STIRLING – You could call it a labour of love and you wouldn’t be far off the mark.
The Hastings County Museum of Agricultural Heritage opened for the season on the Canada Day weekend, providing a glimpse into the past of the dairy industry and its impact on the economy of this and surrounding counties in a "living history" environment.
A dedicated group of volunteers has cajoled and convinced area residents and firms to donate cash, building materials and artefacts to bring the dream to reality.
The museum, located on the Stirling fairgrounds, is open Thursday through Sunday and on holiday Mondays throughout the summer and the media got a sneak preview during the weekend of June 10 - 11 as the first display in what will eventually be a collection of buildings was unveiled.
The long-term project calls for separate buildings that will display the history of ploughing and cropping and antique tractors. A second steel-clad building was already under construction during the media weekend, held in conjunction with the Stirling Theatre, and will house rotating displays of antique tractors from a group of collectors in Hastings and neighbouring counties.
The building is now closed in and museum staff and volunteers expect the tractors to start rolling in this summer.
The project is being undertaken entirely by a group of volunteers and other than a grant of $20,000 from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to employ summer staff members and for marketing start-up costs, it has been funded entirely through financial and in-kind donations, volunteer labour and donations of artefacts from residents and businesses keen to see this important part of the county’s heritage not only preserved but put on display for all to see.
Harry Danford of Springbrook, one of the project’s five fund raisers, told The AgriNews the committee decided to go with plain metal-clad buildings, preferring to put their efforts into the buildings’ interiors rather than spend hard-earned dollars on exteriors.
And the plain exteriors give little indication of the world into which the visitor is about to step.
The dairy museum is a step back into the 1940s and ’50s, with a replica of a dairy barn, cheese factory, butter making and milk bottling, dairy lab and a working farm kitchen and farmhouse front parlour, complete with a Victrola and copies of the Family Herald.
The equipment in the cheese and butter plants is all in working order. Some of the cheese making equipment was donated from the collection of the late Don Pollock of Campbellford, who was known for his displays at different agricultural functions throughout Eastern Ontario, and retired federal cheese inspector Norm McWaters of Belleville put his expertise to work in arranging displays. He also donated a display of calendars collected for dairies, creameries and cheese plants across the province.
It is a powerful evocation of a time when virtually every concession road in rural Eastern Ontario had a cheese plant. A map in the centre of the building shows the locations of the more than 270 cheese plants that dotted the landscape of Hastings, Lennox & Addington, Northumberland, Peterborough, Victoria and Frontenac before the advent of modern mega-plants. At one time Hastings alone boasted 63 cheese factories. Today it has two, the rest being little more than coloured pin heads on the museum’s regional map.
Many of the articles on display were donated by local companies, including the Stirling Creamery, and some were found by determined volunteers who scoured the countryside to make the displays as realistic as possible.
While some were donated as soon as companies found out about the project, others were discovered through good luck.
That was the case with the Douglas fir churn in the creamery display. The committee had advertised across North American looking for this particular piece of equipment, all to no avail, only to discover what they were looking for lying abandoned in a field near Havelock. The 1937-patented DeLaval churn was gladly donated to the museum by its owner and after a minimum of refurbishing is now back in working order as one of the museum’s largest pieces of equipment, Danford said.
Response to the project has been so positive, Danford added, that it is far ahead of its original 10-year schedule for completion. Much of the work on the interiors is done during Wednesday work-bees although on the Saturday of the media weekend, a gang was hard at it putting up trusses for the tractor building.
Land for the buildings was donated by the Stirling and District Agricultural Society, further cutting the committee’s costs.
The museums’ target audience is tourists attracted to the area’s rich history, school bus trips and local residents.
The recent refurbishing of the Stirling Theatre and its development as a poplar centre for live performances now draws large audiences including tourists and day excursion groups and in future the committee hopes these group visitor packages can be expanded to include a visit to the museum.
"History, properly preserved an accurately recorded, is a valuable teacher. It is important to our community that the rich agricultural heritage of this area of Ontario be captured for the enjoyment of every visitors and for the educational value it provides. We will all benefit by supporting this major endeavour," states a piece of the museum’s promotional literature.
For more information on the museum, visit its web site at www.hastingsctyagmuseum.com.
From the Archives:
AgriFeature, July 2000
