This high school went deep, deep into its archives to celebrate its 150th birthday

Kingston resident Bev Nichols was on vacation in Alberta this week, but the Sydenham High School alum made sure to be back in Ontario by the weekend because there was no way she was missing her high school reunion, she says.  

Nichols graduated from Sydenham, a rural Frontenac County school located about 27 kilometres northwest of Kingston, in 1973. 

This weekend marks not only Nichols’s 50th class reunion but the school’s 150th birthday, and for Nichols and other families, it’s a multi-generational affair. 

Nichols’s parents also graduated from Sydenham, her late father taught there, and Nichols’s son was a student too. 

“Sydenham has a lot of sentimental value to me,” Nichols said. “There’s a lot of family history there.”

In the leadup to the reunion, alumni like Nichols have scanned and digitized various tokens of the school’s past: everything from a near-complete collection of yearbooks dating to the 1940s, to film and VHS tapes chronicling life at the school during various decades. 

Organizers have posted some of the material online, in part to preserve their school’s history, but also to play an emotional game of “Who’s who?”

“Some of them aren’t around anymore,” Nichols said of alumni captured in some material, “which makes you a little nostalgic. It’s really moving.”

‘Because we love our high school’ 

Before the school amalgamated with others, Sydenham had a small population, so everybody knew everybody, Nichols said.

The school combined kids from various small communities. Some were from farming families. 

“We were always teased as being the country school,” Nichols said. 

In the 1950s, teacher Harold Miller took portraits of students posing with farm animals outside their houses. The school had a program where chicks were distributed to students. 

Chris Van Luven, who graduated from Sydenham in 1980, has digitized many of those photos and posted them to the 150th reunion website.

The original slides weren’t labelled, “but people have been commenting and identifying the [subjects],” Van Luven said.

The photos will be among those on display in “decades rooms” at the school this weekend.

Liz Shibley, a former Sydenham teacher and member of the reunion’s organizing committee, searched “all the nooks and crannies” of the school alongside the principal in search of material. 

The pair pulled together “an enormous pile of old photos, trophies of every shape and size, old uniforms and sports or team uniforms [and] the weirdest collection of eagle statues [in honour of the school’s football team] you can imagine,” Shibley said via email. 

“Some of us will continue the process of digitizing after the reunion concludes,” she said. 

For Eva Stewart-Bindernagel, it was all about the yearbooks. 

A member of the same graduating 1973 class as Nichols, Stewart-Bindernagel led the effort to have every page of every yearbook dating back to 1946 professionally scanned. 

The school community sourced all but eight years’ worth of yearbooks. The collected scans will be available for viewing for free on the school’s website following the reunion’s opening ceremonies on Friday. 

Why do all this? 

“Because we love our high school passionately,” Stewart-Bindernagel said. “We are intensely proud of being rural.”

“We want to share what a fantastic place it was to be a student and staff. In some cases, many people were both,” she added. 

‘We were so young’

Karl Hammer graduated from Sydenham in 1994 and teaches there now. 

To “pump up the idea of the reunion,” he tracked down VHS tapes of Golden Eagles football games from the 1980s, had “hours upon hours” of them digitized and put them online, he said.

He had championship games on the brain but came to appreciate the smaller moments captured during regular season bouts too. 

“There was, you know, the cheerleading groups … and of course you have the old coaches going up and down the sidelines,” Hammer said. “I’m such a sentimental type of guy.”

The digitizing did not come cheap, Hammer said, “but I think it was an important cost to absorb. Now anyone anywhere in the world can click on a link and show their children, ‘Hey, that was me 30 years ago.'”

Nichols and Stewart-Bindernagel have their own place in the extended Sydenham video universe (which also includes the school’s take on 1985’s Rocky 4). 

Both women were students in the 1968 history class that trouped up to nearby Gould Lake to film a reenactment — complete with kids on horseback, in canoes and wearing fake blood — of the the Battle of Hastings. It’s online too after going missing, being found and getting digitized. 

“I’m not a history buff, but I know the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066 … because of [that] video,” said Nichols, who did wardrobe and set design.

The film competed in a provincial contest, according to Stewart-Bindernagel.

“We had been entered into the drama side of it and won it for the comedy News/Canada/Ottawa. I guess we were pretty amateurish in our quest, but it was quite a fun thing,” she said. 

So what’s it been like going down such a meticulously recorded memory lane?

“We were all so young,” Nichols said. “It makes me even more anxious to go this weekend.”