Argenta Tales

I have always been very curious about the factors of societal change which, in turn, lead me to kibbutz life, hippie communes, Slide Ranch, cooperatives and to intentional communities such as Argenta.   

Recently friends have asked me about life in Argenta and I did some internet surfing to see what I could forward to them.  I found most of what follows in  an oral history dictated by David Herbison for the BC  Co-op Association.  David is a friend of  mine from Argenta days so I hope he won’t mind that  I have moved  his  text around to better tell the story about how the Quakers came to the area, deleted parts of his  story which focuses on the co-op, added further  tidbits on some of the early Quakes and, of course, added my perspective to the history. I  asked another friend from Argenta days,  Bill Wells,  to review this for accuracy and add the bit about his family who are integral to the Argenta story.


Argenta is a small rural community in the Lardeau Valley located at the north end of Kootenay Lake in the south-east corner of British Columbia. To find Argenta and its sister community, Johnson’s Landing on a map, look on the northeastern end of the lake. There really is no village center in either community although each community does have a hall. There are no stores or gas stations, just farms and small land holdings along a one lane dirt road.


The region was first settled around the turn of the 20^th century when a flood of prospectors came to the area searching for rich lodes of silver.  Like many boom and bust towns in British Columbia, Argenta was fueled by speculation and big dreams. Buildings sprang up, among them a two-story hotel with a long bar built beside the lake; cabins to house “women for the convenience of the men” were constructed on the hillside.  After a few years the prospectors left for more lucrative fields, but not before Argenta at one time had a population of as many as a thousand people living in tents and other temporary housing. In 1912, the first of several homesteading families arrived to eke out a living by farming and logging on the bench land above the lake.  They had been lured to the area by real estate agents who were promoting the Kootenays as a fruit growing region.


One small problem surfaced during this era and it continues to be the defining issue for the region: How to make a living in a place where transportation is either by water or dirt road and markets are largely inaccessible. Thus, while the area is fertile, it really takes a long time to get there from a major urban centre (12 hours of hard driving from Vancouver or from Calgary).



In the summer of 1952 three Quaker families emigrated to Argenta from the United States (Tracy and Temple City, California).  John and Helen Stevenson with their family, George and Mary Pollard with their children and Ruth and Bob Boyd with their four children were the first to arrive. Because the land was cheap, the three families were able to purchase a significant amount for about $10 an acre .


The Boyds, while educated in eastern universities, had been farmers in Tracy during the war and had watched small farms in Central California become swallowed up by large corporations.  Their dream was to do small-scale farming in an area where a group of families were in control.  Let me say here that while the  Boyds aspired to be farmers, all members of the Boyd family were accomplished musicians and in his later years Bob (the father) became the music teacher for the public high school in a town about 30 miles away.   They also were the family who brought Ed into their lives. He came up one summer as part of a Quaker Work Camp and ended up living with the Boyds as another son in their log house on “the flats” until he graduated from high school by correspondence.  (In fact, the first time I visited Argenta was to attend the wedding of the youngest daughter, Beth, in 1969 during a famous summer mosquito season. That must have been when I met Bill Wells because he took photos of the event ).

John and Helen Stevenson had been schoolteachers in California but refused to take California’s loyalty oaths, which required all state employees to swear that they were not, and had never been, associated with communists.  Prior to that John Stevenson had been a conscientious objector during World War II (he worked on a Civilian Public Service –CPS – crew in the Angeles National Forest north of Pasadena). The Stevensons had lived in the same community as Bob and Ruth Boyd, John and Anne Rush and several other families who eventually moved to Argenta. In Tracy, the Boyds, Stevensons and Rushs had been involved in helping establish an integrated residential neighbourhood that included whites, Japanese, African-Americans, and Mexicans.  When they moved to Argenta, Helen taught at the local public elementary school before starting  Friends School (grades 1- 10) and John was a stay at home dad and part time farmer.  Most people accepted the Stevenson’s unprecedented role-reversal, but it was definitely a challenge to accepted assumptions of masculinity and femininity.



The Pollards originally came from near Scattergood, Iowa.  They were second, possibly even third generation Quakers.  George was a quiet unassuming man.  Mary was intense; a person who is best described as spiritual – both were quintessential Quakers: plain speech, plain clothes, simple lives.  By the time I arrived on the scene in the late 60’s Mary was one of the Meeting Elders. They had an adopted son, Dick who was friendly with Eddie (and Bill Wells) and who is a great fiddle player.  I recently saw him at a dance here on Saturna where he was fiddling but he didn’t recognize me, or so he said. I digress here to tell my favorite Mary story.  She is the person who told me that “it took 100 years for us (although Mary may have used ‘we’ Quakers) to decide by consensus that slavery was morally wrong. It took the rest of the US 200 years and a war to accept that slavery was morally wrong. Which decision making process do you think works better?”


