Saving for the future

My love of Ontario’s built heritage goes back a long way. The place that did it for me was the Schmidt- Dalziel Barn, located in the Humber Valley. Decades after my very first visit to The Barn I had an opportunity to take my love to new heights. In the ‘90s as a volunteer at Macaulay Heritage Park (yup, the very same located at Church and Union Street in Picton) the curator, Allyson Kelly, told me about the Ontario Museum Association courses. I immediately wrote to the Director of the Association and asked to be included in their next “on site” course. Let the bells ring out, let the banners fly.

The very next course was being offered at the museum in Wellington and I was offered a coveted spot in the Collections Management course. I paid my tuition and got my heritage geek on. I was in nerdy, museum heaven for three days at The Quaker Meeting House. It was a whirlwind of nomenclature, loans, acquisitions, repatriation of artifacts, deaccessioning and records keeping. All of it was heady stuff. I was hooked. I loved the orderliness of documentation and the precision of nomenclature. I signed up for the next course before my first essay and assignment had been returned from the OMA office in Toronto. Museums in Context was a ten-month course, done by correspondence and administered by Laurentian University. Ten glorious months of the history and development of museums. It was a social, professional and historical exploration of community museums. Then it was off to Brockville’s Museum and The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, to Benares in Mississauga, The Holocaust Centre in North York, to the Billings Estate in Ottawa and the Canoe Museum in Peterborough, to Guelph and to Stratford. Each course was offered at a community museum. Each one better than the one before. I learned some amazing things. I met a lot of amazing people. I toured many amazing sites. After each “on site” course it was home to Picton and Macaulay Heritage Park to write an essay and an assignment. For a brief time, I worked in our local Community Museum System, then for the Town of Markham and finally as a private consulting professional. Throughout it all, I remembered my first visit to The Barn in the Humber Valley which eventually became part of Black Creek Pioneer Village and the Metropolitan Toronto Conservation Authority.

This past week LOML and I drove to Toronto to meet our son and his family at Pearson Airport. LOML knew I needed a heritage fix and suggested an early start from The County and a trip to Black Creek before the family arrived. I was as excited as I had ever been about visiting a heritage site. Like many of Ontario’s heritage sites, a great deal of money has been spent to create an appealing reception, educational and retail centre at Black Creek Pioneer Village. Showy money, from corporate sponsors and various levels of government and from private donors to promote a business or to garner a tax receipt. Money donated, perhaps, to foster a sense of community, but splashed about in an entranceway where the visiting public will be dazzled. LOML and I paid our admission fee and I was set to enjoy a morning of warm and fuzzy heritage, but it wasn’t in the cards. Once on site, past the razzle and dazzle of the show-and-tell reception area, the Village looked more than a little bit neglected. Peeling paint, loose caulking around windows, fences and gates looking as if a good wind would blow them over. Many of the buildings were not staffed with interpreters, indeed several were locked and little or no attempt had been made to protect the artifacts inside from “enquiring minds”. At one point I wanted to thank LOML for his kind suggestion to visit, get in the car and head to a mall for retail therapy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great there’s a brewery on site, in the same building as the restaurant and the pub. It’s a building which had been constructed in 1849 as an Inn and “halfway house” in Scarborough. Like all of the heritage structures on site, they’d been saved from demolition and moved to the safe haven of Black Creek Pioneer Village. But, the pub, brewery and restaurant are in the basement of the building, not pretending to be anything but places to generate income for the site. I get it, they need to make money, but obviously there isn’t enough money made to repair the most precious artifacts; the buildings. Black Creek is no longer the museum of its community. It is a rundown curiosity sitting on prime real estate in the heart of a big, noisy city.

We did finish the tour. We met “the kids” and on the long ride home I thought about how fortunate we are to have our Museums here in The County. All of our sites are loved, and lovingly cared for, by a core of dedicated volunteers and a host of Municipal staff. While our sites may not be running in “the black” (and likely never will), they continue to represent the community’s cultural heritage, embodying the elements of everyday County life in a meaningful way.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca