The funeral of H.R.H. Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh on Saturday made me think of a small collection of 20 or so photos in the City of Wetaskiwin Archives. They feature Prince Philip’s future in-laws King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mum) during their Royal Visit to Edmonton on June 2, 1939. But why does our local Archives even have these photos?

They were taken by Carl William Walin who moved to Alberta from Minnesota with his family when he was three-years-old. In 1919 he purchased the F.L. Talbot photographic business in Wetaskiwin (above what is now Jasper’s Studio) and renamed it the Walin Studio of Fine Portrait Photography. For a period of time in the 1930s, Mr. Walin also operated film development services called Artistone Studio and was accredited to photograph Royal Tours of Canada. He was one of only three photographers, not including the official ones who accompanied the royal couple, permitted on the train platform and steps of the Legislative Building during the Royal Visit of King George VI. These 20 or so photographs that he took on that day were on display in his Artistone Studio.

Wallin moved to Vancouver in 1956 and sold his studio to Bert Jasperse, who eventually renamed the business Jasperse Studios. Carl Walin’s photographs are an important chronicle of early to middle 20th-century life in Alberta and especially significant for those of us interested in the history of the Wetaskiwin area. Mr. Walin died in Edmonton in 1966 and is buried in Wetaskiwin.

Stan Reynolds was an avid collector. He inherited this passion from his father Ted, who kept items that held sentimental value for him, including a 1904 Oldsmobile he bought in 1910 when he came to Wetaskiwin and a double-barrelled muzzle-loading shotgun he hunted with.

In 1955, the Reynolds constructed a large building to safely store the growing collection. Three years later, they decided to open up their private collection to the public. It was called the Reynolds Museum. You can still see the building in the field behind Legacy Toyota.

By the early 1970s Stan recognized that parts of this collection had great importance for the story of Alberta and he began to take further steps to see it better preserved. In 1981, he donated 850 machines to the Government of Alberta.

This, along with other items not part of his collection, would provide the foundation for our much-loved Reynolds-Alberta Museum, which opened on Sept. 12, 1992.

Stan did not only donate items to the Alberta government, however. For example, he had photos and other documents which were donated to the City of Wetaskiwin Archives. Further, in the early 1980s the City of Wetaskiwin began collecting objects for their own museum.

Stan donated many that had a specific provenance to our community. When the Wetaskiwin & District Museum Society was officially incorporated on May 20, 1986, the City transferred ownership of these, as well as countless others donated by many members of our community, to the Society. That Society is the non-profit charity that owns and operates the Wetaskiwin District Heritage Museum Centre, which I have the privilege of running.

For the past 40 years the Reynolds family has continued to donate objects, money, and valuable volunteer time to these local institutions.

In turn, we have all been working hard to continue to maintain our ethical balance of making the objects accessible to current generations, while preserving them for future generations, as Stan wanted.

After Stan passed away in 2012 we were given the opportunity to walk through his basement where he kept his private collection to see if there was anything else we wanted.

The same opportunity was given to other museums.
Storing and/or displaying objects does not make a museum. Museums own permanent collections, with each item being carefully registered, catalogued, and stored. Only a small percentage of them are put on display.

Our collections are not financial resources. Instead, they exist for the exclusive purposes of preservation, research, and presentation to the public.

Museum professionals, be they paid or volunteer, understand that it is neither sustainable, nor responsible, to have items just for the sake of having them. Collections make up the majority of our operating budgets. Even when our galleries are closed, like they have been for much of the past year, our collections are not going anywhere.

We have an ethical, and legal, responsibility to spend the same amount of time, money, and energy to not only look after them, but also continue to share them with the community the best we can. None of my museum peers have found that these mandated closures have meant we are any less busy.

A museum’s resources are finite and we have specific collections mandates and policies to try and balance them. At the Wetaskiwin District Heritage Museum Centre, our mandate reads: “objects / artifacts must be relevant to the history of Wetaskiwin and / or District for the purpose of preserving and interpreting material evidence of human cultures and natural environments”. Our policies consist of a small booklet.

