.
The first school on this site was built in the 1830s, the third school to be built in Hull township. This building burned in 1870 and was replaced by a one room stone school in 1872.
A typical rural school, it housed grades one to seven, all taught by a single teacher. The school was heated by a box wood-stove. Two school trustees who lived nearby started the stove each morning. Two privies, one for the girls and one for the boys were outside in opposite corners of the school yard, and remained in use until 1947. Drinking water was brought over in a pail each morning, and a single enamelled cup served everyone.
The No 1 school district stretched from Fraser Road in the west (Loblaws) to Brickyard Road in the east (Mountain Rd), and included Deschênes.
Like the South Hull council, the school board was composed of farmers, who had made few innovations in education between 1870 and 1945. The young parents who moved in to Lakeview Terrace starting in 1946, when it became a veterans’ land settlement, were appalled by the limited facilities of the small local school. They were concerned about the danger their children faced walking to school along the increasingly busy Aylmer Road. In 1946 the school board asked the Quebec Department of Highways to reduce the speed limit on Aylmer Road, and they also considered the possibility of bussing children from Deschênes and Lakeview Terrace to the Simmons School on the NW corner of Vanier and Pink Roads.
The veterans insisted that either a new school be built or they should join the Aylmer school board, which was less “economy-minded”.
In 1948 the school board held a special meeting of taxpayers who voted in favour of a new school. In 1950 the Veterans’ Land Administration sold four lots to the Protestant School Board of South Hull for a new elementary school to consolidate the four one-room schools in South Hull into one school. The four-room South Hull School, on the corner of Vanier Road and Crescent Drive, was built and opened in 1951.
The stone school was no longer needed and was sold by tender to the highest bidder, the King Solomon Masonic Lodge. An extension was added on the west side, and it has been used as a meeting house ever since.
Simmons School, No 2
South Hull School 50th anniversary contents page
Updated 07/6/19