Obituary for Agnes Brownlee "Lee" Treilhard
AGNES BROWNLEE ('Lee') TREILHARD
(nee: Brown)
1921-2021
Teacher, mother and homemaker, Lee was born seventeen years after Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the world's first airplane a modest one-hundred-and-twenty feet. She learned to drive on a black Model-T Ford. She volunteered for WWII which ended right after her training was finished. She raised her family during the most prosperous time in the history of the world and exited this life shortly after the fourth Martian landing. It was a good run but not without heartache. Lee lost her husband when he was just fifty-two and she was predeceased by two of her three sons. Nevertheless, she persevered and refused, outwardly at least, to be bowed by these misfortunes.
Born in Manitoba to Scottish immigrant farmer John 'Jock' Brown and his wife, Olga( McNab), a rural school teacher, Lee and her younger sister, Jean, were raised on a farm in the rural community of Cartwright. At the age of sixteen, Lee started to teach on a permit at Mulvihill. Then, after a year at Brandon Normal School, she taught at Coulter for two years, then for another year at Miami before enlisting in the women's Air Corps. She took her discharge at Vancouver and attended UBC where she met engineering student, Don Treilhard, her husband-to-be. After he graduated with a degree in metallurgy they moved to Flin Flon where he worked for Hudson't Bay Mining and Smelting for a few years before they moved, young family in tow, to Northern Rhodesia and then Uganda. After a decade on the African continent, the family sailed back to Canada where Don took a position with Noranda Mines. in Quebec and a few years later he accepted another as an instructor at the Haileybury School of Mines in Ontario. The peripatetic lifestyle was the one constant feature in their life and Lee became practiced in the art of moving and turning houses into homes as their addresses continued to change, much like the view from the window of a moving train: Copperhill, Tennessee, Montreal, Timmins, Ontario and Toronto.
When Don died, the children had by that time fledged, and Lee returned to Winnipeg, the one place in all the world that felt most like home and in the years that followed she dedicated her time and considerable energy to her friends and the betterment of her community. She was a social activist, campaigning for Cesar Chaves and the United Farm Workers labour union, she volunteered with the Manitoba Historical Society and was involved with Dalnavert House and the Centennial Farm Program, and for some thirty years or so, delivered meals to the elderly and shut-ins in her community of East Kildonan.
Six years ago, Lee relocated to be with family in Toronto and her view of Lake Ontario was a topography that most resembled her beloved prairies of Southern Manitoba.
(nee: Brown)
1921-2021
Teacher, mother and homemaker, Lee was born seventeen years after Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the world's first airplane a modest one-hundred-and-twenty feet. She learned to drive on a black Model-T Ford. She volunteered for WWII which ended right after her training was finished. She raised her family during the most prosperous time in the history of the world and exited this life shortly after the fourth Martian landing. It was a good run but not without heartache. Lee lost her husband when he was just fifty-two and she was predeceased by two of her three sons. Nevertheless, she persevered and refused, outwardly at least, to be bowed by these misfortunes.
Born in Manitoba to Scottish immigrant farmer John 'Jock' Brown and his wife, Olga( McNab), a rural school teacher, Lee and her younger sister, Jean, were raised on a farm in the rural community of Cartwright. At the age of sixteen, Lee started to teach on a permit at Mulvihill. Then, after a year at Brandon Normal School, she taught at Coulter for two years, then for another year at Miami before enlisting in the women's Air Corps. She took her discharge at Vancouver and attended UBC where she met engineering student, Don Treilhard, her husband-to-be. After he graduated with a degree in metallurgy they moved to Flin Flon where he worked for Hudson't Bay Mining and Smelting for a few years before they moved, young family in tow, to Northern Rhodesia and then Uganda. After a decade on the African continent, the family sailed back to Canada where Don took a position with Noranda Mines. in Quebec and a few years later he accepted another as an instructor at the Haileybury School of Mines in Ontario. The peripatetic lifestyle was the one constant feature in their life and Lee became practiced in the art of moving and turning houses into homes as their addresses continued to change, much like the view from the window of a moving train: Copperhill, Tennessee, Montreal, Timmins, Ontario and Toronto.
When Don died, the children had by that time fledged, and Lee returned to Winnipeg, the one place in all the world that felt most like home and in the years that followed she dedicated her time and considerable energy to her friends and the betterment of her community. She was a social activist, campaigning for Cesar Chaves and the United Farm Workers labour union, she volunteered with the Manitoba Historical Society and was involved with Dalnavert House and the Centennial Farm Program, and for some thirty years or so, delivered meals to the elderly and shut-ins in her community of East Kildonan.
Six years ago, Lee relocated to be with family in Toronto and her view of Lake Ontario was a topography that most resembled her beloved prairies of Southern Manitoba.