Within two years four other families arrived to work with the Quakers.  They joined the existing community, building homes, establishing farms, and constructing a Friends (Quaker) Meetinghouse.  Each of the families immigrated for different reasons, but all were responding to broader themes in Western society of the 1950s: Cold War tensions, McCarthyism, segregation in the American South, and the corporate takeover of family farms.


In the fall of 1954 the initial Quaker families started a farming co-op.  The Delta Co-op, as it was called, made decisions by the kind of consensus used by Quakers (Friends Method).  Most members were opposed to a common purse but did favor some degree of salary sharing. There were months of discussion but in the end, members who were paid gave 3/5 to the co-op and 2/5 went to their families.  Men’s work was considered equal to that of women’s, which meant that women who worked outside the home contributed 3/5 to the co-op.  Each adult received thirty dollars a month with five dollars extra given for each child.  Families then lived on about seventy-five dollars a month which, even in those days, was not much money. 

  In the mid 1950’s community projects were the big thing, a spin-off effect of the Co-op.  One of the major projects which the community undertook was the construction of a local hydro-electric power plant in 1957, using the steep-flowing Argenta Creek for it’s energy source.  This project was mostly created by Hugh Elliot, one of the newer co-op members.  Hugh was the third son of an English Earl and because he would never inherit the title had gone exploring (his words, I remember correctly).  Hugh was educated as an engineer and was working in China just after the Revolution.  He had intended to stay in China and build small power projects for the people, but Chairman Mao, in one of his periodic nationalistic fits, issued an edict requiring all foreigners to become Chinese citizens. Hugh was thoroughly British and would never renounce his British citizenship so he packed up and left.  More or less at the same time he met an English woman somewhere in Asia (Hong Kong???) and they decided to move to British Columbia.  Independently wealthy, Elliot provided the capital required to construct the power plant.  Thus, long before BC Hydro brought electricity to the area, community members received their electricity via “Elliot Power”.  They also built a community freezer as an off-shoot of the power station.  Eventually, Hugh sold the power company for a $1 and it became the Argenta Water Power Co-op.  It still continues and 12 lucky Argenta households are served by “Elliot Power” instead of BC Hydro.


In the summer of 1958, Bill Well’s older sister sister Jane came to visit the Boyds after a Yearly Meeting in southern California. Jane had dropped out of Occidental College that spring, and was open to new things….  She was courted by a variety of the local boys and thought that things looked pretty good, so she decided to stay around longer than the month or two she (and my folks, who wanted her to finish her degree) had initially intended. In 1959 Jane married Roy Lake, son of a Johnson’s Landing family (note, I lived in his parents home in Johnson’s Landing the winter Sierra was one; chopped wood, cooked on a woodstove, raised chickens, relearned to play the piano while Ed was in California making the Grateful Dead movie).
Roy Lake, along with some other locals, was starting to farm on some the land that had been part of the Delta Coop, at the head of the lake. After Jane & Roy married, Bill’s  folks chipped in to buy out the others and the Wells-Lake farm was begun. It was next to the Boyd’s farm on the flats.  Like most farmers, they needed an income to afford farming in addition to the help from Phil & Marguerite. Roy got a job on an itinerant highway construction crew, later he got more local work as the janitor/bus driver in the local school.

In 1960, a writer and photographer from Macleans magazine came to Argenta to do a story on the community with a focus on the  Quakers.  The Co-op members explained to the reporter that they “farm, build, and log together … with their actions shaped by a group process and by an underpinning faith in each other.”   The interesting thing is that they really believed it!   However, even with some initial success in farming and uplifting community projects, after a few years of negotiating with each other, the Quakers realised that of the twenty-three adults who lived in Argenta, seventeen had more experience in a classroom than farming.  Obviously, they needed to rethink priorities.


The Friends Meeting formed a School Committee to explore the feasibility of building a high school in Argenta.  After two years of consideration, plans evolved for a school – to be called Argenta Friends School, or AFS -- under the stewardship of Argenta Friends Meeting.   As an alternative school, it would offer university preparatory courses for students in Grades 11 and 12.  Students would live with families and would be integrated into the activities of that family and the Argenta community. And, one of the most  important educational aspects which AFS offered to students was the opportunity to learn to make decisions using consensus.


