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The Citizen, 1988-02-10, Page 5Huron Pioneer Museum nearing completion THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1988. PAGE 5. New museum to provide exciting displays The CPR steam engine, one of the most famous attractions in the museum, got to see the light of day once again during construction. The old museum building was torn down around it and the new one built back up again. BY KEITH ROULSTON Someday soon the building will be filled with tools and machines from the 1800’s and early 1900’s but today it is filled with modern power tools as workmen scurry about putting in wiring, finishing drywall, installing new doors. Yet as Claus Breede, Project Director of the new Huron County Pioneer Museum leads the way around the building, imagination adds the paint and the displays and puts the artifacts in place to see the future the building holds. Construction of the $2.4 million first stage of the museum recon­ struction is nearly completed and, after being closed to the public for the past year, the museum will openitsdoorsagaininMay. For those who remember a visit to the old museum with its jumble of collected artifacts inside a barn­ like structure behind the old Victoria Public School on North Street, Goderich, the eventual changes will be dramatic. The museum that re-opens in May, however, will be a mere shadow of the museum that will eventually serve the public. The basic shell of the new part of the museum will be in place but the Federal holdup will delay displays displays won’t be built as yet. The displays, as well as funding for renovation of the old school house are part of a grant of $1.5 million applied for from the federal government’s Department of Communications some 28 months ago that still, despite the best efforts of county officials and Huron-Bruce M.P. Murray Car­ diff, has not been approved although it has been repeatedly termed a “high priority’’ by department officials. It will take, Mr. Breede esti­ mates, five years to build the various displays in the museum to present the kind of museum ‘ ‘experience’ ’ the planners have in mind (two years if the $300,000 for displays in the federal grant came through soon). In the meantime visitors to the museum will see a display similar to the displays that were available in the old museum butinmorepleasant(and safer) surroundings. The big disappoint­ ment will be that the entire old school section of the museum has been closed to the public because it doesn’t meet safety standards and won’t be reopened until the federal grant or funding from some other source provides the money for the necessary standards. Visitors to the new museum will enter through a new entrance at the end of a long walk that goes down the south side of the old school building. They’ll step into a soaring lobby that goes all the way to the roof of the two-storey building. Justtothe right of the entrance will be the desk for paying admission or registering for use of the archives housed in a wing to the right. The first place visitors will go on arriving inside the museum will be the theatre off to the left where a 15-to-20 minute slide presentation will be shown on the history of the county and the museum. Mr. Breede hopes to have the slide presentation put together later this year. The small theatre will be equipped with projectors and screens and a lecturn for speakers but currently has a problem: there are no seats in the 50-60 seat theatre because in trying to cut costs to bring the stage one building under the $2.4 million target price, the seats were among the things axed to save $200,000. From the theatre the visitors will proceed, when the second stage of the building is completed and the oldschoolisrenovated, into the various galleries on the two floors of the old school. Starting down­ stairs, they’ll pass through a gallery about the museum itself, particularly the role played by Joseph Herbert Neill, the Gorrie- area man who assembled the collection that became the Huron County Pioneer Museum in 1950. It will include many of the ingenious models Mr. Neill built to demon­ strate how pioneers did their work. Next comes the gallery that deals with Europe from 1800 to 1850 and shows many of the conditions in the “old country’’ that led pioneers to make the hazardous journey to a new land to carve a life out of the bush. The next gallery will feature the Canada those pioneers found, from looking back at prehistoric times to the conditions the pioneers came into, a huge tract of forest-covered land. The focus of the gallery will be on the Canada company which opened up the land from what is now County Road 25 south, starting with Tiger Dunlop’s work in the late 1820’s. The second floor of the old school house will eventually house four galleries dealing with transporta­ tion, and the importance of water, road and rail transportation to the development of the county; the development of institutions such as local government, schools and churches; the growth of urban areas and finally, the early indus­ tries of the county. Mr. Breede and his planners estimate the typical visitors will have spent one to one and a half hours in the museum by this point. To give people a break as they exit the industrial gallery and enter the new part of the museum again, there is a public lounge area where people can sit and chat. It is hoped that some of the 40 volunteer staffers may also be able to provide refreshments in the lounge. The second part of the tour will begin in the military gallery. This gallery will begin closer to present times with the unification of the armed forces, and work backward in time. It will deal with the impact on the county of the closing of the air force bases in Clinton and Centralia. It will look back at