Sydenham High School - 150 Years Old

Wilma Kenny | Aug 16, 2023

Sydenham was a boomtown in the last quarter of the 1800’s, a mining and lumber centre with two 3-storey hotels and numerous smaller ones, lumber and grist mills, taverns and tannery. There were brickworks, breweries, bakeries and blacksmiths; churches, doctors, ministers, milliners, merchants and moonshiners.

So it made sense that in January of 1872, in Upham’s hotel (now a private stone house on Portland Ave) a group of citizens voted to ask Frontenac County Council for a $2,000 grant to help build a high school. They didn’t waste time: Stonemasons Schammerhorn and Truscott, the stonemasons who had built the Township Hall, were engaged to build the original handsome school building which stood, with frequent add-ons over the years, until it was destroyed in the reconstruction of 1972. Only the bell tower was salvaged, and stands in a corner of the schoolyard.

The school, which is said to have opened in 1873, provided living quarters for the headmaster for the first 11 years, after which time the space was needed for classrooms.

My grandmother Stella Wood’s (thick, hard-cover and in some places very faded) SHS exercise book dates to 1877, and contains history, literature, doggerel and a great deal of bookkeeping. (She later went on to get her teaching certificate, signed by E. Ryerson).

Stella lived in Sydenham, but for the majority of students, secondary school was a rare luxury. Sydenham High served all the rural areas north of Kingston: Battersea, Perth Road, and all the way north to number 7 Highway, which meant that until the late 1930’s most students had to be able to afford train fare to Sydenham and room and board in the village. Some probably worked for their food and accommodation: Grace Kellar was nearing a hundred when she told me she lived with two spinster sisters, and one of her tasks was to cross the creek daily to milk and feed the cow.

Gene Wartman Babcook remembered her almost 16-year old brother driving a load of students in a crank-start 1918 Model T daily from Keplar to SHS. They carried a pail and funnel, shaking it in lieu of a horn, and used it four or five times each trip to refill the leaking radiator. They often got to school late.

Long-time math teacher Ken Sigsworth grew up in Harrowsmith and as a student, he drove an old overcrowded car every day up and down a steep crooked hill an,d across a sometimes flooded swamp road, to Sydenham. Sometimes everyone but the driver had to get out and help push the car up the hill home.

The students of the early years would not recognize Sydenham High today; a huge sprawling, largely modernized structure drawing numerous orange busses and offering an amazing range of subjects and events.

But one thing unites a century and a half of students: for a formative few years SHS has provided them, for better or worse, the intense and unforgettable experience of transition between childhood and adulthood.