History
Between 1906 and 1945 the Museum occupied several premises including the Regina Trading Company Building, the Provincial Legislative Building, and the Normal School (the eastern-most historic building on the "College Avenue" campus of the University of Regina). During the Second World War the Museum's collections were taken out of public display and stored initially in the General Motors Building (east on Dewdney Avenue) to permit the Normal School to be used for the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, and then, when the GM building was also requisitioned, in Pilkington’s Glass Company Building. The collections returned to the Normal School in 1944 and opened to the public again in 1946.
Finally the provincial government built the current premises on the corner of Albert Street and College Avenue, the site of the abandoned Chateau Qu'Appelle Hotel, as a Saskatchewan Golden Jubilee project. Partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to avoid the expansive task of uprooting the pilings, the museum was built on an angle with a large front lawn. The new premises were opened by Governor General Vincent Massey on May 16, 1955. To reflect the areas of devotion, the museum adopted a new title "Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History". This title stuck until 1993 when they received royal designation from Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada and became the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.
The Museum collection, then housed in the provincial legislative building, had been decimated by the 1912 "Regina Cyclone." The collection was severely damaged again in 1990 when fire broke out in the First Nations Gallery, which was then under construction. Smoke damage required the museum to close for four months; and many areas remained closed for years. Since the fire, the First Nations Gallery and the Life Sciences have been substantially improved.
Read more about this topic: Royal Saskatchewan Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)