The Thorold Museum is slowly but surely becoming a reality.
After receiving over $6M in funding from the federal government earlier this year, the museum has set up their temporary headquarters at the Canadian Corps Museum on Carleton Street.
There, they are hard at work cataloguing historical artifacts and preparing a vision of what the museum will look like.
“We have an estimate of about 30,000 artifacts,” says museum administrator Emily Fulton, in an interview with ThoroldToday. “It's a massive undertaking to get these objects catalogued properly, in order for the museum to be able to showcase them. We need their information written down. We need to know what we have.”
That's why, co-op students from Thorold Secondary School are helping out with the cataloguing, as well as the marketing of the museum.
“They're really great kids and they've been such a huge help,” says Fulton. “There’s not a lot of other museums that will take co-op students right into the archives and into active cataloguing. It’s an almost serendipitous little moment that we have a lack of resources, creating opportunities for students to get involved.”
One of the Thorold Secondary students currently working at the museum is Alison Campos Amaya, who is helping with marketing, social media, and the branding style guide of the museum.
“I wanted to do something with marketing but they told me to not even think about it because there are not a lot of places to do that,” she tells ThoroldToday. “I heard about the museum and I took it right on. I didn’t think I would be so involved, but I’m so grateful for Emily.”
Campos Amaya has helped come up with the colour palette of the museum’s branding.
“It was really hard choosing the colours because they need to be [disability-]friendly,” she says. “It took a long time. It was very stressful.”
After much consideration, Campos Amaya came up with a set of colours that all link back to Thorold’s history.
“The board actually loved the palette so much they wanted to send a letter of thanks to her,” says Fulton.
Every day is a new surprise, as the other co-op students dig through Thorold’s historical treasures.
“They keep showing me these amazing photos of Thorold history,” Fulton says. “It's amazing to see the little treasures of the history of the community and the history of the people.”
While the students are helping build the vision of the museum, the city has engaged architects to draw up plans for the museum’s permanent home at the old Fire Station 1 on Towpath Street.
“We're waiting on the plans,” says Fulton. “There's a lot of work to be done. There’s a lot of things up and moving right now. The museum is definitely very excited to get things going.”
In the meantime, the museum board hopes to put on a series of events in the coming year to keep the community engaged.
To stay up to date, keep an eye on the museum’s website.
