The Chilliwack
Progress Wednesday
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Sports
Community
Kenya
Line Up
Baker Douglas earns invite to Top Gun.
Local lifeline for Kenyan women.
What’s up at Harrison Festival of the Arts.
Football
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Y O U R C O M M U N I T Y N E W S PA P E R • F O U N D E D I N 1 8 9 1 • W W W. T H E P R O G R E S S . C O M • W E D N E S D AY, J U N E 1 7 , 2 0 1 5
Fire leaves more than 40 people homeless Related story, page 3
Continued: FIRE/ p7
Fire officials and RCMP continue to investigate Monday’s fire.
Sharon Stephens is giving back five cedar baskets that have been in her family for 100 years. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
Cedar baskets brought back home Jennifer Feinberg The Progress It’s heart-warming tale that may give you goose bumps. Cedar baskets crafted by Sto:lo hands are coming home — full circle after almost 100 years. The five baskets are owned by Sharon Stephens of Chilliwack, a descendent of the Northcote family. When she moved to Chilliwack about nine years ago, it was into an apartment building that’s actually kitty corner to where her great-grandparents used to live. “Ever since I was a little girl, I really liked the baskets,” she tells The Progress. “They were so pretty and interesting looking.”
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They are of different shapes and sizes, made from both cedar bark and cedar roots. With ample family history here, Stephens actually grew up in Burnaby, and spent most of her life, almost half a century, in a variety of B.C. communities, many with a strong aboriginal presence. One of the strange elements of her tale is that when she finally arrived in Chilliwack, she did not unpack her beloved cedar baskets as she usually did. It’s the first place she has lived where they were not out on display. They remained tucked away in a laundry basket out of sight. She did not for the life of her know why. Until now.
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The baskets have been in her family ever since her great-grandmother Annie Northcote bought them on the doorstep about 90 years ago. The Northcotes, John and Annie, lived in a house near the corner of Corbould and Princess, near The Landing site. She would admire the baskets at her grandmother’s house, displayed along with the Limoges pieces. Her dad, Harold Stephens, 95, still talks about how he would travel up to Chilliwack from Burnaby on the B.C. Electric train to visit his grandparents, her great-grandparents, The Northcotes. Dad still remembers the baskets being purchased by his
grandmother from some Sto:lo ladies who came up to the door from the Fraser River, selling the hand-made cedar baskets, house to house. When Stephens eventually inherited them, she was thrilled to become the keeper of the baskets, at the age of 20. She brought them with her as she moved from community to community, with her developer husband, through most of her adult life. Now 68, she never thought of selling them, or parting with them in any way. “It was strange because I always had them on display in a place of honour in my home. I liked to have them around me.” But not here. Continued: CEDAR/ p11
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Fire forced a frantic evacuation of about 40 tenants from a downtown apartment early Monday morning. The fire broke out at around 4 a.m. in the third-floor apartment of a three-storey building, located in the 9200 block of Mary Street near Spadina. When fire fighters arrived, flames were already shooting through the roof. A tenant in one of the lower units said he was awoken by the alarm outside his unit. When he raced outside and turned around, he could see sheets of flame coming from the top floor. Apartment manager Robert Lucas said he began banging on doors on the first and second floors at around 4 a.m. when the fire alarm sounded. He said he tried going up to the third floor, but the smoke was so thick by the time he got up there, he couldn’t see into the hallway. He did a quick head count on the street outside and said all tenants are accounted for – a point later confirmed by Chilliwack fire officials. “There was concern raised when one of the resident’s from the complex could not be found at