While most of the Rocky Ag Society’s historic school marker signs are in rural areas of Clearwater County, one resides in the heart of Rocky Mountain House.

Confluence School served the West Country from 1912 to 1962 — with both town and country kids attending.

Vic Maxwell, who graduated from the school in 1953, recalls walking to school two miles each way every single day — with some fellow students travelling even further.

Students from as far away as Frisco attended, he recalls — although those students arrived on a stove-heated “horse van” before bussing was adopted in the early 50s.

Vic Maxwell speaks about the long distances students traveled to attend Confluence School in Rocky Mountain House

 

Maxwell recalls many games of baseball played in the well-kept diamond nearby.

He also recalls the outdoor washroom — or “biffy” — students used, often in frigid winter and blizzard conditions.

“It had an outdoor biffy for the girls and an outdoor biffy for the boys,” he laughs. “It was a bench with four holes — that’s the only place when it’s -40 out.”

Vic Maxwell recalls the outdoor biffy at Confluence School

 

The building itself had two sections with the east half housing Grades 1 through 6, while Grades 7 and up occupied the west half. A coal-fired furnace heated the building, with Maxwell earning “a buck a week” to shovel coal.

The Confluence bell — which has recently made a return to Rocky Mountain House — was hung atop the building.

The school sat at the current site of École Rocky Elementary. Maxwell believes the concrete foundation of the old school was utilized in the construction of École Rocky.

Vic Maxwell recalls walking to school in the 1940s

 

Sanitation was handled very differently in those days, Maxwell recalls, as there was no municipal septic system.

Buildings in Rocky would often share a septic tank — sometimes three or four sharing one system — and a wooden, horse-drawn, hand-pumped “honey wagon” would suck out the tank on a regular basis.

Additionally, buildings were wood and coal heated until the early 1960s when natural gas was finally introduced.

The town itself was very different too, he says, with a much smaller population of around 1,200 people in the 1950s. Maxwell says it wasn’t until major oil and gas discoveries at Husky Ram River and Baseline in the 1960s that the town began to grow.