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Walking through Deep Cove History

For this project we worked closely with the Deep Cove Historical Society, which is the group that has studied the history of the Deep Cove area, where our school is located. We worked closely with Jim from the Society to assist in translating their printed material to an online format so more people would be able to have access to the information.  

To begin our project, we read a lot of the printed material the Society had about the origins and history of Deep Cove and made notes. We then developed a timeline for Deep Cove history. I read about Robert Dollar, who was a very wealthy man from his lumber camps and steam boat operations. He started the lumber mill in Deep Cove and is who Dollarton Road and area are named for. I found the story of his life and how he impacted our community very interesting. 

For the actual project, we had to take the Deep Cove Historical Walking Tour and revamp it, adding in the use of technology to add details to the tour. On the original tour, there are 16 stops. We kept all of these original stops but added 5 more to make 21 stops on the new tour. We put the walking tour on the internet, making it much more accessible for everyone. We also made a pamphlet for those who want a printed document. Our main focus though was to reach a broader and younger audience who would be drawn to using the internet based materials. 

I was assigned the War Canoe in Cates Park, which I was really happy about. I really liked this project and had a lot of fun with it. I started with some research about war canoes and what they actually are. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the canoes were not really used very often for battle. They were used for transportation of people and goods, and were also used in races. I did some research about war canoes in Canada and specifically for the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and compiled this information into a short write up for the pamphlet. I did a second longer write up for the on-line version of the walking tour. Everyone in class was assigned to do the same thing for their points of interest on the tour. 

We used Google Maps to create our on-line walking tour website, which you can see here:

Deep Cove Walking Tour

We really wanted people of all ages and those who may not use a phone or have data on their phone, to be able to access the tour as well so there was a printed pamphlet made that has shorter write ups for the same stops as on this Google Maps tour. We also included a QR code on the printed pamphlet that would link you to this site when you scan it so people can get more information if they want. 

For our Google Maps Walking Tour, we had to do an audio recording of our write up. Here is the one I made for the War Canoe. 

War Canoe Audio

We added in a “digital enhancement” that people could check out for some additional details and information. For this section, I chose to do a video of war canoe races because it is much more dramatic to be able to see the race happening. Here is that video.

We are going to continue this project when we reconvene for part two of this class in the fourth quarter of the school year. At that time, we will take the feedback we receive from the Deep Cove Historical Society to make any changes or refinements to the project. So stay tuned for part two.