The Art of Hetty Fredrickson now accessible to all in Sayward Gallery

This article was originally published in the North Island Gazette June 25, 2013
On a recent trip down Island, I was pleasantly surprised to come across a new (to me) and exciting piece of North Island history.

During a routine stop at the Sayward coffee and ice cream bar (beside the gas station on the highway), we happened upon the small sign for the gallery located in the rear of the building.  Upon entry we were treated to numerous portraits and paintings, most of which were completed on round pieces of wood sawed off of the ends of logs - complete with bark attached.  These looked familiar to me, as I recognized the faces as the same style as those which used to be more plentiful on the sides of buildings we would see from the highway while travelling through Sayward.

When we dropped our donation in the gallery box the lady in the coffee shop commented how wonderful it is to now have a permanent home for so many of Hetty’s paintings.  Of course this triggered my curiosity, and I had to do a little bit more research!

Hetty Mulder – Fredrickson, the artist behind this prolific collection of paintings, is a familiar personality to many North Islanders.  For 25 years she ran the “Valley of 1000 Faces” in Sayward, which was a popular roadside attraction.

Hetty was born in Indonesia in 1921.  Her family was originally from the Netherlands, but lived for an extended period of time in South East Asia.During WWII Hetty was attending school in Europe when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, and the Japanese occupied Indonesia.  For an extended period of time she had no contact with her parents. Eventually she married, and then divorced.  Perhaps impulsively, without any concrete plans, she decided to pack up her two young sons and move to Canada.
Initially settling in Montreal, Hetty accepted a housekeeping job in the remote BC interior, the pay being only room and board for her and her children. Unable to save any money she felt trapped and isolated. Hetty started looking through the want ads in the paper and found a job housekeeping and child-minding for widower logger named Douglas T. Fredrickson.
The two eventually fell in love and married. During this period Hetty resumed the painting which she had abandoned earlier in life.
After a brief stint in Chilliwack, where the Fredricksons had the unfortunate experience of living in a house which was widely believed to be haunted, they moved to Sayward. In order to keep busy in the small logging community, Hetty offered painting lessons for the local children.  
She was also a prolific painter herself. To save money, Hetty’s preferred canvases were slices of logs. She was known to use common house-paint as a medium, and when paintbrushes were not readily available she would paint with her fingers. After painting a number of portraits, Hetty decided to hang them alongside the road.  They caused a bit of a traffic jam as people stopped to look at them, and many were stolen under the cover of darkness.
Hetty and her husband then decided to forge a trail through their 4 acre property, and filled the forest with portraits.  Cars would pull off the road to visit the outdoor exhibit which took patrons through a rainforest trail. The attraction was called The Valley of 1000 Faces, and for the 25 years that it existed patrons were only charged $1 admission.

Hetty passed away in 1994, and we are lucky that when the property was sold residents of Sayward had the foresight to collect and save a large number of Hetty’s paintings.  They are now accessible to all in the little gallery behind the espresso and ice cream shop just off the highway.  
Please stop in and take a moment to view this lasting piece of North Island history – and don’t forget to leave a donation.
A wonderful short film has been made about Hetty Fredrickson's life and is available on-line here: https://vimeo.com/31637357.
  

Interesting facts about Malcolm Island

This article originally appeared in the North Island Gazette in June 2013.

One of the things that attracts me to the history of the North Island are the unbelievable stories.  Just when I think I’ve researched something fully, a new piece of information surprises me. 

I have published a previous article on the early history of Sointula, but I was recently contacted by the group who is putting on a conference September 20 – 22: Culture Shock: Utopian Dreams, Hard Realities: http://www.sointulan.ca/ .  The keynote speaker at the conference, Dr. Ed Dutton of Finland, will be outlining his theory that the modern sociological concept of culture-shock originated from the personal experiences of Dr. Kalervo Oberg,  a pioneer in the study of anthropology who grew up in the utopian settlement of Sointula.

This conference looks like a very interesting opportunity for anyone interested in the history of the North Island to learn a little more about our unique area.  It has also encouraged me to pull out my files find some other interesting historical tidbits about Malcolm Island.

Mink was the first inhabitant of the island.  When he arrived, he thought the island was too flat, so he collected many rocks and built a mountain that rose to the clouds.  Then Mink collected plants and bushes, but when he tried to plant them on the mountain they kept rolling down the sides.  Mink eventually became frustrated, and he kicked and pulled apart the mountain until nothing remained.  That is why Malcolm Island is so flat.

Some geologists postulate that Malcolm Island is actually a fluvial deposit from a once great river, perhaps the Nimpkish. In pre-history times the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples used the island extensively for seasonal food gathering, including the harvest of clams, berries, and halibut.  There are numerous petroglyphs on the island.

Sointula means “place of harmony” in Finnish.  Malcolm Island is named after Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm of the Royal Navy (1758-1838).

In the late 1800s the provincial government offered pre-emptions to settlers who would travel to the rural and remote parts of the BC coast and make improvements on the land.  Many travelled across Canada and the United States and boarded boats with all their worldly possessions to take on this challenge, never having seen the land or the coast where they would settle.

This was also the age of utopian communities in North America.  Numerous groups (many ethnic Scandanavian who had struggled with their home countries’ deep divisions related to communist ideas), frustrated with the economic downturn in the 1890s, sought out these pre-emptions looking for a better way of life.  On the North Island this included the Danish settlement at Cape Scott, the Norwegian colony at Quatsino, and the Finnish colony of Sointula.

The first utopian group to arrive on Malcolm Island was the Christian Temperance Commonwealth Society, who arrived in 1885.  They had disbanded many years before a group of Finnish settlers, many of which had grown disillusioned working in the Nanaimo coal mines, decided to move to the island under the auspices of the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company, the group that founded Sointula.