Dora Christina Schell: A Pioneer Spirit in the Nineties

By Karen Hogg

Originally Published in the Fenelon Falls Gazette, circa 1993

Dora Christina Schell has spent her entire life in Somerville Township. At 86, she is able to carry water from the well, pile firewood and live without the luxury of electricity. “What you never have you never miss,” she says. Dora raised 17 children and more grandchildren than she can readily count. With the stout determination of ancestors who forged this country she says, “I can still do anything I want.”

Although her sons Joe and Dan check on her every day, she manages fairly well on her own. This fall the boys cut her winter’s wood and dumped it and came the next day to find that she had it all piled. “I like doing things like and I think it’s good for you,” she says.

The well is close to the house and she uses soft water collected in rain barrels for washing, which she does, by hand, with a wash board. Larger items she now lets the kids take home to launder for her.

One of three children, Dora was the only one to marry. Her father came from Ireland, as did her mother’s people. “Dad farmed and cut wood. He did a bit of everything,” she explains.

It may have been a difficult life but Dora never minded. She attended Howie’s School to her senior third year and remembers walking two miles to school. In the winter they simply didn’t go to school and in the spring would find themselves behind the rest of the class. “I got education enough for the job I got,” she laughs. Most of the classmates she went to school with are gone, but a few remain and one lives with her sister. She recalls when the three of them used to walk three miles to Burnt River to get groceries for their parents. “It took three hours if we came back the winter road but if we went around the road it took five hours,” she says.

Although the family didn’t attend church because it was too far away, she says, “I guess we weren’t too bad little beggars.” Her father always said that he knew if Dora was home the chores would all be done when he got there.

Dora is proud of the things she has accomplished. As a child she was always helping her dad to pick stones, cut wood or whatever else needed doing. An uncle used to tease her by asking, “Are they trying to make a man out of you?” Her stock reply was that she could do whatever a man could.

“It’s her sense of humour that strikes you first when you talk to Dora Christina Schell. It crops up in all the stories she tells of making all the children’s clothes, of going to school fairs, and threshings where neighbours helped one another. She recalls churning butter for her mother to sell and packing it in crocks for the family for the winter.

She has seen some big changes and recalls the first airplane the swung over Burnt River. That she says “was before I was married in 1926.” Her husband George passed away eight or nine years ago. Although she never learned to drive a car, Dora once had a ride in an airplane and “I liked that, it was just like riding in a car, and I kept looking out and seeing the wings.”

Asked if she is afraid of living alone, Dora says, “There’s not anybody going to take me away in the night, and if they did they’d bring me back in the morning, she adds.

This winter, for the first time, Dora has gone to stay with her son and daughter-in-law, but she expects to go home in the spring. “This year I might even put in a garden for something to do,” she says.

This very endearing and determined lady may just do that because she’s still looking to the future. “If I could wish for anything for the future,” she says, “It would be to go back and do it all over again.”