Preserving the past is a continuous process

August 22, 2024

This display includes a list of the communities whose history is being preserved by the Strait Area Museum; Logan Fox, president of the Port Hastings Historical Society, shows off the museum’s telegraph display; the last pair of shoes of champion Cape Breton step dancer Donald B. Riley; Angie MacIsaac has been manager of the Strait Area Museum for the past six years; Fox shows off part of the Canso Causeway construction display to visitors Nicole Latimer, left, and Tessa MacIsaac.

The Strait Area Museum is very much focused on the future as it preserves the history of the communities most impacted by the opening of the Canso Causeway nearly 70 years ago.

“A museum is always evolving. It has to continue to evolve so it means adding new things to our collection all the time, whether it be information or artifacts,” says Angie MacIsaac, who’s managed the Port Hastings museum for the past six years. “We’re always in motion.”

MacIsaac says she wants the museum to be a place where people can gather, and to that end the facility has started hosting a weekly coffee club, a free drop-in event.

“It’ll be one morning a week,” MacIsaac explains. “You can sit, have a conversation. We can look at photographs—more of a social thing. We want to be an active, happy social place to visit.”

“It’s just to get people to know what we have,” she adds. “Many locals don’t realize we have as much information as we do.”

Also new for this season will be information and artifacts that the former Point Tupper Heritage Association entrusted to the museum when it closed its own museum during the early days of the Covid pandemic.

“We helped them bring it over,” MacIsaac says. “And then we worked on all their items, getting them photographed and in our system, to have them ready to go out for this year.”

She says it’s also important to attract younger people to the museum. The Port Hastings Historical Society, the volunteer group that supports the museum, has its youngest president ever in Logan Fox. In fact, the society’s entire executive is under the age of 40.

Fox, who grew up in the Port Hastings area, first came to work at the museum in 2020 and stayed on as a member.

“Local history has always interested me,” he says. “When I started work at the museum, I realized some of the cool older pictures and artifacts they have and how important it is to keep that in your community and be able to show future generations how people used to live.”

He says the younger generation owes it to older volunteers to step up and continue the important work of preserving the past.

“They’ve put a lot of years into our organization,” Fox notes. “A lot of them, especially since the pandemic, don’t come out as much. It’s so important to keep the museum active in our community, so we definitely need younger people to sign up and take on those roles.”

One of those long-time volunteers is Yvonne Fox, who spearheaded the creation of the Port Hastings Historical Society in 1978, when information was being gathered to mark the 25th anniversary of the causeway’s opening in 1980.

“If Yvonne Fox wouldn’t have collected all this stuff in the 70s and 80s, we wouldn’t be here,” MacIsaac explains. “She’s got to get total credit for making it all happen.”

“She’s the driving force,” she adds. “Even today, if I have a question that I don’t know the answer to, Yvonne’s my first call.”

The Strait Area Museum is supported by the federal and provincial governments, as well as by the
Town of Port Hawkesbury, and the Municipality of Inverness County which provides grant money to hire staff each season. But MacIsaac says its main sources of revenue are the ice cream barn located next to the museum, the donations collected at the door, the artisans shop on-site, and the weekly ceilidhs the museum hosts on Tuesdays at the Port Hawkesbury Civic Centre.

MacIsaac says the museum is receiving donations of information and artifacts all the time. She says they’re happy to make available anything that focuses on the history of the communities most impacted by the causeway. Those include Port Hastings, Port Hawkesbury, Point Tupper, Auld’s Cove, Mulgrave, up Route 19 as far as Long Point, and up Highway 105 as far as Kingsville.

“My suggestion is that if it’s anything genealogical or family-related, we do have a family file system in our museum, so that families can come in, do their own research, take it with them, but also store a copy within our facility for future,” she says.

“We do have the skills now that we can scan in photographs and add them to our collection, and that’s going to a be a big focus over the next couple of years, adding to our collection of photographs and documents and making that available digitally to allow people to access it more easily.”

For artifacts, MacIsaac says all donations are reviewed by an accessioning committee to see how they fit the focus of the museum. “As long as it fits, we’ll be able to bring it into our collection.”

“Yvonne has gathered so much information over the years, that we haven’t gathered as much in recent years,” she says. “The stuff we collect right now that’s happening—photographs or newspaper articles—is going to be history in 20 years’ time. It’s a continuous process.”