This might be the final installment of my blog for the summer as my time here at the Parksville Museum is rapidly coming to an end. However, the past month that I've been neglecting this blog has been rather busy. Lately I have been in contact with other local museums such as the Nanaimo Military Museum to organize the exchange of some items and to gain information on specific items in our collections. We have since then used this information to create new and informative exhibits.

Other projects I've been working on include stabilizing and reducing the relative humidity of some of our storage rooms. This has involved acquiring dehumidifiers, both chemical and electric, to help with this process. I have also begun quarantining some items that were beginning to show different types of decomposition. For example with a leather item that was beginning to show signs of mold, caused by high humidity levels. I wrapped the leather boots in an air tight plastic container and placed it in a dry freezer. This would halt the growth of any more mold spores, but it doesn't necessarily kill them. To prevent the spores from becoming active again once reintroduced to the, now stabilized, storage area I took the leather boots outside and gently brush the mold spores off the leather while using a vacuum, covered with a cloth filter to ensure no parts of the artifact were accidentally vacuumed up and lost. Some of the metal items I found that needed attention I placed into plastic containers with chemical dehumidifiers to try and halt any further oxidization. Once I am comfortable that they are stable within that environment I plan on taking them out and cleaning them using Canadian Conservation Institute's guidelines.

Other projects around the Museum I have been working on in the last month have included Changing around exhibits to ensure that all items are properly labeled. I've continued on entering items into our digital database, taking photos and doing research to get as much information on these items as possible. We have also gotten several people coming in asking us to go through our archives to find information on either their ancestors or the community itself. One person came in wanting to know more about their great grandfather who was killed during the First World War and we were able to use both our own archives and those of the forces war record to paint a fairly detailed history about this person.

In closing I would like to say that this summer has been absolutely fantastic. The museum manager and my co-workers have been extremely helpful and supportive throughout the summer without whom I would not have been able to learn from or enjoy this experience nearly as much.

The other day I realized it had been quite a while since my last post so I thought it was time to sit down and talk a bit more. Lately this blog has drifted away from what I had originally been hoping to base it around which was an inside look into the work undertaken in collections management. The reason for this is that the museum has been pursuing several different community events that have taken up most, if not all, the museum staff's time over the last month or so. During this time we have put on several farmers markets along with our annual summer kids day called Panther Valley Day, which had to compete with many other community events this year. The farmers market and Panther Valley Day took a lot of planning and work to organize like ensuring we had all the right equipment for the children's activities. This work which ranged from getting tents donated to calling local bands to preform at our event took a great deal of time and really brought into perspective how much work goes into organizing and pulling off an event such as this. In the end all the work paid off and we had all the volunteers, goods, entertainment and activities we needed to create a successful event.
Thankfully now with  Panther Valley Day out of the way and the Farmers market becoming a weekly routine we can get back to business as usual at the museum. This means I'll be attempting to complete a grant application that gets the museum the funding to recreate their entire exhibit. In addition to this I will be able to continue working to update our collection's database while maintaining the museum's collection. In other words I will be able to get back to my regular posts about the interesting items I find while working in the back and share them with you. Also if the grant is a success I will hopefully be able to continue working at the museum over the fall and possibly winter helping to update our exhibits with the knowledge of what our collection could support.

Last night was our first ever farmers market here at the museum. The event was a huge success with approximately 750 people attending. Our vendors included everything from freshly cut flowers, home made sausages, fresh locally grown vegetables, locally made chutneys and other delicacies like kale chips, a blacksmith, local coffee vendors, fresh fire oven cooked pizza, fresh fish, artisans, awesome old cars and live music playing nicely in the background. This live music accompanied by the smells of fresh food and flowers surrounded by the historical setting of our museum grounds resulted in the perfect atmosphere for our market.

The event was such a success that many of the vendors sold out of numerous items. Due to this success most if not all of our current vendors have signed up to return next week, or for the entire summer. On top of that numerous other vendors have asked to attend next week's market to see if we can repeat our success. So we encourage everyone to come out next Friday the 18th between 5 and 8pm so we can have an even bigger and better market!

So we've had a very exciting couple weeks here at the museum. Unfortunately it hasn't all been fun. About two weeks ago we had a break in. During this break in several of our display cases were badly damaged, several artifacts were stolen and our front door broken.

These actions were a real wake up call for all of us at the museum and has led to us taking several measures to tighten security around the museum. We are also hopeful that this recent burglary will aid us with our grant applications. Some of the grants we are planning on/in the process of applying to will not only help us purchase better security measures and also allow us to upgrade much of the outdated lighting and display cases along with several other projects planned for the museum.

