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That’s not a soup bowl, it’s a chamber pot!

Community museums, industry museums, just go see ’em

If pressed, I could probably build a reasonably well-assembled wooden barrel. While I doubt there will ever be occasion that I will be called upon to demonstrate this particular skill, it is something I never would have learned had the twin provincial and federal centennials not occurred in my formative years. Because of those two historical milestones, museums – particularly those ones focusing on local history that had national import – were well funded and therefore well promoted.

Under the Trudeau Liberals creating a means to foster identity to further distinguish us from Americans meant giving Canadians a sense of our rich cultural heritage. My understanding of barrel making, learned at the Fort Langley Museum, was a result of that commitment. The combination of preserved buildings, a connection with the explorer Simon Fraser and the fort’s history as a Hudson’s Bay trading post, made the location ideal for fulfillment of the federal and provincial mandates.

The idea that true understanding comes from experience was a philosophy behind the activities that constituted the 1970s museum visit. The hands on experience, which often featured college theatre school students in period costume, meant the museum took on an "attraction" type status for kids, while the performances provided the parents with as close to an authentic historical experience as the museum’s insurance would allow. Aspiring actors had meaningful summer employment, kids were fascinated and the adult taxpayer came away with the feeling that maybe – just maybe – investing in museums was an endeavour worthy of their tax dollars.

I have been to community and industrial museums throughout the Lower Mainland, from Chilliwack to West Vancouver. And I can probably provide adequate directions to a number of Vancouver Island and BC Interior temples to the muses.

This is the result of having had a typical 1970s aspiration-class childhood. My parents were not raised in families where cultural activity was either prized or indulged in. However, my mother had a keen interest in history cultivated by the UBC correspondence courses she took to keep her intellect from complete atrophy due to the sustained interaction with small children.

I am sure that my father would have been happy to make Stanley Park our weekly family destination, but my mother insisted that museum visits appeared frequently on the Sunday outing agenda. Not art museums. No, those were obviously for people other than us – you know, those people with time for art. No, we, and I assumed other people like us, visited good, solid natural history museums. Places where we would learn our history and perhaps, after looking at archaic devices for domestic and farm chores, come away with an appreciation for just how damned lucky we were.

My brother, who at four years younger qualified as a Centennial baby, did not share my limited interest in visiting dusty, musty, cramped spaces full of rusty farm implements and grainy black and white photos of grim looking immigrant families. So, to keep the peace as long as possible, our Sunday plans would remain undisclosed under the promise of "a Magical Mystery Tour." If this nod to The Beatles actually made my parents lament their suburban, child-encumbered existence, they never whined about it. I, being older and wiser than my brother, knew that regardless of what it was called, every other family outing would include standing around having my father try to bullshit his way around some artifact he knew nothing about.

"Oh for God’s sake," my mother would say. "That’s not a soup bowl, it’s a chamber pot!"

Industrial history

Along the Sea to Sky Highway there are several perfect Magical Mystery Tour destinations. Two are relatively well known, the other two are not. The difference? The two museums with higher profiles are connected with industry.

According to a report developed for the federal government by Hills Strategies, overall museum attendance for community museums, also known as general museums, has been on the decline since the early 1990s. Perhaps coincidentally, public funding for these types of museums has also been on the decline. However, technological museums, such as Britannia Beach’s B.C. Museum of Mining and Squamish’s West Coast Railway Heritage Park, have actually experienced an increase in attendance.

The B.C. Museum of Mining held a "Hard Hat Party" on May 11 to celebrate the announcement of $3 million in new federal, provincial and private sector funding earmarked for restoration of the site’s mill (concentrator) building. The copper mine, which operated for more than 70 years, was once the chief environmental threat to the picturesque coastal community. Now it is being developed as a centre with an even greater focus on education, environmental issues and sustainability than is currently offered. This is a facility committed to reflecting the interests of the times.

Opening its doors to the public in 1975, the B.C. Museum of Mining has been designated a National Historic Site and Provincial Historic Landmark. This designation means far more than a couple of tasteful plaques can convey. It means that the facility will remain a funding priority for both governments.

