A couple of weeks ago, I got an email announcing the establishment of the BC chapter of Arts Health Network Canada, and today I had some time to check out their website a bit.



There are a number of documents available on their site, detailing the role that arts and arts organisations can play in individual and community health - for example, that visiting a museum or watching a performance can make people feel better about their own health (resulting in fewer doctor visits and reduced need for medications), and that participating in arts or cultural activities can make things better and easier for a patient once they're in a hospital or long-term care facility.

Some of this, I already knew, but there's nothing like reading through a few reports to get you thinking about things that can get lost or forgotten in the usual day-to-day shuffle. So, now that I am thinking about it, and before I get another crazy-busy day and forget all about it: What can a community-history museum do to help promote and support community health?

We've sent small collections of artifacts up to Swan Valley Lodge for short-term exhibits, and Bunny goes there each month with a presentation on some kind of local history. We've visited TAPs and CrestView Village fairly often, and TAPS, Swan Valley Lodge, and CrestView all routinely visit the Museum during the summer.

Is that all we can do?  I'm sure there are many other things we could be doing! Your thoughts?

One more section to go, and then it's ready to print!

I'm talking about the book we've been working on for almost a year now:



"War Stories of the Creston Valley" is the result of the research we did all last winter, and throughout the spring and summer, on the role of people from the Creston Valley in the wars of the past century.

We've been compiling a list of everyone who has served, and collecting their stories, and now, with the exception of one more chapter, the book is ready to print!

You'll notice I don't say it's done - this is a project that will probably never be really done, because we're always learning new things. There are a few chapters that we want to include, but don't yet have enough information, and our list of local veterans is by no means complete. So let's think of this as the First Edition, and we'll print supplements and updated editions as necessary.

Look for this at the Craft Fair at the Rec Centre next Saturday.

I'm looking forward to the Toastmasters meeting tonight. I'm not a member so I don't attend often, but I've been asked to give a talk on the role of the Red Cross and other community organisations in the fundraising drives and other work done on the homefront during the two world wars.

I like this topic - it's one of the most significant aspects of local military history. It is really amazing how much was done here in the Creston Valley.

Here's one of my favourite photos, from one of the fundraising events:



An explanatory note, from the presentation I'm giving tonight:

Dressed in wooden barrels and very little else, the Victory Bundles girls sang, "We're here to tell a story, and it's not for any glory, but we want your old clothes right away.  We will press them, we will mend them, we will sew them and we'll send them, to our Allies far away."

Rub-a-dub-dub
Two kids in a tub

Monday is Wash Day

What do you mean you thought you saw a fin?!...

i GUESS IT'S DATING ME, BUT I REMEMBER THOSE DAY!!

doing this as a test

I'll scratch your back: you scratch mine.

Archives consultant Linda Wills has been in town for the past couple of days, helping us come up with ways of saving a whole lot of time and probably quite a bit of money when it comes to processing and cataloguing things that are donated to the Archives collection.

In one of the boxes we went through today, we found five photos. According to a little note that accompanied them, they were found, many years ago, in a frame in the basement of a store on Canyon Street.  The note goes on to say, "These pictures include an old Grand Trunk Bunk Car - ditching service and the old wharf at Kuskanook."

Well, the one we could identify - the wharf at Kuskanook - is unfortunately in terrible shape (it has some kind of film over it). It's possible that this is the one referred to as a "Grand Trunk Bunk Car ditching service." I have no idea what that means, but those round things to the left of the men look to me like some kind of concrete pipe or culverting:



One is a complete mystery and probably not only unidentifable, but not worth worrying about, because the people and buildings are so small:



This one is equally mysterious, but I am really curious about it. If you look really closely at the centre of the photo, there is along, straight line of what appears to be pilings or even fence posts extending across the channel. I would love to know what that is!



This one is also probably unidentifiable - but feel free to offer your suggestions - but it is such a fantastic photo that I don't care - it's a keeper. I'm thinking all we need is a funny caption and this will be a best-selling greeting card, fridge magnet, and/or sticky note pad. Take a look:



Isn't that great? My new favourite photo! Send me your caption ideas, I'll post them on this website, and we'll pick a winner!

I just realised I haven't posted anything here all week! At this rate, you might be thinking there's nothing happening at the Museum at all, but in fact, it's been quite the opposite! We've had a lot of people in here the past few days, including an unusual number of tours going through the Museum (at least for this time of year!

Several of the people on the tours were admiring this portrait:



and asking who she was. The answer is, we have no idea. This is one of the items that came from the Yahk Museum when it closed more than thirty years ago, and it arrived with no documentation at all.

One lady said we should send out a photo of the portrait and ask if anyone recognises it - so here it is!

