Private donations make public collections sing in the world of museums.
The rich tapestry of historic materials in the Foothills is on display at rotating and evolving exhibits at both the Okotoks Museum and Archives and High River’s Museum of the Highwood.
“We’re constantly getting donations or offers of donations which speaks to the community’s faith and trust in the museum,” says Kathy Coutts, with the Okotoks Museum and Archives.
“They’re willing to part with their family’s treasures and sometimes it takes a couple of years of relationship building before they’re ready to bring it in. They want to know how we’ll take care of that, how we’ll preserve that.”
At the Museum of the Highwood, visitors are interested in history, largely of the television and film variety.
Collections manager Kortni Backhouse estimates 80 per cent of visitors are there to see the TV and film display showcasing the plethora of locally shot productions.
Highlights on display include props, clothing and set materials running the gamut from Superman III, The Revenant to the FX series Fargo, Netflix’s Wynonna Earp and the long-running CBC drama Heartland.
“People are very surprised at how many movies and TV shows are actually filmed here,” Backhouse says.
Stepping into history
Collective history is palpable when walking through the doors at the Okotoks Museum and Archives.
In 2000, the building was moved from its original location at Elizabeth Street and Northridge Drive to its current North Railway Street location to house the museum.
The heritage house was built in circa 1905 and was the home of G.A. Welch, Okotoks’ mayor from 1918-21 and 1923-26. It had several owners over the years, ranging from daycares, to the law office of Charles Dixon and constituency office of members of Parliament Ken Hughes and Grant Hill.
“I was here when the building made its way to this location,” Coutts says. “It was like a parade.”
The Okotoks Museum and Archives will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2025.
The collection started from scratch and is entirely donated from the community.
“Okotoks didn’t have a museum, so we lost a lot of that first-hand knowledge,” she says. “From 2000 onward, we started collecting oral histories, stories, artifacts, but it’s too bad we didn’t start earlier because I think we lost those stories from the first pioneers, first homesteaders.
“But it’s important to capture stories, even stories today, because 50 years from now, 100 years from now, it’s part of that puzzle of how did we get to where we are? Museums help people appreciate the past and helps explain where we are.”
The Museum of the Highwood opened its doors in 1961.
In 1973, it moved into the former CP Rail train station that was purchased by the Town of High River in a building with as much history as what it has on display. The building is on the national register and is both provincially and municipally designated as a historic site.
“The train station closed in the ‘60s and then they just had passenger service where you bought your ticket on the platform,” says Irene Kerr, director and curator at the Museum of the Highwood. “It sat empty for a while and the Town then allowed the museum to move in here.
“The building itself is really the biggest artifact, when you think about it.”
The Museum of the Highwood has seen its share of obstacles over the past 15 years.
Just ahead of its 50th anniversary year, a devastating fire hit the museum in 2010 and three years later, the 2013 flood wiped out 80 per cent of the museum’s collection.
“But quite honestly, a lot of we shouldn’t have had in the first place,” Kerr says. “Anything anybody brought in they would just take it and put it in the collection.
“Now it has to be from the area.”
The art of collection
The Okotoks Museum’s scope of acquisition provides guidelines on what it will accept, broken down into three unique collections: permanent artifacts, permanent archival and educational.
The museum’s mandate is to collect, preserve, research, exhibit and interpret artifacts and archival material that are relevant to the district.
“That provides the guidelines for when someone comes in and wants to donate what you can say yes or no to,” says Coutts. “It’s really difficult to say no. During COVID, when people were at home cleaning, there were a few things that I said no to. We have a storage issue.
“We really want to collect things related to Okotoks that help tell that Okotoks story.”
At the Museum of the Highwood, the geographic parameters for the collection extend south of Okotoks to Claresholm and from the mountains to Vulcan.
“The second thing is we have to know as much as we can about it,” Kerr says. “The provenance, we call it, where did it come from? Is there any history to it?”
