Submitted by Tammy Bradford, Manager Creston Museum
As you might expect from the Creston Museum, we’ve put a lot of effort over the past year finding ways to help people explore the community’s past. It started with an art-meets-agriculture exhibit in January, passed through a whole week jam-packed with walking tours, and continued with a whole series of displays for the hundredth anniversary of the Fall Fair.
We welcomed more school groups to the Museum this year than ever before. They came for guided tours and hands-on activities ranging from spelling bees to biscuit-making. A lot of those activities made a reappearance in our week-long Pioneer Camps in July and August. And then we welcomed a lot of students back in September for historical-theatre workshops.
Our collections of objects, photographs, and historical documents continue to grow. One of the most exciting recent donations is a big collection of nearly-intact Civil Defence emergency medical supplies from the Cold war era – we’ve managed to get well and truly sidetracked with that one. I’m sure you’ll be hearing (and seeing) more of it soon! We’ve responded to a couple hundred inquiries about local history – everything from the history of a road to requests for obituaries and photo reprints. There have been monthly stories in I Love Creston and daily “On This Day” posts on Facebook…the local story is just too good to keep to ourselves, you see.
We paraded our 1947 Maple Leaf truck at Blossom Fest; took some old-fashioned ice-cream-making out to Canyon Park for Canada Day; and wrapped up the year with kids’ crafts at the Rec Centre for Winterfest. In between all of that, we found some time to create our latest exhibit, Lumberjack Soldiers – a look at a Canadian Forestry battalion raised in Creston in 1917.
But we’ve also been looking forward to the future. When we asked you, over the past year or two, for ideas as to what the Creston Museum should be presenting, you gave us tons of suggestions. So we have a number of new things in the works: a brand new exhibit on the local Forestry exhibit in the new shed the Creston Valley Rotary Club built to protect the logging arch (and maybe some restoration work on the logging arch itself); our Timelines gallery going into the Founders’ Hall; hopefully a special showing of Margaret Moore’s artwork. The Civil Defence exhibit might just be showing up at a community event in February.
Watch for our usual slate of summer events: Kids’ Day, our annual Pioneer Camps, an exhibit by local artist Sandy Kunze, “History About Town” week in August. The year coming up is sure to be as busy as the one we’ve just completed!
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has made all of this possible: our donors and funders, and the team of very dedicated volunteers who do so much work. A very big, and very grateful, thanks to each of you – and wishing you all the best for 2019!