Blog

The community-run Salmar Theatre turns 70 in May. It is a place the community gathers to share a laugh and shed a tear. . .

Things on the first floor of the Montebello building are getting back to normal. Soon it will be business as usual, thanks to contractors and several super volunteers.

There was no end to the excitement caused when a 2 year old pressure valve failed in the Montebello's mechanical room. The four inch drain and the curator couldn't cope. Cathy English, Curator at the Revelstoke City Museum had some sage words.

The men and women who work on the ground floor of the Montebello Building are wonderful. They do the real work of caring for the collection and making it available to the public. When Nancy Tait began volunteering last February, I did my crash course on processing a new collection with her. I used the language that I had used for decades. I pulled out Chenhall’s Book of Nomenclature. Then I made a confession. My colleagues don’t catalogue new artefacts. They accession them.

It was about time. Louis had been advising the Curatorial Department at the Salmon Arm Museum for almost two decades. When he was finally offered a position, he agreed to make the relationship official.

A century-old Christmas wish. . .

The Shuswap’s oldest apple tree is living proof of a relationship between the area’s first settler and the permanent residents, members of the Secwepemc First Nation.

July 1998 Crack. A small lightning strike in the Fly Hills. We saw it. Felt it. Salmon Arm’s Fire Chief Ken Tebo was taking a coffee break on the deck of No. 3 Fire Hall in downtown Salmon Arm. He looked up and saw smoke. Then the Fire Chief said, “We’d better keep an eye on that,” to his colleagues drinking their coffee. Within a week there was a disaster. At the same time, Pam Axley was on duty at the Queest Forestry Tower on the Anstey Arm of Shuswap...

My visitors thought the photo in the calendar in the exhibit was a piece of art imitating real life. As the exhibit’s Curator, though, I was imitating art; the photo was snapped in 1914 by Rex Lingford just before he went off to Valcartier. All of a sudden I was seeing the exhibit through my visitors’ eyes.

Moving a museum collection isn’t like moving a house full of things. According to Movers.com the average 3 bedroom household requires an average of 75 to 90 boxes. Lindsay Ault, Haney’s Registrar of Collections packed the first room - the rolling shelving room. Lindsay filled 180 boxes, double the maximum needed to move the average home. This is the collection’s second move in 28 years. I was there for the first and the artefact and archival collections have grown. In 1990...