This is the time of year when we tackle a lot of behind-the-scenes projects. It's also the only time we can turn our attention to some of the wouldn't-it-be-nice thigns that are always on our to-do list.

I spent the afternoon updating the list of current volunteer jobs on our website, and adding a few new ones. There's quite a variety, and actually quite a few that can be done at home - so if you're looking for something to do, let me know!

If you're one of our regular volunteers, first of all, we love you, and secondly I'll probably be calling about one or another of these things in the next week or so. But you're still welcome to shoot me an email if you'd like to sign up right away!

There was a certificate in today's mail, announcing that the Creston Museum has won Silver in the Kootenay Business "Best of Business Awards" for museums or heritage venues in the East Kootenay.



I haven't been keeping track, but I know that we have received this award for several years now - at first, Bronze, now Silver, and I think one of these days we'll receive Gold or maybe even Platinum.

Now, every year when these certificates come out, I hear comments from various people that "It's not that big a deal," or "Not very many people vote so it doesn't mean the winners are really the best" or "They have so many categories anyone could be a winner - it's meaningless."

Well, I'm going to disagree with all of those. Who cares how many votes were submitted? What matters to me is that someone, or several someones, likes what we're doing, and thinks highly enough of the Museum, to take the time to tell someone else about it. That means a lot.

So, thanks, to everyone who has voted for the Creston Museum in the Kootenay Business "Best of Business Awards," or who has ever stopped to tell someone that Creston has a really great little museum. We appreciate it, very much.

And, as always, we love to hear your ideas and suggestions.

I love it when people donate photos that show something we don't already have photos of.

Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours with Dawn Sommerfeld, looking through photographs and documents that came from the Arrowsmith family. If you're not familiar with the local genealogy, John Arrowsmith and his wife Emma were among the first settlers in the Creston Valley, along with Emma's extended family, the Huscrofts. Needless to say, I was pretty excited about being offered these photos, and many of them are being added to the Archives collection - thanks, Dawn.

This is one of my favourites:



It shows the original Co-op building in downtown Creston. We have very few photos of this building, and those few we do have only show parts of it - behind a parade, for example, or cut off on the very edge of a photo. So it was pretty cool to find this one, showing the building from the rear and giving all sorts of detail about its size and shape - right down to the Five Roses Flour signs on the side.

You can see the alley way alongside, where the walk-through next to Fields is today, and opposite is a good view of 11th Avenue North with the firehall and village office tucked in behind the Grand Theatre (the very tall peak-roofed building ). You can also see a corner of the garage that stood where Shoppers Drug Mart is now.

The Creston Motors garage was built about 1928, and the Co-op burned in 1941.

Thanks to Ian for taking a display of sports memorabilia to the grand-reopening of the arena at the Rec Centre this past Sunday. It's always great to be able to share local history with people outside of the Museum's walls.

Thanks also to the people who loaned us hockey jerseys, photographs, and other items for the display. I hear visitors to the Rec Centre really enjoyed picking out their relatives in the old photos!

One common question I get at this time of year is, "Do you get to take some time off, now that things are a bit quieter at the Museum?"

The answer is yes, I do - I'll be taking an extended weekend this week and will be back in my office on Wednesday, 26 October. See you then!

These are probably the same people that leave paint at the dump by the sign that says that the dump cannot accept paint.

Okay, time for one of my periodic grumblings about what I like to call drive-by donations. These are the artifacts that just appear outside my door, or by the gate, or somewhere else around the Museum, things that somebody thought would be good for the Museum.

Let me start by saying that we do very much appreciate people thinking of us when they've got old stuff to get rid of. There are some real treasures out there, and things that are unique to our collection and have a direct connection to local history are always welcome. It's these ongoing donations that let us learn more about local history and the people who lived it, and create new exhibits so that we can pass that knowledge on to others.

But drive-by donations drive me nuts.

Let me show you a couple of examples of drive-by donations, and I'll explain what I mean.



This is a collage of 1926 Canadian Pacific Railway schedules, from various places including the Sirdar subdivision, and a couple of unidentified photos, all glued onto what appears to be an old window. It was left outside my office door one day, and has actually been hanging around for quite some time.



This scythe and rake showed up just a couple of days ago. The scythe blade appears to be old, but it's attached to an aluminum handle.  The rake is a moss rake.

These drop-offs represent most of the problems that drive-by donations cause for museums. Take the scythe, for starters. We have several of these in the collection already, with the original wooden handles, so we don't need this one. It's probably going to go to the dump, and I hope whoever dropped it off is okay with that. I also hope I won't get an inquiry ten years down the road from someone who wants to see the scythe Grandpa (Grandma?) donated to the Museum. And if the someone who dropped it off had also left some cash for the dump fees, I would be really happy.