In addition this break in forced us to rebuild several of the displays and move around/tweak some of the existing exhibits in the museum. The hats I wrote about a few blog posts ago have been put out on display and are looking absolutely fabulous in their new home.

One of the other displays that was broken into also has been remade into an exhibit based around a woman's carrying case from 1886 and is complete with all the make-up bottles, brushes and other accessories.

In all everything is starting to get back to normal here at the museum and we are excitedly looking forward to our first ever farmers market on the 11th of July.

Hello all!

We've been having a very interesting a busy week...which is why I'm pumping out two post back to back. Actually I had just failed to press publish on my last post and due to the pace around here forgot to get back and publish it. Anyway, we here at the museum are happy to announce that we have received the green light on our farmers market which will be starting July 11 and running till the end of summer. This is great news as all the work getting the grounds ready for some local vendors has really paid off. With that said we invite everyone out to enjoy some local produce and goods every Friday from 4:30 until 8:00 pm starting July 11th.

Other exciting news is that we've been getting things organised for Panther Valley Day both Starbucks and Re/max have both agreed to help support the day providing tents and coffee. We are still figuring out a few other details but at the moment we already have live music, petting zoo, blacksmith, gold panning, butter churning, balloon animals and much more all lined up.

Finally getting around to a bit of history is the fact that we have just received, on loan, this beautifully restored 1905 White steam delivery van.

While the van is circa 1905 parts from 1905 to 1910 were used along with a photo from a 1952 book on steam cars to complete an authentic restoration. These vehicles were built by the White Sewing Machine Company in Cleveland Ohio. The earliest version of this steam van was built in 1903 which White continued to build until 1910 when it was decided that the future was gasoline powered internal combustion engines. The company eventually gave up producing automobiles in 1918, and concentrated on trucks at which time it became White Trucks. White later became Freightliner. Therefore, this may be the world's oldest Freightliner!

Steam vehicles were quite popular during their introduction in urban centres as they were silent and therefore did not bother horses. However, they were heavy on fuel and needed to be refilled with water frequently, because of this they were not suitable for long trips. Additional problems arose for the steam van with the fall of the horse for urban transportation as there were no longer horse troughs from which to load up on water. With fewer and fewer horses to be found in urban centres the louder but longer running gasoline powered internal combustion engine was able to push the Steam van, and other steam driven vehicles, out of popular use.

Hello once again to those who read this blog. It has been a pretty busy lately at the museum but lately we've been doing some work in the back trying to protect and maintain our artifacts. Recently this has involved doing condition checks and changing out the neutral paper used to store and preserve these items. Today we worked with dozens of items but there were a few that were pretty amusing. The first one I will talk about is a Canadian army uniform that belonged to a member of the Royal Canadian Ordinance Corp.

Formed from the Canadian Ordinance Corp in 1919 the Royal Canadian Ordinance Corp uniform is recognizable for several reasons, my personal favorite is the inscriptions on the buttons.

It is probably impossible to make out the inscription from this photo, that I unfortunately had to take with my phone, but it says "honi soit qui mal y pense" which roughly translates into "Shame be he who thinks ill of it."

Another item that we found rather interesting was a photo of Canadian forces during the Boer War. The reason that the men in this photo can be easily recognized as Canadian is that they were the only troops equipped with Stetson hats during the Boer War.

We've been affectionately referring to this photo as the "Boer War photo-bomb" as a guy, this guy

is comically smoking a cigarette and possibly making a face through the window. So with that little bit of fun I will quickly wrap up this entry.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the second installment of the Parksville Museum and Archive's blog. I would quickly like to take some time to talk about some of the work we've been doing around the museum and share some artifacts you might not get to see unless you were working behind the scenes. First off work is continuing on the grounds of the museum to get it ready for the farmers market. Just as a disclaimer we haven't finished completing all of the required upgrades and paperwork to allow us to host a farmers market. However, we are still trying our hardest to make it a reality  for this summer. Lately we have leveled off the grounds so we can accommodate as many vendors as possible. We have also been working on a small shaded garden patch in the center of the grounds to which we will be adding a bench or two.

So enough about landscaping what I really wanted to talk about in this blog are some of the artifacts we've been working with in the museum lately. Lately we've been working on updating a lot of our database which means going through the collection taking photos of artifacts, entering them into the new system and making sure that they haven't begun to fall apart. If they are starting to show their age we do whatever we can to try stop the item from deteriorating further. This can be done generally by working to change the conditions in the storage area, be it cycling out the air and removing humidity while cleaning the artifact of any contaminants as we would do in the event that some of our collection acquired mold. Luckily we haven't had too many problems with this at the museum so we've been able to go ahead and focus more on using the artifacts and discuss how we might be able to create some new exhibits. A few days ago we were going through one of our storage rooms that we are in the process of rearranging, cataloging, coming up with exhibit ideas, etc. While doing this we moved a few boxes filled with old display props such as broken manikin heads and random bits of cloth not associated with our collection. After wading through these items that did not have any historical significance we stumbled onto a little treasure trove. The first indication we had something special on our hands was when we spotted an old hat stretcher.  

