Well, I find myself here after making my usual unremembered promises! Island history: I love to read about it and to contribute the occasional tale, verbally. My research has been so personal, though, that it is difficult to imagine it as of interest to others.

   

I recently had a rather shocking experience – again, so personal, but still amazing. I have been an appreciator of Marshall’s Beach – as settlers began calling it after they started living here – since I first visited it when I was a child, around 1959. As a community, we all loved it, and always felt free to drive down to Lenny’s Lagoon for a visit anytime. Our one perfect, fully sandy beach. I think it may be the only one on Lasqueti; certainly, the only large, wide, perfect beach like that. I have sat there in appreciation, had picnics there, recently attended archaeological talks about it by Dana and the local Indigenous elders and community members.

   

Since the uplands around it have been so carefully monitored by the current owners, it has become less accessible; but luckily in this country the tidal lands are publicly owned, and so it is still possible to access it from the water and from other nearby properties. It is an exquisite and useful spot – an ancient refrigerator, a fish trap which could keep the fish fresh until it could be processed – in use for possibly thousands of years! This coast had been so beneficial and so well used for centuries.

   

I always knew the Land Company owned the land around there, but never wondered where it came from. I assumed it was something to which Charlie Williams may have contributed. When Great-Grandpa sailed down this coast in 1895 and got dropped off here on Lasqueti, he purchased a few swaths of land on the north end for himself and his brothers-in-law. They tried moving here and attempted to set up and farm his estate at Sunset Beach (Schumak Farm). But ... it was too tricky for them!  They bought the Island’s first work horses. The land that Great- Grandpa bought for them was around Lennie’s Lagoon.

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It was only this winter, after all these years, that it finally twigged, that this beach had taken its name from them, because they owned it at the time. They were the Marshall brothers!