Item 0004 - Letter, 16 January 1910

Born February 15, 1889 the daughter of Anna and Bernard J. Harrington, and raised in Montreal in a houseful of siblings beside the McGill University campus, Lois married Edward Winslow-Spragge, a young engineer, in 1912. Theirs had been a four-year courtship, detailed in their correspondence, published in 2000 by their daughter, Anne V. Byers. Lois, who signs herself “Loie” and sometimes “Sybil,” writes to “Eddy” regularly about such things as her interview in 1909 for a job teaching art at Miss Edgar's and Miss Cramp's school for girls, and how much she misses him during his train trip across Quebec, Ontario and the Northwest. His travels for his work and their longing for each other during his long absences, would be a constant theme throughout their marriage. Lois raised their five children (Alice Margaret, Edward, Anne, Ruth Naomi and Mary Lois) frequently alone in Montreal and Sherbrooke with summers in Metis at the old Dawson home, Birkenshaw, which she eventually inherited from her sister Clare. It was not until their sixties that she and her husband were finally able to live together without the continual interruptions of travel for his job. With the children grown up then, she was able to indulge her love of art (evident in the doodlings and sketched portraits in her letters), for which she had a talent like her mother, Anna, and her uncle George Mercer Dawson, both of whom have works exhibited in the McCord Museum. She also was able then to write a biography of George, entitled “No ordinary man.” Lois died in 1978 in Lanark, Ontario.