Harrow High: a family tradition

by Ashley Ann Mentley

Early on a September morning in the late 1930s, Jeanne Brown packed her lunch and gathered her school books.  Along with her three sisters, she walked the one mile from their farmhouse into Colchester, along the northern coast of Lake Erie.  There they met fellow classmates, piled into a ten-seater Cadillac and drove to the high school in Harrow.

Brown is now 93 years old and lives alone in the same farmhouse, which was built by her father in 1870.  In 1939, she was part of the first class at Harrow District High School.  It is where her four children all later attended and now, the last of her grandchildren are students.  With the recent decision by the Greater Essex County District School Board to permanently close the school, not only will her grandchildren be displaced, but a large part of her history, her family’s history and the history of the community will be lost.

Before the high school was built, students went to Harrow Continuation School. Brown’s mother, Fannie Munger, was one of the ‘Original 14,’ a nickname given to the students of very first graduating class.  The Munger family was one of the first families to settle in the area, documented as far back as the late 1700s.

“You know, it’s a crime,” Brown said about the recent decision to close the high school. “Because a lot of people aren’t going to come to Harrow now.”

Looking at a well-worn photo from the Harrow High School class of 1939, Brown pointed out the faces of family and friends, such as her younger sister Shirley and her cousin and best friend Clara. She even remembered the four teachers in the photo who taught at the school.

“That’s Mrs. Crookshank.  She was an old cracker jack.”

Brown reminisced on getting into trouble in the upstairs science lab and being very involved in sports.

“We were allowed to play lacrosse,” she explained, “until I ran Janette into the fence and broke her ankle. That was the end of the girls playing lacrosse.”

Brown’s second cousin (Clara’s son), Jonathan Thrasher, also grew up in the area and graduated from the high school in 1980.

The high school, Thrasher explained, was originally part of the Harrow-Colchester South School Board, which is when it was at its peak.  It then merged with the Essex County District School Board and finally with the Windsor-Essex County District School Board.  He said since then it has been on the chopping block five times.  Until now it remained safe but recently the school board voted 5-4 to close the school.

“There were 500 kids when I was there and that’s when it was at its maximum capacity,” he said.

Thrasher, who now drives school buses in Harrow and Amherstburg, said the school always had good, dedicated teachers.

“There was a strike while I was there.  Teachers, it was rumoured, taught kids in their basement during the strike so they could still graduate.  The teachers at Harrow High taught because they wanted to teach,” he said.

Thrasher said Harrow was a great town to grow up in and businesses are still currently growing, but he is concerned about the future of it.

“If you were going to build a house and start a family, would you go to a town that didn’t have a high school?” he asked.

Since Harrow is a small, rural town and Harrow High has been the only high school in the area, both Brown and Thrasher agreed it created a great sense of community and pride.  Looking over her old class photo, Brown pointed out another familiar face – Bill Viveash.

“He was my first boyfriend,” she said with a shy smile. “We weren’t even old enough to date, he couldn’t even drive.”

The two were good friends all their lives.  Bill got a job at the Windsor Star and later became the head of marketing at the paper.  Despite fighting in Europe in World War II and later moving to B.C. with his wife, Viveash and Brown always kept in touch.

“Once a month he would call me. One time…he wanted to know if when he died…I would take [his ashes] over to the high school and put them out by the rocks,” she said.

Brown said she agreed, but when he died in 2014 his wife never sent the ashes.

“That was his life,” she said with pride. “That’s what he thought of having a good job and everything like he did.  But still, Harrow was this thing…that’s all there was to it.”

Both Brown and Thrasher spoke with pride of people, like Viveash and many others, who built excellent careers for themselves but never forgot where they grew up and where they went to high school.

Brown raised two daughters and a son and they all attended Harrow District High School. Now, with the last of her grandchildren enrolled at the soon-to-be-closed Harrow High, not only will four generations of her family have attended the school, but they will have spanned from the very first to the very last class.