From a user perspective, the museum offers a set of unique experiences that include gold panning, guided tours through a 1910 underground mining tunnel, demonstrations of various mining techniques, and hands-on activities. And, of course, there are displays detailing the province’s mining history. With regular season rates running from $11.75 for students/seniors to $14.98 for adults, it’s not an especially cheap outing, but the variety of activities give a good bang for your buck. Off-season rates are $6 for everyone, but the tunnel tour and gold-panning activities close down during the winter season. And any kid who has seen the movie Scooby-Doo 2 , which was filmed largely at the museum, will want to go underground.

Twenty-five kilometres up the road, things are rolling along at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park. Having celebrated its 10 th anniversary last year, Canada’s second largest railway museum is relatively new and yet its collection is impressive. The museum illustrates the province’s railway history through exhibits such as 15 restored railcars and locomotives dating back as far as 1890. All in all, the facility which is also dubbed the "home of Royal Hudson" – one of Canada’s last operating steam trains – offers visitors a chance to view 65 pieces of "rolling stock" and approximately 3,000 related artifacts. A miniature railway operates taking guests on a 15-minute tour of the park.

The park also currently offers library and extensive archival services, an information centre and meeting room rentals. The idea of meeting rooms is significant, as this will be a primary focus of the park’s $4.2 million expansion to be undertaken this year.

The creation, that will be known as The Roundhouse & Conference Centre at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park, will mean a permanent home for the Royal Hudson, a new exhibit hall and a potential 20,000 square feet of meeting space. The capital project’s budget reflects $2 million in private funding and a matching grant from the province’s Community Development Infrastructure fund.

A further $200,000 has been raised to install a turntable in the roundhouse. These monies were a result of a $100,000 gaming grant, $50,000 from the West Coast Railway Association and $50,000 from a private donor. The turntable allows the locomotive engine to turn around and exit the building.

Clearly, the big museums in the corridor aren’t hurting, but what about the other ones?

Spud Valley’s past

Operated by the Pemberton & District Museum and Archives Society, the Pemberton Heritage Museum is a stellar example of what committed volunteers can do to preserve community history. When the project was undertaken in the early ’80s, organizers decided that its work would be carried out entirely on a volunteer basis. The only government funds they would seek would be student employment grants. Now into its third decade, the museum continues to operate in this way, making it one of only three community museums in Canada to use this model. Relying on a combination of fundraising ventures, donations and sales of consignment items from the gift store, books and calendar sales, as well as facility rentals, the museum is able to keep its doors open. But with some of the heritage buildings in need of major maintenance, such as new shake roofs, the society is looking at having to invest another $60,000 into the museum as soon as it can afford to do so.

Seven buildings occupy the museum site, located on slightly less than an acre of BC Rail property at the corner of Prospect and Camus Streets. Originally swamp land, contractors and truckers bringing in fill reclaimed the land. Orville Bilenduke spent a whole summer working for free moving the buildings in from as far as D’Arcy and Lillooet Lake.

Four of the museum’s buildings are original structures built at the turn of the century. One, the Miller house, was in daily use as a home until the ’80s. It is awe-inspiring to stand in front of any of these buildings and imagine the labour that went into creating the dovetail, hand-hewn, log homes. The fact that they are still standing is equally amazing. The newest building on the property, the 20 foot by 40 foot Soo House, also features dovetail construction to keep with the facility’s heritage feel. Like all the museum’s major projects, creating the building was a community effort. For example, local businessman Cam McIvor extended his mill from 40 feet to 56 feet to help turn the 50-foot logs – four feet in diameter – into the beams necessary to build the Soo House.

In the back corner of the property there is a concrete pad waiting for the resources that will see it transformed into another building that will house the museum’s sizeable agricultural equipment collection, a working blacksmith’s shop and quite likely a chainsaw museum on a second floor. There are also plans to create a "spud museum", a building dedicated to the region’s history as a distributor of quality seed potatoes.

President George Henry, a longtime community member, is excited about the potential for a two-storey building for two reasons. By taking the building to a second storey any view of modern Pemberton will be blocked, helping to create the illusion that a visitor is really in a place that could have existed a hundred years ago. And he likes the idea of a chainsaw museum onsite.