The CPR schedule collage is really cool. It's not just your run-of-the-mill tool that's been standing in the barn for decades - someone went to a good deal of effort to make it. It's very unique, and might make a great addition to the model railway display. But who made it, and why? Who are the two people in the photograph? Which railway station is shown in the other photo? These are the things our visitors will want to know about this collage, and it's the stories behind an object that really make it special. Without this information, the collage, interesting as it is, is pretty much useless for us. The same thing goes for the moss rake - unique to our collection, but all we know about it is, it's a moss rake.

Imagine a museum full of things about which nothing is known other than what the object is. On second thought, don't - it's an exceedingly boring thing to imagine.

Legally, we're supposed to document where everything in our collection
came from, just in case someone questions our right to have it in the
future. Family disputes over who should have got what from Grandma's
house can get nasty. And if an object parked outside the door turns out
to be stolen, we could find ourselves in the midst of major legal troubles. Probably not the case with these particular objects, but it is still an issue we need to consider when we get drive-by donations.

So what would you do?  Keep an unknown object simply because it's unique, even though you don't know the story behind it? Or throw it out, and take the chance that you're throwing out something of real historic value?  Keep it just in case twenty years from now there's a legal issue over it and at the very least if you still have it you can simply give it back, or get rid of it because you really don't have the storage space to keep things that, because you know nothing about it, are unlikely to ever go on display?

First thing I'm going to do, is put a notepad of some kind outside the door, so people can leave me a message if I'm not here when they bring things in. That way, at least I'll have someone to contact about the objects.

I think I'll put it right next to the sign that says we can't accept objects left outside of office hours.

About a month ago, we had an exhibit at the Creston Valley Fall Fair called "Where Have All the Apples Gone?" It looked at the ups and downs that the local apple industry has experienced over the years, and tried to answer a couple questions: Why were apples so overwhelmingly dominant in the local fruit industry for so long, and why have they now given way to cherries?



We got lots of input from local growers at that exhibit, which was exactly what we'd hoped to get when we set it up. But in the display, we pointed out that there were 53 varieties of apples shipped out through the packing sheds in 1947-1948 - and probably the most frequently-asked question we got was, "How many varieties are grown in the Creston Valley today?"

Today, I typed up the notes we made at the Fall Fair. Here's a list of all the varieties that people identified at the Fair, that are still being grown here today:

Creston Apple (red blush on a yellow background)
Newton
Honeycrisp (it’s a very nice apple)
Sunrise
Silkens (pollinators for other varieties)
Transparents
Galas
Spartans
McIntosh
Red Delicious
Golden Delicious
Jonagold
Cameos (not very many)
Fujis
Ambrosia
Jonaprince (very few of those)
Nicola
Winter Banana (an older variety; not many around anymore)
Liberty
Crabapples
Elstar
Cox Orange (pippin)
Rome Beauties (some still around)
Wealthies
Tydeman
Braeburn (new variety)
Orin (from Japan, new to this country)
Ginger Gold
Early Gold
Granny Smith (maybe a tree or two)
Gravenstein (at least one tree, planted by someone who specifically wanted them. He had them growing up in Nova Scotia, and they were always the first apples they got in the fall. He says, “It was just like eating a pear.” So when he moved here, he bought a Grav tree and planted it, “but it’s not at all the same apple.”


Most of these are not grown in commercial quantity - but then, neither were some of those 53 varieties in 1947. And quite a few of the ones on the "Grown today" iist are not on the list from 1947 - they're newer varieties that were not yet known in the late 1950s.


Have we missed any?

Okay, I'm not one of these people who finishes their Christmas shopping in July and starts listening to Christmas music in September. I usually wait until well into November before the carols hit my CD player, and I do very little shopping, actually, because everyone I know gets homemade jam. But I can't help it today, because look at what Bunny brought in:



Aren't they cute?  Little wooden Santas that are just looking for a home in someone's Holiday Village. Jim cut them, and Bunny painted them, and they've donated them to us to sell at the Arts Council's Christmas Craft Fair on November 26. There are about a dozen sets, with four little Santas in each set, and Bunny's asked us to sell them for $10 a set.

Thanks, Bunny and Jim!

I gave a couple of tours of the Museum today, one of which was to a gentleman named John Ward. Coincidentally enough, that is the name of one of the robbers in the Great Creston Bank Robbery of October 20, 1925.

Are you familiar with that story?  It's a great story - one of my favourites in local history. It combines drama, mystery, humour (maybe I should say slapstick comedy), and even a high-speed chase (sort of). If it were ever used as the plot for a movie it would be the most ridiculous, unbelievable story ever - the kind where you just have to think, "That sort of thing only happens in the movies!"  But it's all true.

If you don't know it, drop in sometime - I'd love to tell you the story of the Great Creston Bank Robbery.

