Canmore Museum is inviting the public to take part in its first Heritage Open House this weekend.
The event, scheduled to take place in the museum in the Canmore Civic Centre on Saturday (Aug. 11) from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., is meant to help further connect the community to the museum and Canmore’s history.
“This is the Canmore Museum and we really want to invite people in. It’s the Canmore community museum. We’re not here for any other reason than Canmore’s history. It’s important to bring these stories to life. Things are changing so quickly, if we don’t move fast we’ll lose so much,” museum administrator Debbie Carrico said Aug. 3.
The open house will feature tours of the museum’s collection, a photo booth for kids where they can dress up like coal miners with a hardhat and lunchbox and have their photo taken and tables filled with mystery objects that the museum needs the public’s help to identify.
Lynne Huras, the museum’s new collections manager who has replaced outgoing manager Amanda Sittrop, said the collections tour will offer Canmore residents an opportunity to see how objects donated to the museum are stored, cared for and used.
“We want to show people how their donations are being preserved and cared for. People have the impression the things they donate will automatically go on display,” she said, adding many artifacts and archival material may never go on display, but are used for research.
“We want to give the reassurance that if people are giving donations we take care of their things,” she said.
Huras, who also works on contract with the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and the Eleanor Luxton Historical Foundation, will demonstrate how objects are catalogued and stored.
And, as Huras said, the museum is open for suggestions from the public as to topics for future heritage open houses.
One of the ideas they’re working with, Carrico said, is a cultural food fair as a way to showcase, through food, the different cultural groups that called Canmore home.
The idea is to explore Canmore’s history and heritage through different themes and stories, often overlooked in favour of the coal-mining story, Carrico said.
“We’re always looking for these stories. These are Canmore stories and they’re unique,” she said.
The tables of mystery objects continue the museum’s newest exhibition, Jewels of the Bow: An exploration of the Canmore Museum collection and the Deep Research project that the exhibition evolved from.
For that project, the museum chose 50 objects, including photographs, that they spent nearly a year researching. As part of that research, undertaken by Sittrop, was an ongoing call to the public for help in identifying objects or providing historical information.
“We’re deeply grateful for all that Amanda did. She opened doors with Deep Research. We thank her and all of this will be maintained,” Carrico said of the collections and the Deep Research project.
Admission is by donation, with the suggested donation being $2.
Also, this month, the museum will host a Canmore mine site car caravan with mine engineer Gerry Stephenson, who served as a mine engineer for Canmore Mines Ltd.
The tour will be held Aug. 25 from 11 a.m. to about 3 p.m. with stops at Quarry Lake, the No. 1 and No. 2 mine sites, the lamphouse and the coal outcrop visible at the junction of Spray Lakes Road and Three Sisters Parkway.
The cost is $20 for museum members and $30 for non-members.
Carrico said Stephenson, one of the people instrumental in the creation of Quarry Lake, will talk about coal mining in Canmore and how it worked underground.