Sometimes that means having to turn down well-intentioned donators.
“It’s sad to have to say no. It’s really hard and it’s happening a lot more as people get older and downsize,” Kerr says.
“And then sometimes you get donated stuff that’s really exciting.”
Recently, an elixir fix-all bottle was donated, sponsored by the High River Chamber of Commerce.
“The whole back of it has a poem on everything it was supposed to heal,” Backhouse says.
For Kerr, who has been with the museum for 16 years, there are a number of favourite exhibits from film and musical history to the currently displayed unfair trade exhibit.
“It’s so timely,” Kerr adds. “We have this exhibit that talks about residential schools and reconciliation. We were a little bit ahead of time on that one.
“The film exhibit we put it in right after the flood and I noticed that people were starting to come in, more and more Heartland fans. They would come in and say, ‘We’ve been to Maggie’s Diner, what else can we see?’ That was really all they could see back then.
“We were working on our recovery of the collections after the flood and the inventory, that was a huge job, and I thought why don’t we do a film exhibit? It was great because it was at a time we needed that and it’s still here today and people love it.”
The museum recently acquired props from Wynonna Earp, thanks in large part to a travelling fan of the show who took matters into her own hands to fill a void.
“She felt really bad we didn’t have anything for it, so she donated it to us,” Backhouse says.
The investigation aspect is one of the best parts of the job, says Kerr, who termed the process of research and discovery ‘history mysteries.’
Not everything in collection is on exhibit; in fact, that ratio is close to 15 per cent, significantly higher than what a large museum has showcased.
The rest, including education materials used in programming, is stored at on off-site location. Items are sorted based on material and type of collection in the temperature-controlled facility.
Donated items are grouped into accessions, the process of creating a permanent record of an object. Each object gets an accession number and object ID number.
“It’s kind of like archeology,” Backhouse says. “Without the context, the history of the object and the provenance, it’s kind of meaningless.”
What’s next?
Noting that donors want to see artifacts on display, Coutts says exhibits rotate often with a few exceptions. What’s not displayed is stored in a purpose-built basement that serves as the museum’s storage facility.
“Some things are a little hard to move, like the piano and the 900-pound stove,” Coutts says with a laugh. “You have to be creative in interesting spaces like we have.”
As one exhibit goes up, the wheels are often in motion for what’s next on the docket with planning, research and writing a time-consuming process. Ahead of all of this, the accession process of an artifact takes about five hours.
“From the idea to beginning to develop it, that takes about three to six months of research and then developing a storyline, writing the text, developing the panels, selecting what artifacts will help tell that story and then installing that,” Coutts explains.
Coutts, formerly a reporter at the Western Wheel, has found many connecting threads with journalism and curation.
“Exhibits is a different type of storytelling,” she says. “It’s also oral histories that you do at the time of donations. There’s lots of overlap, the five Ws, when someone donates something that story goes with that artifact. It’s the stories that go with the artifact that make it interesting.”
One artifact stands out as an encapsulation of that formula.
Coutts received a call from a B.C. resident whose mother previously lived in Okotoks.
“It’s from about 1905 and you open the drawers and it has a stamp on the inside. It’s authentic,” she says.
“It’s from a furniture store that was where Triangle Park is now, and it’s now returned to Okotoks half a block from where it started.”
As part of Truth and Reconciliation, the emphasis on Indigenous history has also been reinforced at Canadian museums and brought forward a more complete picture of life in the area across all demographics. Okotoks will soon house the third in a series of travelling exhibits curated by the Indigenous community.
“We want the collection displayed in the museum to reflect the community,” Coutts says. “History is like a big giant puzzle and all of these artifacts, photographs, are all pieces that help put together that puzzle.
“We don’t know what that puzzle is going to look like when it’s done, there’s no image on the cover of the box, but it contributes to the collective history of Okotoks and helps us begin to visualize what the community was like.”
