Memories of the former Kingsville District High School are being revived at the very same time the building is turned to rubble. Throughout the demolition process, teams for Gagnon Salvage and Antiques have been scouring the classrooms and opening up walls to ensure nothing important is left behind. At their shop in McGregor, Katharine Gagnon, the company’s co-owner, said they’ve been sharing their finds online for sale. “The one day my son found that Du Maurier pack of cigarettes behind the locker and it generated, I don’t know, over 1,500 comments on just a little pack of cigarettes,” she told CTV News Friday morning. From old pop cans to high school lockers, benches, sports equipment, and more, former teachers and students have been eager to get a piece of it. Often, Gagnon said the messages are ones of thanks for the company’s work to preserve the items. “I think Kingsville was a pretty tight community, and I think they still are,” she said about the interest they’ve received. “So it’s nice to be able to maybe allow them to have some part of their history that they’ve lost.” The team also found an old time capsule, which Gagnon said could be purchased and opened at a future school reunion. Memories For some, the finds have been especially sentimental. A former teacher at the high school, Lana Roughton-Grondin used to have her graduating students sign a ceiling tile each year. “So I did come across [them on] Facebook, and they were photographed there, and I was so excited I actually cried,” said Roughton-Grondin. One tile was signed by Roughton-Grondin’s youngest son, who was in her class in 2018. While she wanted to take it when she retired, she feared it wouldn’t be allowed. “It says, ‘I love you,’ so again, I would see that each and every day,” she said. Roughton-Grondin picked up the ceiling tile on Friday along with another from her last year teaching. She plans to hang them in her planting shed, where she often works, so she can look up again, like when she was a teacher. Still close with other former staff, she said they’ve been “touched” by the efforts to preserve the memories. “To watch my classroom be demolished, it’s tough, but we get to keep a little piece of that, and it’s the memories that are the most important,” she added. Teachers haven’t been the only ones to get in on the action. Chris Parent, the president of Ernie’s TV in Kingsville, got his hands on the original plans for the school’s addition in 1964. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with them, but I thought it would be really neat to have and put in a corner somewhere and maybe grab a couple of the pages and put them on the wall somewhere,” he said. While the items may not seem like much to some, Parent said the efforts aren’t lost on the community. “I grew up here and went to school here. So a lot of memories go with that, and so I think for people like me, [it] means a lot that they would take the time to salvage those little things,” he said Salvage and demolition The KDHS property was sold earlier this year by the Greater Essex County District School Board. The salvaging process required a team of about eight people to work through the school, according to Joe Gagnon, the site supervisor for this project. “We try to keep that and repurpose it, and there are people out there that want a piece of the school whether they went here or not,” Gagnon said. On-site, the focus now turns to demolition, which Gagnon said is about a quarter of the way complete. Crews are focused on separating materials from the debris to limit the impact on the landfill. From the road, the work may seem preliminary, but that’s only because most of the exterior walls have been left standing to mitigate dust and debris until the interior is completed. “We started demolition probably about three weeks to a month ago, but we’ve been at this particular job for well over two months doing salvage work and pre-work and all kinds of other stuff pre-demolition to get ready for the actual demo. So now we’re going at it full steam,” he said. So far, there’s been no publicly announced plans for the future of the Main Street property. Kingsville District High School closed in 2024.
