Wetaskiwin District Heritage Museum Centre & City of Wetaskiwin Archives
an inclusive gathering place for the local community to engage in the history, heritage and culture of Wetaskiwin City, County, and the Maskwacis Cree Four Nations
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Category: Heritage Moments
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The History of the Electric Telegraph: Innovations by Samuel Morse
Look at this telegraph. The electric telegraph was invented in 1832 by Samuel F.B. Morse, he became interested in the possibility of electric telegraphy and made sketches of ideas for such a system. Morse later devised a system of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers (Morse Code). The telegraph equipment in our collection…
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The Heritage of a Vintage Barber Chair
Blain Fuller inherited this chair from his best friend’s father, Cam Bratt. Cam bought it used in the early 1970’s and used it in his barber shop in Camrose. Blain has had the chair for 5-6 years. His children used to bounce on it, which may account for the poor condition of the seat. This…
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Preserving Legacy: The Story of the Brightview School Organ
In the early 1900’s the one room schools were few and far between with children driving horse and buggys four or more miles. The Lone Ridge School was filled up and couldn’t take any more. The Goodhands, my grandparents, who had started the Brightview Post Office, store and stopping place helped organize a new school…
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Balancing Light and Artifact Preservation in Museums
We need light in order to see the collection, but light can damage some objects. The most vulnerable to damage is textiles. Ultra-Violet light causes the most damage, to the point where it can cause colour to fade, and the object to become brittle and break apart. This is where it is difficult for museums,…
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Space Transformation: Moving Artifacts in Our Museum
If any of you have been following our Facebook page or Instagram, you may have seen that we have removed our wall in front of the washrooms and moved the big crank organ. A big thank you to KelKenny Contracting for removing the wall while keeping our donation tree intact and replanting it in our…
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Fritz Kirstein’s Legacy: Wetaskiwin’s Iconic Meat Shop
In August 1921, Fritz Kirstein opened the City Meat Market between 49 Street and 49 Avenue in Wetaskiwin. They sold everything from homemade wieners, fish, to cheese cut from wide rounds. Sawdust was used in the back for cleanliness and blocks of ice preserved the freshness of the meat until the sanitary coolers were installed…
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The Legacy of Gus Elgert: Alberta’s Award-Winning Farmer
This week we got a donation in from Deborah Kirstein which included a ton of items from the 1930s to the 1970s. One of the items she included was a picture and magazine article about their grandfather Gus Elgert who was a farmer that owned land one and a half miles east of Wetaskiwin. His…
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Dissociation Explained: Impact on Museum Artifacts
What is Dissociation? It is loss of objects, or object-related data, or the ability to retrieve or associate objects and data. This can happen in three different ways: rare and catastrophic single events resulting in extensive loss of data, objects, or object values; Sporadic and severe events occurring every few years or decades resulting in…
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Understanding Relative Humidity and Its Effects
What is relative humidity (RH)? It is the quality of the air that ranges between damp and dry. We don’t perceive RH itself, we relate to RH through the dampness or dryness of our bodies in reaction to ambient RH, or we observe the effect on objects such as paper or cloth, which become damp…
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The Impact of Chemical Warfare in WWI
Remembering those who have experienced the traumas of war and those that will never return, we continue this week’s Heritage Moment discussing gas masks. Prior to the Battle of Ypres, 18,000 gas shells filled with xylyl bromide targeted Russian lines over Bolimow in January of 1915. This early form of tear gas was a failure…