Canmore Museum and Geoscience Centre - History

History

The museum started from a school assignment in 1936. Teacher Edna Appleby gave the students an assignment to write a letter to a foreign country requesting a doll in ethnic dress. One of the students, Mavis Mallabone, continued to collect dolls from all over the world. This significant collection was on display at the original museum until the mid 1990’s. The museum as steward of the town’s history has a collection of artifacts from early mining history to the 1988 Winter Olympics and beyond.

Miner’s Day is an annual event held on the Saturday closest to July 13, the day the last coal mine closed in 1979 after 92 years of continuous operation. There is a parade of the miner’s families along main street followed by a town BBQ organized by Canmore Museum and Geoscience Centre. After the mine closed in 1979, some expected that the town would soon follow the likes of nearby Georgetown, Anthracite and Bankhead and become a ghost town or vanish like the work in the coal mine. Instead, within a few years, Canmore was the site of the Nordic Centre for the 1988 Winter Olympics. The resulting development through the 1990s, and beyond have led to a mountain community with year round tourism as a sought after vacation destination and a major real estate market in recreational property. History buffs have no shortage of places to visit in the town of Canmore including the 19th Century North-West Mounted Police Barracks hosted by the Canmore Museum and Geoscience Centre. In addition, the miner’s favourite hang-out, the Canmore Hotel, the original Miner’s Union Hall is still a multi-use facility which will be the cornerstone of the new Lamphouse Theatre project.

The entrance is built to give the illusion of walking down a shaft of a blackened coal mine. It is not just a museum of coal mining history, but has a mandate to tell the stories of the heritage of the town and the people of the mountains. There are areas of the museum devoted to archaeology in displays related to Negotiating Place, there have been rotating displays of mountain culture which includes the climbing history of the Rocky Mountains from Lawrence Grassi to Sharon Wood. There are displays of rocks and fossils from the rockies, and the Gordon Tebitt reef display makes the comparison of the Grassi Lakes Devonian reef with a reef system which could be found in the Caribbean tropics today.

This museum is also for kids. A big screen TV in the corner allows kids and adults to learn about the geology of the rockies on short DVD programs. Many youngsters also run for the modern computers which have geology games installed. Besides that, there are summer programs for the kids, and there is the annual rock and fossil road show put on with the cooperation and support of organizations like APEGA and the Burgess Shale Foundation. In cooperation with Burgess Shale Foundations, CMAGS has run yearly trips to the Mount Stephen trilobite beds and to the Walcott Quarry. Tours have also been hosted to the Columbia Icefield Visitors' Centre and to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. The museum has also produced multi-media shows which study the changes in the community over time. Interviews were grouped into three main aspects: blessings, challenges and history were among the wide range of ideas and issues considered when looking at the positives and negatives of a growing community.

In 2008, the Canmore Museum and Geoscience Centre organized a traveling exhibition in celebration of the David Thompson Bicentennials (2007–2011). The exhibit is designed to create not only an awareness of how Thompson’s efforts gave shape and definition to the northwest half of North America. The environment and aboriginal world inhabited by Thompson is also explored in the exhibition. The exhibit called ‘David Thompson: 200 Years Later’ will travel to other museums and historic sites beginning in 2009.