"At one time Vancouver was known as the chainsaw capital of the world. There were probably 16 manufacturers there. One by one, the companies were bought up and moved out. Today there are none."

Henry, a retired teacher, has been the president of the board for the past six years. He is passionate about the museum and enthusiastic about his fellow board members and community members that help keep the museum going. The day we met he was helping a student clean up the grounds for an anticipated opening date, which is dependent on HRDC summer employment funding coming through.

"If we get a student we can open as early as June. And then we continue until Labour Day with a student and then we go on a volunteer basis until people can’t stand it... that’s usually in October."

Henry believes the museum offers a unique experience because of the isolation of the Pemberton Valley.

"This is one of the few places that didn’t have a road in and out – except of course, for the railroad (which came in 1914) – until the late ’60s. As a pioneer community and a settlement area, it was relatively unchanged since the first rush of immigration in the late 1800s until modern times.

"When the road opened the pioneer women could see that things were leaving and decided to start preserving the history. A similar situation had happened in Squamish and they missed the opportunity to go down the museum road," says Henry. "Now that stuff is gone."

Before the road came in, the population of Pemberton hovered around 140 people. Most of the artifacts come from families who still call the valley home, many still engaged in what originally attracted people to the valley, the pursuit of farming. The resulting collection is impressive. From hand-woven Lil’wat baskets to turn-of-the-century dental equipment and labour-saving farming devices such as a turnip sorter, the collection offers a comprehensive view of what pioneer life was like for the early settlers of Pemberton.

Whistler at a turning point

The Whistler Museum and Archives Society is at a turning point. Employing a more traditional model relying on government funding, the museum operates with an annual budget. Currently the museum has a 2,000 square foot space in the same building as the Whistler library. With the new library building going ahead on the existing site, without plans to include the museum, the society is now considering its options and role in the community. Offering a combination of pioneer, resort and natural history, the museum now has to establish how best to deliver those components to the community.

"We’re looking at two issues right now," explains curator Kerry Clark, "The first being the feasibility of the museum becoming municipally-affiliated and the second being examining the facility needs of the museum, both in the short-term and in light of the 2010 Games."

A Task Force comprised of members from the museum and the municipality has developed a process in the past year called the Heritage Needs Assessment. The process began in January of this year and will involve three major studies: a market analysis, a fundraising analysis and the development of a programmatic space plan.

"We want to find out who our market is. Who can we attract? What are they looking for? What kind of activities do they want to see and what will they pay for it?" says Clark. "Then we want to look at funding and see what kind of support there is for what we want to do. Federal, provincial, municipal, other granters, donors, admissions… whatever it will be."

The results of the market and fundraising analysis will greatly inform the programmatic space plan. Currently the amount of space means that almost 95 per cent of the museum’s collection is not visible.

"Some communities want a 12,000 square foot museum space, others don’t. This might be the case in Whistler. We might find people are asking for a museum that takes programs out to the schools, lectures in Millennium Places and tours of the mountains… perhaps the physical space could be reduced and staffing increased."

Clark sites changes in how museums have been perceived across Canada in the past 10 to 20 years.

"The number of organizations have increased, while the funding has decreased, so obviously you have to find a way to be more competitive," says Clark. "When you think of the typical model of a museum, with exhibits, offices, meeting spaces… that doesn’t always work for communities anymore."

Illustrating how to deliver service outside a building is the museum’s recent release of a DVD created in conjunction with Celebration 2010. The DVD, titled Community Now: The People of Whistler , features a collection of interviews with senior community members interspersed with archival footage and still photos. In the years leading up to the 2010 Games subsequent films will profile other demographics such as youth and adults. In 2010, all the 30-minute films will be taken, edited and presented as a feature-length film that will showcase Whistler, its history and its people. The first installment is available at the museum for a suggested donation of $10.

The Heritage Needs Assessment is expected to be completed by the end of October. What the result will be is anyone’s guess at this time, but Clark is betting on a positive outcome.

"I believe people will say we have a place in the community."



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