the Commonwealth Air Training Plan and the four different air bases that brought people from around the world to train in Huron county during World War II. Atone point in the gallery the been part of the museum for many years. The entire museum was built around the 60-foot long engine. To make it appear as if it The CPR steam engine, one of the most famous attractions in the museum, got to see the light of day once again during construction. The old museum building was torn down around it and the new one built back up again. visitor will come out of the darkened display areas and look downward, through a glass win­ dow that slopes up and out from the floor, on a huge Sherman tank parked outside the museum on the lawn. Inside the museum is another large weapon, a Howitzer that was lifted into the museum’s second floor by crane during the construction period before the roof went on. After the military gallery, visi­ tors will enter the second floor of the agriculture gallery which will show the contributions agriculture made to the way of life of the county, the industries it spawned, and so on. At this point the visitors will come to a balcony overlooking the lower-floor of the agriculture gallery withitslarger machines like threshing machines and steam tractors. The area is lit by a huge, two-storey window, modern in design but reminiscent of a church window. Hangingfrom the ceiling, lit by the window will be a collection of windmills. Turning right in the gallery again the visitors will see methods of early transportation from bug­ gies to cutters and such lighter artifacts. To the left there are a series of windows that allow the visitor to look down on the huge storage area where artifacts not part of the current displays, will be stored with a completely com- Items will be recorded on computer puterized record of every item in the room and every item that goes in and out of the room. Next come the domestic galler­ ies where visitors will get a glimpse intoroomsofthe past furnished according to the period. The gallery will be set up like an upstairs apartment over stores and shops and eventually the hall outside will have a decorative tin ceilingasmany buildings of the period did. Visitors will then go down a large wooden staircase to the lower floor of the museum. There they will enter the centre­ piece of the museum and the most impressive of its galleries: the History Hall. Dominating the centre of the two-storey hall is the famous CPR locomotive that has has just arrived in the building there is a huge arch behind it, modelled after the CPR arch in Blyth where it cuts under the old CNR right of way at the northeast corner of the village. The rest of the history hall will be a model main street from Huron County. Various storefronts will be constructed along the sides and when visitors enter these they’ll see how the store or shop functioned. One of the first storefronts to go up will be the “sample room’’ front saved when the Queen’s Hotel in Brussels was torn down. There will also be an undertaker’s shop and a fire hall which uses lumber salvaged from the old Wingham fire hall, as well as an 1860’s fire pumper from Goderich and a hand pumper from Clinton. There will be a machine shop further down and it will give access to a large gallery that will feature some of the largest items on display including a huge stationary steam engine, and threshing ma­ chines and other farm equipment. Because space is limited the equipment chosen for display will be chosen for uniqueness and size. Other main street attractions when the display is finally finished will likely be a general store, a doctor’s office, a dentist office, etc. As well as these permanent attractions in the museum there will be a special gallery for touring museum exhibits from museums such as the Royal Ontario Museum and the Ontario Science Centre. These exhibits will help bring peopleintothe museum several times a year instead of less frequently. Openings of these exhibits will be turned into social occasions using the nearby lobby. The new museum offers another attraction. Forthefirsttime the Huron archives, collected over many years by volunteers with the Huron County Historical Society, will have a permanent, proper home. The Historical Society last year turned its archives over to the museum to be housed in a large stacks room, with proper humidity and temperature controls and protected from fire. With a dona­ tion of $30,000 from the Historical Society the vault will be equipped with special rolling shelving which will more than double the volume of shelf-space. Nearby is a comfor­ table reading room where people will be able to research their family trees of delve into the history of the county. For the staff, one of the great reliefs of getting the new building will be the new office area where they will have a dry roof over their heads. Currently they live an eventful life in the upstairs of the old school. One recent warm day they found a new leak in the roof where there hadn’t been one before: directly over one of the computers. There’s also the pro­ blem of the bat droppings several inches deep in the school attic and smell that comes seeping through when it rains. The new offices will also have a staff library and a board room that, Mr. Breede says, will be available for groups like the Historical Society and the Geneological Society to use for their meetings. The whole project has come a long way since the first bad word was received that the old museum couldn’t be kept open to the public and a study was started whether to move the museum to Vanastra. The museum that re-opens to the public in May will be an exciting place. The one that finally emerges when all the displays are built and the old school house has been renovated will be even better.