Guest Post this week! From my cousin Pat Markley, journalist, writer and awesome museum person! She lives in High River, Alberta Canada where famous Canadian author W.O. Mitchell used to teach school in his pajamas! (Good strategy W.O. I should try that!).
Here's Pat with a tale of a museum, a fire, and that prairie thing of raising a barn and never giving up!
Like my cousin Jan, I seem to attract
strange events – and even stranger people – into my life. However, I never
imagined when I took a job at the Museum of the Highwood in High River in June
2010 – a place where nothing much had changed in decades – that a month later
I’d be standing on the sidewalk watching it burn.
Now, most small museums do
not survive a building fire. Thanks to the dedication of board members and
other volunteers, staff and folks who just wandered in off the street, the
Museum of the Highwood is alive and well and will re-open to the public on May
19th.
I think one of the things we’re proudest of
is that we never stopped being a museum – even though we were without a
building for almost two years. We answered research requests during breaks in
cleaning and sorting artifacts. As the museum’s programmer, I found myself
doing presentations in classrooms, gymnasiums, church basements, seniors’ homes
– and perched on the edge of a buffalo jump! The experience brought home to all
of us that a museum is more than a building and more than ‘old stuff.’
1 Comments on Out of the Ashes - The Museum of the Highwood rises!, last added: 5/16/2012
Display Comments
Add a Comment
It's great to hear about people preserving local history. Stories should not be forgotten. Thanks for sharing!