School Name History

Location

32476 Huntingdon Road, Abbotsford, BC

Opened

1933; early 1950s new building was erected on the property; 2003 became South Poplar Traditional Elementary

The School

The Mennonite families of the area wanted a school for their children. The British Columbia government hired H. C. Green to build the school. He was a school trustee at the time, but he resigned so he could take on this project. It was finished in November of 1932. There were no roads leading to the school, so a bulldozer was hired to extend Huntingdon and Emerson (now Gladwin) Roads as far as the school. Twenty-eight children from Grades one to seven began attending school in January of 1933. In two years, the population of the school grew to about fifty.

South Poplar was a one-room school, painted red with white trim. Its basement was used to store firewood and as a play area on indoor days. There was no electricity, furnace, or plumbing. Drinking water was brought in a bucket each day by the janitor from a well on H. C. Green’s farm. The building was heated by a wood-burning stove. There was no indoor toilet, so an outhouse was used. Students sat at wooden desks with ink wells. They made ink by mixing water and ink powder. After writing with nib pens dipped in this ink, they used blotting paper to soak up the excess ink. Sometimes the ink in the ink wells froze in the winter. Besides the writing supplies, there was little other equipment, mainly the following three items: chalk, foolscap paper and drawing paper. In 1935, Abbotsford, Matsqui, and Sumas formed a new school district. Its first school inspector, Philip Sheffield, arranged for South Poplar school to have paper towels, a water container with a tap, a paper cutter, and toilet paper.  

Origin of the Name

In 1897, Professor Charles Hill-Tout, a well-known anthropologist, settled in what is now called the Clearbrook area. He became successful in the lumber industry, eventually owning a sawmill on Abbotsford Lake, now Mill Lake.

In the early 1900s, his eleven-year-old son, William Hill-Tout, transplanted five Lombardy poplar trees from the John Maclure homestead on Matsqui Prairie. He planted them on the Hill-Tout property at the corner of King and Clearbrook Roads. The area became known as the Poplar area.

When the population of the area grew large enough to need a school, the new school was name Poplar School. In 1933, a second school was built in the Poplar area. It was called South Poplar because it was south of the poplar trees planted by Will Hill-Tout. The first school was renamed North Poplar because it was north of the trees.  

The Early Community

For thousands of years, the Sto:lo people lived on the land in the Clearbrook region. They were displaced when settlers from Europe began arriving in the late 1800s. In the 1870s, Mennonite immigrants from Russia settled in the area and established farms. At first, the area was called Sandy Flats or West Abbotsford. By the 1940s, it was known as Clearbrook after Clearbrook Road, a road that led from the town down to Clearbrook, Washington. The road, first called Clearbrook Trail, was originally a route used by the Sto:lo people. In the early 1900s, the land was cleared by logging companies. Farmers, many of them Mennonite immigrants, cleaned up the cleared land to plant strawberries and raspberries. Later, they began dairy and poultry farms.