The items from Stan Reynolds private collection that are now on auction are those which did not fit the mandates of our local museums. Instead, we have the good stuff.

At the Heritage Museum Centre alone we have almost 4,000 items that once belonged to the Reynolds family. Only a fraction of these are on display, but they include objects such as this Royal Air Force uniform and “Great Coat” that was worn by early Wetaskiwin resident H.R. French during WWI. Our most recent acquisition from the family is the cash register used by Ted Reynolds in his automotive shop. In many ways, this is where the entire Reynolds collection began.

A second newspaper article was published on Saturday with the tagline “Edmonton antique dealer parts with massive collection of ancient artifacts acquired from the Stan Reynolds collection — plus a few extras of his own”. The auction itself is called “The Stan Reynolds Museum Artifacts Collection”. All of this is misleading. Only about one-third of the items on auction are identified as coming from the Reynolds PRIVATE collection (not the museum). Approximately half of those are ancient bronze coins that have no real numismatic value. The discovery of Roman coin hoards is common, and the bronzes are, I almost hate to say it, a dime a dozen.

Would I love to own a bronze coin of the first Roman Emperor Augustus, of course I would. I have a PhD in Greek and Roman Archaeology, and my first museum “job” was in 1999 when I studied the Roman Republican Coin collection of the then Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary for my undergraduate minor in Museum and Heritage Studies. This coin would be part of my private collection, however, like Ted Reynolds’ shot gun. It would be tucked away in a drawer at home because of its sentimental value and not part of the public collection I work everyday to preserve, research, and share with our community.

This artifact was donated by Hugh Stevens.

In the early 1900’s the one-room schools were few and far between with children driving horse and buggies four or more miles. The Lone Ridge School was filled up and could not take any more. The Goodhands, donors’ grandparents, who had started the Brightview Post Office, store and stopping place helped organize a new school district on April 22, 1909. Fred Leschert was the chairman and Angus Goodhand the treasurer. A debenture was drawn up for the Brightview School District of the North West Territories, Dec. 11, 1909 to borrow $700 at five-and-a-half per cent interest to build a new school. The school must have been built before the money was borrowed because classes started Nov. 15, 1909 and Miss Helen Howlett was the first teacher. It was built on N.W. 8-46-25-W4.

It is not certain when the organ was bought but one of the teachers (the donor’s Mom) Bessie Goodhand, mentioned mice nesting in the organ in 1921. Bessie and her siblings attended the school and then she came back and taught in 1921-1922. The donor’s dad, Russell Stevens, taught in 1929-1930. When the school was sold the donor bought the organ for $5. Their children learned to play on it.

For several years, I have had this dream of a coffee shop where on a typical day you will find our Star Store Gifts and Wool. If you have been to any of our events over the past few years, however, you will know that we also use this space as a coffee station.

What you may not have noticed is a narrow room behind it. This is directly under a flight of stairs that leads to our second floor from street level. We use the stairwell as a fire exit, but it was built to provide access to offices of the original building that were separated from the general store below. Last Monday we started to ‘break ground’ to fulfill this dream of having a formal coffee bar that will allow us to better fulfill our vision of being a friendly gathering place for the local community.

It is important to me that any renovations we do are true to the history of the building and our contractor, Ken Schubert of KelKenny Contracting, has been very patient with the archaeologist in me as I watch him uncover each element of the building’s history. On Thursday his task was to show me what the original floors were.

As you can see, we have evidence for several layers. At the bottom is a hardwood floor. This floor is part of the original construction by John West, who had to rebuild after a fire devastated his Pioneer Store, along with the rest of the bustling business district of Wetaskiwin, on June 23, 1903. The Star Trading Co. General Store opened five months later and these are the floors the first patrons walked on.