 

Now this was an absolutely amazing find. The hat stretcher was in incredible condition, it had only minor wear around the edges and where hats would have sat while being stretched. So the item is called a hat stretcher which sounds pretty self explanatory, but back in the day when you bought a hat it might sit a bit too snug on your head. So what you'd do to fix this problem is go to a hat maker who would stretch the band of your hat with this device. To do this he would turn a screw that would separate the blocks of wood to the desired size which can be seen marked on the piece of metal in the second photo. The amazing thing about this item was that on close observation we found the screw that separates the two blocks to still be well greased and fully functional! Now after this we were really excited and continued to uncover more amazing items like women's dress hats, boat hats and more. I'd quickly like to state that I love old hats, shoes, watches...pretty much old clothing in general even though they wouldn't look particularly good on me if I wore them (also motors which we have some amazing examples of. That could actually be a theme of a future blog). What is really amazing about all these old items is the detail that went into them and how unique each one is. You can honestly spend hours looking at an old watch and continue to find new incredible details that would be unlikely to be found on some newer items. Anyway, after a while we came across a leather hat box that had seen better days.

This is a photo from the side of the box and clearly shows the broken straps and some water damage along the base of the box. Despite this damage we were all getting a little excited because the style and workmanship of the box suggested it might contain something special. To be sure not to damage either the box or its possible contents we slowly went about discovering if there was anything  in the box.

This is a photo after we've taken off the lid and removed 

the first layer of the case meant to hold the hat in place.

In this photo we can see the felt top hat as soon as it

came out of the box. In the top right is the part of the

case directly under the lid mentioned in the previous

photo.

In this photo we can see just a little bit of the

damage sustained by the hat. Unfortunately 

like the box that contained it the hat was not

in the greatest of shape but still beautiful.

The reason that all these hats were such a fortunate find is that they play along to an idea for an exhibit we've been throwing about. This exhibit would focus on Parksville as a vacation destination for much of the island in the first half of the 20th century. Along with some information about the events and activities that were put on we would try and portray life during that time and depict some of that experience through the clothing people would have worn. Unfortunately we might not be able to include this beautiful top hat in such an exhibit due to its poor state (which is why I chose to post some pictures of it here for you). However, some of the other items and hats not shown in this blog will hopefully be making an appearance. Anyway I hope you enjoyed this entry and to be completely honest I'm more than a little impressed you stuck it out...really proud of you. If you liked any of this or if you have any questions, comments, suggestions of things you'd like us to explain or talk about please feel to make them known and I'll try to get to them in a future blog.

I'd like to briefly welcome any readers to this blog. My name is Alain Borgeaud and I'm a co-op student working at the Parksville Museum and Archives over the summer of 2014. This is going to be an exciting summer for us as we are upgrading much of the museum and attempting to encourage more community activities. At the moment we are in the process of setting up the property to facilitate the start of a weekly farmers market at the museum. We are hopeful that this farmers market will be up and running before the end of summer and will be keeping the community updated as often as is possible...so fingers crossed everything can work out great and we can enjoy some beautiful fresh produce in the sun. We were also pleased to announce that Panther Valley Day will be returning for another year and will be including many family favorites including live music, pony rides, prizes and much more. For any additional information about these events please feel free to look us at parksvillemuseum.ca/ or follow on twitter at ParksvillePast for instant updates on any events. 

In addition to keeping you up to date on the progress of the numerous projects around the museum this summer I will be giving you a bit of insight into what happens behind the doors labeled "Staff Only."  You see museum workers tend to be a fairly nefarious lot, we keep an incredible amount of artifacts and projects hidden from the eyes of the public. This secrecy isn't necessarily planned but rather due to the fact that we often don't have enough items to make a proper exhibit or the space for a new exhibit. One of the main goals of this blog will be to give the public, you our readers who are truly wonderful for putting up with my ramblings, an idea of the types of projects we undertake here and a look at some of the artifacts that might not make it out onto the museum floor. In addition I will be throwing some tentative ideas around for future exhibits so if there is anything that you really like and feel should be put on exhibition please let us know, we appreciate any feed back we can get from the community.