In the mid-60s, the energy of original Quakers gradually dispersed as the Co-Op had not found a sustaining economic base although the school was flourishing.  Members were still committed to the dream, but felt financially pinched as cars wore out and children grew up.  In a final two-hour meeting, the assets of the Co-Op were divided and members parted as friends.  I add a postscript here: In general, kindness toward each other was the dominant norm, at least while I lived there.  For example, while in Argenta, and angry about something - I forget what - I asked Ruth Boyd how she could put up with such nonsense.  She replied, "love your friends (and family) because of and despite their faults. It is who they are." 


Well, by the time I arrived in the late 60’s, Argenta had become one of the safe havens Vietnam draft dodgers knew about, visited and where some stayed.  I was immediately fascinated by the mix of people, the rural lifestyle, the cooperative approaches which had been and were being tried by the community, Friends Meeting and the school.  After Eddie and I moved to Argenta in the early 70’s, I started teaching at the school.  In those days, students came from all over Canada and the US. It was fun to teach there and the consensus process was so well developed that students participated with the adults in determining curricula, school policies, finances, outings, and much more.  However, the snake was already in the garden.


Because members of Friends Meeting were essentially idealistic and honest people, somewhat culturally isolated (no TV and only CBC radio was available) little did the Quakers realize that the kids coming from all over had different ideas about sex drugs and rock and roll.  Guess what: It is pretty difficult to have discussions by consensus about drugs or sex.  Moreover, many of the original families had moved or aged so that other younger families housed students and many of them had different ideas about sex, drugs and rock and roll than those from Friends Meeting.  Eventually the school closed in 1983, partly because the Stevenson’s needed to retire, partly because of staffing problems, finances and dwindling commitment from Friends Meeting members and because of sex, drugs and rock and roll (at least this is my view).


As for how my pal Bill Wells got there, well, Richard Nixon was inaugurated in early 1969 and he lost his job as a rural coop organizer in Appalachian Ohio when all the War on Poverty programs in Ohio were cancelled.  Initially Bill came to help out Jane and Roy because their house burned down.  It was “a no brainer” for Bill. He emigrated and bought a lovely piece of land in Johnson’s Landing from the Jones brothers who were part of the earlier wave of farmers.  Bill’s parents retired and arrived at the north end of the lake in 1970. They had known the founding Quaker families from the late ‘30’s and 40’s, and had provided financial support to the Meeting and School, as well as the Wells-Lake farm. They even had a little house built there, though Jane & Roy and their 3 little  kids lived in it until their burnt house was rebuilt in late 1969.



The Herbison family were Canadians who moved to Argenta from Nelson in about ’57 or ’58. Hugh was a school teacher at the public school, though they did house AFS kids occasionally after their own children fledged. Hugh also was something of a regional historian and was one of the first who documented the Doukhobor struggles in  Southeastern BC. Agnes (the mother) was and still is a music teacher to private students over the years. She’s very generous with her music and no doubt contributed mightily to AFS and other community musical activities. She is still one of the very best accompanists, in her 90’s. The Herbisons had four kids, two of whom are exceptional musicans although all played or sang as kids.  David has an incredible tenor voice and Bill tells me that David will be the Tenor Soloist in this year’s Messiah, presented by the Nelson Choral Society.  Nancy Herbison, the youngest of the kids,  is known professionally as Nancy Argenta and lives in Victoria and sings soprano with choral ensembles (Google her and listen).

There are hundreds of other short stories about the characters who live(d) in Argenta.  I haven’t touched on Bill and ML’s wedding when the older Quaker ladies ate all the pot brownies I baked, or stories about some of the draft dodgers, the hippies, the oldtimers and the very eccentric Valentines but the above vignettes should give you a flavor of the community.  For a time it really was a special place for me. 

I can remember Bob Boyd telling me that one of the reasons he settled in Argenta was because it was a healthy community.  John and Helen Stevenson were always quick to stress that Argenta was never the “Quaker Community” it has often been labeled, although I disagree somewhat.  They used to say,  “Argenta was not, is not, a Quaker Community.  It is a community, a freestanding community and it was infested with a few Quakers who turned up and tried to settle in and be part of the group

After reading a draft  of  this Argenta tale, a friend of mine gently reminded me about the difference between ideals and ideology.  She said,  we humans have figured out over the centuries that, for instance, trust is the glue that makes social cohesion possible. This trust forms codes of honor, moral structures that facilitate trust and so forth – they form our ideals.  But seeing the world through a single lens (i.e., an ideology) whatever it might be, narrows the view too much and ultimately creates the seeds of destruction.  Is it because strict ideology fails to take into account that people are who they are? …. The impulse towards virtue co-exists with multiple varieties of warts, at least in my life.