On top of the hardwood is another wood floor constructed with tongue and groove planks that is laid perpendicular to the first. We are estimating that this is from around the 1940s, when Jim Montgomery, a great nephew of Mr. West, was operating Montgomery’s Department store.

Immediately obvious over the tongue and groove is a plywood subfloor and then our familiar orange carpet throughout the main floor, except for a small section of sheet linoleum in the small room directly under the stairs. This layer of a subfloor with carpet or linoleum on top was installed by Don Montgomery, who took over the family business and eventually sold the building to our Wetaskiwin & District Museum Society at a very reasonable price.

Look closely, however, because there is evidence for a different layer directly on top of yet another wooden tongue and groove floor in the narrow section between the carpet and sheet linoleum.

Unlike the tongue and groove that we believe dates to Jim Montgomery, this other one runs parallel to the original hardwood. On top of this second tongue and groove is an older plywood subfloor and cream coloured linoleum tiles (note the power cord coming through the first tile).

If we pan back again to look at the walls around the area [picture 2], we start to see yet another story.

Once the slat walls of the store were removed we found ship-lap, but there are two different kinds. At the far end the ship-lap boards are darker grey and thinner than those closer to the camera (and now mostly removed). By colour alone, it is obvious that this lighter and wider ship-lap is a newer construction. It was placed directly on top of the cream coloured tiles.

Returning to the flooring, notice that the edge of Don’s carpet lays on top of the edge of the tile. What you cannot see in the photos is that there is no further evidence for the tile under the rest of the carpet, just a subfloor. This suggests that the walls of the room under the stairs were constructed at a date later than the tile, but before the carpet.

The sheet linoleum is also interesting. It does not touch the tiles at all, instead there is a small gap between the two types of linoleum. I am excited to see if the floors under the carpet, which we have not removed yet, are the same as that under the older tiles, or the newer looking plywood under the sheet linoleum.

All of this was not the only story to be revealed on Thursday, however. After the floors were first exposed, and I had spent about half an hour wooing over them, I noticed that Linda Montgomery (Don’s wife) was in the gift shop. I went over to say hi and asked if she wanted to see what we had uncovered in her family’s building. We chatted for a bit and then she said something that caught my breath… She remembers taking staff coffee breaks in that little room where the sheet linoleum is and the new coffee bar will be.

I may not have known at the time, but years ago I heard the building’s story. Last week, that story became a little clearer. As lovers and protectors of Heritage we need to trust our connection to the objects and keep on listening.

We are excited for the renovations to be completed so we can welcome you all in to share a coffee and your stories with us and each other, or just have a quiet conversation with the building and its artifacts and hear their stories for yourself.

Originally published in the Wetaskiwin Times, April 7, 2021

This watchmaker’s bench was owned by H.R. French and sat at the back of his shop where he would repair the watches brought to him. The bench was probably already in the shop in the Compton Block on Pearce St. (50 Ave.) when Mr. French arrived in 1909. The lathe and tools were his, and they date back to his earliest days in Wetaskiwin. Watch repair and service have always been a large part of business carried out at French’s Jewellery. H.R. French was also designated as CPR Watch Inspector, which he would check all CPR watches monthly for accuracy and serviced them once a year.

Originally published for the Wetaskiwin Times, March 31, 2021

What is the right level of light to allow? We measure light in lux (luminous flux per unit area), and the recommended amount of light for a collection varies. A benchmark measurement is 50 lux, which someone with healthy and perfect eyesight can view the artifacts. When placing other aspects into consideration it drastically raises the number, to the max of 4000 lux, which is can cause major damage to an artifact over a long period of time.

We recently got a light sensor to test our all of our exhibit and storage areas to see how we can improve our museum. Currently we try to keep the light exposure to a minimum by having our lighting system on automatic sensors.

