1944
The Ormiston farm passes on
The Living Archive · An Oral History
Echoes of Elkhaven
A community remembers the land that became Camp Denman
When we shared a handful of old photographs of the Elkhaven camp, the island answered with its memory. In a single conversation, neighbours and the grandchildren of campers pieced together nearly a century of life on this land — Girl Guide tents, an Elks lodge, an island preschool, a barn full of horse buggies, and a merry-go-round that no child was supposed to touch. These are their words, gathered and kept.
A Place Through Time
1955
Land subdivided by J. Boulton
1959
Sold to the Elks as a camp
1960s
Lodge building & conversion
1970s
Denman Preschool & art workshops
1986
The “mystical playground”
2026
Camp Denman — Create Together
Originally part of the Ormiston farm. After Leila Ormiston passed in 1944, the land was sold to Jack Boulton, who subdivided it in 1955. In 1959 it was sold to the Elks for use as a camp — and the site has served children’s programs for at least half a century since. Compiled by Craig Williams from community records.
In Their Own Words
The 1960s
“Sometime in the ’60s we’d go over with my father, a carpenter, helping the Elks convert the lodge. I mostly remember the empty downstairs — and the old mangle that ended up in the DI museum.”
The 1970s
“I used to camp there for a week each summer with the Girl Guides — that was in the early ’70s. The building was off limits.”
A Quieter Era
“We used to go down there and sneak into the barn — it had beautiful old horse buggies.”
circa 1973–75
“I shook a thermos full of OJ and it exploded all over Josh and me. Preschool there, with Maggie and Tandra as our teachers.”
The 1970s
“Denman Preschool was in one of the rooms. I did clay workshops with the visiting Girl Guides in the summer.”
Summer, 1986 · The Mystical Playground
“As children of the island, we were forbidden to go there. Rumour was, they had a great playground — just like in the big city, with a hobby horse and everything. We walked up from the beach one summer day and, lo and behold, there it was! We grabbed the handles of the upright merry-go-round and were having a blast — then we heard shouting. The caretaker was running towards us! We took off into the woods, never to return to that mystical place.”
Elkhaven Remembered
An afternoon with Mike Lindsay
Mike came to Denman in the early 1980s and worked the property through the Elks years — the electrical hand who hiked the snow line to chase down a fault. He sat down with us to trace the land’s older lives.
On the Elks years
“They usually did two of the White Crow get-togethers a summer — that was special-needs kids. The upper section was always the camping ground, maybe forty kids to ten adults.”
On the work
“In years gone by, I’ve had to hike through three feet of snow to chase down problems. The power line runs down through the property — in winter, finding the fault meant wading out to it on foot.”
On the older families
“The Ormistons, I think, were summer people — these were summer places. People would come, in some cases by boat, to the dock. It was not an easy place to reach.”
“It’ll still be Elkhaven to me, no matter what.”— Mike Lindsay, on Camp Denman carrying it forward
The Handover · June 2025
The torch is passed
For more than half a century, the Elks Recreation Children’s Camp Society of British Columbia kept this property as a place for young people. In June 2025, after a careful, multi-year review, that long chapter drew to a close — and the land passed, with the Society’s support, to the founders of Camp Denman.
The Society’s one condition was never about a name — it was about purpose: keep running camps for young people on Denman Island. Faced with taking the aging lodge down and selling the land bare, the Society chose instead to keep the whole property intact, and to give it a new beginning.
With gratitude to the Elks of British Columbia — for more than half a century of welcoming children to this shore, and for entrusting it, with grace, to Create Together.
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