An ongoing project for museum interpretive exhibit intern Emily Carr for more a year now, the exhibit on the history of Fort Frances is nearly complete and open for public viewing.
And now Carr, who started the job in late June, 2006 after coming here from Whitby, Ont., is encouraging the public to stop by the museum—and step back in time.
“A lot of people say, ‘I should come see it, but I’m too busy,’” Carr said in an interview last Thursday. “I can honestly say they should come take a look at it.
“It’s important to understand your town’s history as a resident,” she stressed.
“The museum mainly gets tourists,” added Carr. “But as a resident, I’m from a town that doesn’t have a museum and I would really like to know what the history of my hometown is.
“Fort Frances has such a rich history that I would think, as a resident, I would really want to know.
“I’d never even heard of Fort Frances before I got the job. It’s a really interesting history. There’s so much that’s happened, and that continues to happen, that it really blows my mind,” she noted.
“It’s a small town with a huge history. It’s amazing.”
“I think it’s a great addition,” museum curator Pam Hawley said of the new exhibit. “I know when colleagues came to visit, they were very impressed with the level our museum was exhibiting at.
“There’s a bit of a buzz in the museum community of how we now look.”
Carr, who came here with B.A. (Honours) in Art History from McMaster University, and a post-graduate certificate in museum management and curatorship from Sir Sandford Fleming College (Peterborough Campus), summed up the work she’s done over the past 15 months.
“Basically, what it started with was I wrote an exhibit brief, which outlines the ideas the museum wanted to cover and how I wanted to go about it,” she explained.
“Then I did the community survey, which actually got a fairly decent response, so I was happy about that.
“Following that was the exhibit research paper, so I spent a number of months reading books and then writing the paper, which is basically what the whole exhibit is based on.
“From there, I developed a storyline the exhibit would follow, split it up by themes,” she added.
“From that, I wrote a text based on research paper but brought it down to a more general reading level, and found artifacts to go in the exhibit. Found all the pictures, wrote all the captions, wrote all the artifact labels.
“It was lots of work,” she sighed with a smile.
Carr said the fact the museum staff had to move all of the contents out of the building for renovations over the winter, then move them back in the spring, was a complicating factor in her work.
“It was a challenge,” she admitted. “I didn’t know the collection—I knew it in general, and knew the themes I could follow.
“Obviously, there’s still a few gaps in the display cases that they’ll still work on after I’ve left because the artifacts are still in boxes,” Carr added. “As Sarah [Garlick], the collections management intern, goes through them all, they can find them and put them out.”
The exhibit, which takes up most of the upper floor of renovated museum, is split up into different eras and themes within those eras. These are easily identifiable through a series of large panels covered in graphics and text that accompany the artifacts and other exhibit pieces.
The different eras and themes include:
•Aboriginal Pre-History—Uncovering the Past;
•The Ojibway—Living in Harmony with the Land and Water;
•The Early Explorers—Scouting the Land and Water;
•The Fur Trade—Exploitation of the Land and Water;
•Securing Treaties—Occupation of the Land and Water;
•Early Town Development—Settlement of the Land and Water;
•Early Transportation;
•Early Settlement;
•The Dawson Road—Surveying the Land and Water;
•The Forest Industry—Industrialization of the Land and Water;
•Koochiching Falls Dam; and
•Wilderness Conservation and the Rainy Lake Watershed.
For those looking for yet more information, Carr noted a thick binder containing copious amounts of research is available at the museum for public viewing.
Tying into the museum’s role as a Discovery Centre, there’s also numerous pamphlets for places in the region and Minnesota that people can visit that are related to the different themes.
Many of these places Carr visited during her research.
“We’re there to provide an overview of what Fort Frances and the region’s history is. We’re not a site dedicated to, say, the Manitou Mounds or the forest industry,” noted Hawley.
“There’s sites that do it a lot better dedicated to just those topics,” she explained. “We do it all, and give everybody a taste of what the context is for them to go and visit them.”
While the exhibit on the top floor of the museum is permanent, Carr said she has compiled a list of ideas related to it that could be further developed down the road.
“You want it to grow, you don’t want it to stagnate. You want to keep people coming in,” she stressed. “Once the collection is finished being unpacked, [the museum staff] can go through and find more things they can change on the mannequins or in the display cases.
“An always-evolving exhibit is what you want to keep it fresh and new.”
“We want people to have new experiences as they come and visit,” echoed Hawley.
Carr also explained that other aspects of the town’s history, like the fort and the Hallett, will be covered in Phase Two of the museum’s Heritage Tourism Plan, which will get underway next year.
Besides spending hours poring over old books and boxes of artifacts, Carr did a lot of legwork, and met and worked with many people, to get a better understanding of Fort Frances and the area and complete aspects of the exhibit.
“It was all fun to do,” she enthused. “I worked with some people from the Oberholzter Foundation to get images for the wilderness conservation panel, so I went over then and spoke with them to get the rights to use their photos.
“I had a tour of the paper mill to find out what that was like,” she added. “I had never seen it before, and that helped me understand the papermill process better—not being from around here, I didn’t have a clue.”
Local residents also helped her with woodworking, painting, and even translating Ojibway.
“I got lots help. But you might as well use people’s talents from the community,” Carr remarked. “It is a community project—it’s for the community, so you get people from the community to help.
“They feel a part of it. You should have pride in your community and things related to your community, like an exhibit about its history.”
Carr added an exhaustive list of all the people and businesses—including Fort Frances Times Printing, a division of the Fort Frances Times, which designed the interpretive panels—that helped out with the exhibit also is at the museum for viewing.
The public is encouraged to come see the exhibit. The museum’s winter hours are 11 a.m.-4 p.m. on Monday through Saturday.
Carr will be moving to Calgary this week, but only had good things to say about Fort Frances—her adopted home for the past 15 months.
Besides living and breathing the town’s history through her research and hard work, Carr also made friends here, and spent much of her free time working out at Energy Fitness and helping with the local Sparks Girl Guide group.
“I worked with so many people throughout the whole project. I really enjoyed that,” she enthused. “I made great connections, and some great friends. From that, it was a great experience.
“I learned a lot along the way. You want to keep learning,” she stressed.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