Originally published in the Wetaskiwin Times, March 24, 2021

This trunk was a transfer item from the Red Deer and District Museum Society and was donated by August Brunner. This trunk was possibly made in the late 1800s and belonged to his mother Mary Ann Baumbach when she lived in Stratford, Ontario. Mary Ann married George Brunner and then in 1901 they moved to a homesteaded community in Wetaskiwin County, Lewisville. August Brunner has a sister by the name of Winnifred Peterson (nee Brunner), whom was a Woman of Aspenland in 2002. The homestead that they grew up on did not have electricity, central heating, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, telephone, or car. The main source of transportation for the family was horse and wagon or sleigh. Supplies were bought from travelling salesman or ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue. Otherwise, this family was quite self-sufficient.

Originally published in the Wetaskiwin Times, March 17, 2021.

Once that wall was removed, we decided to try to clear up the space around the staircase, which meant moving one of our biggest and heaviest artifacts, a crank organ that has been in this museum, in that spot, since 2009 (pictured above on the right).

In this situation we examined the organ and saw that there was only one wheel, upon further inspection we realized that we could remove some pieces off the top of the organ and on the front as well to hopefully lighten up the load. While it did help, the organ was still heavy and difficult to move. After an hour-long struggle to move it 20 feet, it was finally in position. Once there, Craig our Collections Coordinator gave it a good clean using brush and vacuum technique, then put the organ pieces back.

Although museums are still closed to the public due to COVID-19, the public should still come down to the museum to check out our gift shop and wool shop. We have recently got in some new items and you can also see how spacious our main floor gallery area is after the organ transplant.

Originally published in the Wetaskiwin Times, March 10, 2021.

A.C. Dandy’s beginnings was a family-operated small business known as Joe Broere Electric. Joseph Broere was a Dutch national who had lived in Indonesia for 20 years. During World War II, having been called into service, he was forced into a Japanese slave labour camp. After the war he worked to help rebuild the country.

In 1948, a year before Indonesia gained its independence, Broere started a very successful service and repair business that gradually expanded into a large manufacturer. In 1957, however, he and his family were forced to leave Indonesia for good. They immigrated to Canada, settled in Wetaskiwin, and began again (A. Bert Reynolds, Siding 16 Wetaskiwin, 1930-1960: pp: 396-7).

Today, Hans Broere, president of A.C. Dandy Electrical Products Ltd, and family carry on this great tradition of hard work, innovation, and supporting the community they live in.

Also published in the Wetaskiwin Times, March 3, 2021

Blush or rouge has been colouring complexions for over 3,000 years and not primarily to doll up the ‘fairer’ sex, but to make one appear healthier. The Egyptians rubbed ochre on their cheeks while the Greeks used crushed mulberries or Alkanet root to achieve those rosy reds. Romans went a step further and applied lead compounds to enhance a ghostly sheen followed by a layer of red vermilion to accentuate the facial features. Little did they know the danger of pesky toxins contained in both grooming rituals would ultimately cause the deterioration of the integumentary system and send one into madness.

Europeans in the middle ages took a different stance on the cherry chops when it came to de rigueur. Etiquette dictated that the aristocracy be pale to imply their absence from fieldwork to the degree that ‘The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine,’ suggested using leeches to remove redness. When Giulia Tofana entered the Italian Renaissance cosmetic scene, her powdered makeup products called Aqua Tofana promised even skin tone and strawberry cheeks. To the dismay of over 600 men whose wives purchased the arsenic, belladonna, and lead-laced items, the lethal beauty ointment was merely a disguise for a timely and unnegotiable ‘divorce’ if the wives heeded the instructions of Lady Tofana!

Coincidently, this particular Toronto produced blush set from our collection reads as follows: “Dear Madam, Don’t expect best results for Lady Esther Rouge unless you carefully follow directions shown in my Rouge Guide, Cordially, Lady Esther.”

Let us hope this turn of the 20th century cosmetic led many a person to confidence and not to the funeral home!

Originally published in the Wetaskiwin Times, February 17, 2021.