The Rural Voice, 1993-07, Page 36Daytripping
Paisley's Treasure Chest Museum helps
show us our rural hertiage
With the Saugeen River flowing
right through the middle of town,
Paisley has always been a beautiful
spot to visit. The village, with its old
town hall and other buildings, also
offers a sense of the history of that
arca. That history is shown in a very
graphic way in the Treasure Chest
Museum on Queen Street North.
The Treasure Chest is a
municipally owned
museum, the product
of a lifetime of
collecting by
Norman E. Hagedorn
and his wife Ina.
Norman, born in
1901, kept many of
the mementoes of his
early lift. He began
collecting in a
serious way in the
1940s and by the
1960s had a wide
collection of
antiques. Tragedy
followed in January
1968 when a fire
destroyed the family
business and much of
his collection.
Norman Hagedorn
wasn't a man to be
stopped easily and he
began his collection
all over again,
travelling from coast
to coast across
Canada. Everywhere
he and Ina went, they
brought home
something significant
about the heritage of
the arca they were in.
This retirement
project was an
opportunity for him
to do something for
Paisley, the
community where he had spent his
life.
The majority of the Hagedorns'
collection was stored in their home
until the 1980s. After his earlier
tragic fire, however, Norman was
worried about safety of his collection.
He approached the village of Paisley
and asked about assistance in
building a facility to house his
artifacts. There was plenty of
discussion but the council didn't
make a decision so in 1984 Norman
went ahead on his own and built a
and Norman welcomed about 800
visitors in each of 1986 and 1987.
Now that the building was in
place, Hagedorn went back to the
village council and offered to donate
the museum to the village. This time
the offer was accepted and he turned
over the collection and building in
1988. In 1990 a museum
management board was set up to
operate the facility and
Norman Ilagedorn built the Treasure Chest Museum (above) and donated
it to the Village of Paisley. (Below) An elegant cutter and lots of farm tools
are part of the main floor display. — Photos by Gerry Fortune.
32 THE RURAL VOICE
modern, all -concrete museum with
his own funds.
The Treasure Chest Museum
opened its doors on August 1, 1985
in 1991 students were
hired to keep the
museum open during
the summer months. Ina
is gone now but
Norman, in his 90s, still
has a keen interest in
the collection he turned
over to his community.
Depending on your
interests, you can spend
an hour to 90 minutes
poking through the two
floors of the museum.
The first floor is
dedicated mainly to
agricultural tools from
pioneer times. The walls
are covered with shelves
of stone crocks. On the
floor is a blacksmith's
forge and, nearby, the
tools Norman himself
used when he founded
what is today N. E.
Hagedorn and Sons, the
Paisley farm machinery
manufacturer. There's a
wide selection of
tractor seats and oil
lanterns. There's an old
apple peeler that could
peel 60 apples per
minute. There's an
ornate old cutter and
other artifacts from the
era when horses
provided the main
source of power.
Also on the main floor is a coin
collection, stamp collection, and a
binder full of foreign money and