Please spell our last name correctly... it should be MacKinnon not McKinnon
Thanks
Laurie (nee MacKinnon)

I went up to the Gray Creek store today, for the unveiling of the original steering wheel from the Kootenay Lake sternwheeler SS Nasookin. The eight-and-a-half-foot-diameter wheel, made from oak, teak, and mahogany, is an impressive sight, suspended from the ceiling of the Gray Creek Store:



The wheel has been in the McKinnon family for eighty years - ever since it was removed from the Nasookin in 1933 and acquired by Captain Malcolm McKinnon, who captained the Nasookin many times during her career, including on her last run in July 1947.  Many of the McKinnon family were on hand, including matriarch Ruby, who is in her 90s and actually worked on the Nasookin, in the coffee bar.



Michael Cone of Longbeach was there, with a collection of fantastic photos of the Nasookin, including this one, of which I took a quick photo because it's such an impressive view of the ship. I knew she was the largest sternwheeler in western North America, but this image really brings home just how big she was:



One of the long-time residents at this afternoon's event recalls that Captain McKinnon would let the local youngsters climb up to the wheelhouse and dive off the top deck of the ship, to swim back to shore. That is some seriously high diving, that!

An interesting fact I learned today: Captain Malcolm McKinnon piloted the Nasookin on the first voyage, and on her last, then went on to pilot the MV Anscomb on her first voyage.  His grandson (maybe great-grandson?) Don McKinnon captained the Anscomb on her last run, then took the present-day ferry MV Osprey on her first run - and was unable to attend this afternoon's event because he was piloting the Osprey today.

We tend to think of sending photographs and documents electronically as a new technology. But is it really? Everyone emails digital images these days without giving it a second thought. But I remember, maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago, seeing commercials for fax machines - a well-dressed, very tall, very thin woman who was presumably a fashion model saying "But I want to see it, dahling," and within moments after the touch of a button the image appeared on her phone (black-and-white, of course - technology has made a few improvements since then!). Faxes were definitely the best thing since sliced bread then. But still not a new concept.

A few days ago, Cyril C. brought in a newspaper with a headline he came in specifically to show me:

"Science of the Day. Pictures Sent Across Atlantic by Wireless for First Time."

The newspaper was the Family Herald and Weekly Star, from Montreal, and the date was Wednesday, December 10 ... 1924.

Yep, you read that right - photos were sent electronically (sort of, anyway) from London to New York 1924, using a device called a photoradiogram. Here's a photo of it:



Somewhat larger than a modern-day modem, certainly.  The photographs are fastened on the outside of a transparent drum (2 feet long by 1 foot in diameter) that contains a high-powered light and a special lens. The lens moves in 64th-of-an-inch increments across the photograph, and the drum rotates to bring another "row" of the photograph into view of the lens.

The article continues, "The impressions on the cell, varying with the intensity or weakness of the light cast through the photograph and transmitted to the cell through the lens, are then automatically transformed into wireless rays, which finally are transmitted across the Atlantic as dots and dashes, the method used in sending ordinary messages.

"The receiving is carried out by means of a pen or pencil directed by radio, the motors in London and in New York being synchronized."

And it was secure - absolutely secret" in the words of the article, because anyone trying to "hack into" the transmission would need to know, and replicate, the exact rate of transmission, or the end result would be a mere blur.

What it wasn't, was fast, at least by our standards. It took half an hour per photo. But by the standards of the day, that was practically instantaneous - compared to the speed of a trans-Atlantic steamer, anyway.

Step 1 in cleaning grain, any kind of grain, from wheat to peas: get a grain cleaner.

That was our big project of the day. The seed cleaner we told you about a few weeks ago (Never Enough Space, 10 August 2011), that was originally in Sunset Seed, has now made its way to the Museum. This is not as easy as it sounds; the cleaner weighs about 2,500 pounds, according to Ted Heal.  Here's how we did it:



First, borrow a big forklift and Travis the forklift driver from Wynndel Box and Lumber, lift the grain cleaner, and put it on the back of Greg's truck, with the loan of some slings from Kevin at Across the Board Creations and some help from Ray C.

Then drive (slowly and carefully, of course) into Creston. We got some very curious stares on the way.



Then, borrow another forklift and Kevin the yard guy from Home Building Centre to unload the seed cleaner at the Museum and move it into the brand new section of the ods, where we store and display big things like this. Hold your breath as the forklift just barely makes it under the eaves, then drive it down the length of the shed. Put the grain cleaner down and...



Stand back and admire it in position.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!  Also thanks to the ThunderCats for being willing to help - even though your schedule didn't work out for this move, we appreciate the thought. And we have more equipment to move in here, so if you still want that workout...