The Old Fire “Excape” at Shelburne’s Old School on the Hill

When the fire alarm sounded at Shelburne’s old public school, the kids in the second floor classrooms were thrilled. It meant a chance to launch themselves – one by one – down the school’s evacuation slide. “We called it the fire ‘excape,’” recalls Jennifer Lenz-Franklin, who was one of those kids in the 1970s. At the bottom, waiting to catch the kids, was a teacher and a pillowy mat.

The school, a striking Italianate building that once stood proudly on the hill on the north side of Second Avenue West, opened in 1900 – without fire escapes. To correct this safety deficit, two evacuation slides were installed. The photo, which dates to the mid-1950s, shows the slide on the east side of the building.

But when classes weren’t in session, the slides were an irresistible attraction for neighbourhood scalawags. Starting at the bottom, kids would scooch their way up the inside of the dark, dirty and dank-smelling tunnel and reward themselves with a hair-raising slide back down – unless Tom Hume, the school’s kindly caretaker, caught them at it. “He would pull us out at the top and take us home to our parents,” laughs Jennifer.

For the kids, the risk was worth it. “When you got up to the top, it was like being at Canada’s Wonderland,” she says. “You would just shoot down and fly out the bottom … Looking back at it now, it was like a water slide without the water.”

By the 1990s, the “old school on the hill” had outlived its usefulness as a school, and the slides were long gone. So when, in a sad twist of fate, the building was damaged by fire in 1994, it was torn down.