Night at the Museum Student Showcase - Madysson Weatherford

For our 2021 Night at the Museum event, Archives Assistant Madysson took visitors on a pictorial walk down memory lane!

Madysson wore a few different hats during her summer here at the Rossland Museum, including developing and delivering tours as well as archival research. For her Night at the Museum Student Showcase, Madysson combined all of her projects into a photo display of historic properties - businesses, hotels, community buildings/sites - and plotted them out according to where they would have been in downtown Rossland in the 1890s-1930s. Madysson’s idea was to share an image of what the city would have looked like during its boomtown period.

Close-up photo of part of Madysson’s Showcase display - the corner of Columbia Ave. and Washington St.

Here’s Madysson describing her Showcase project in her own words:

“This summer I helped to create an audio downtown tour to provide more information and oral histories on the historic sites in the city of Rossland. My Showcase display contained multiple photos that will be used in the audio downtown tour and to give people a greater perspective as to what the buildings on the Tour looked like in the early 1900s. The photos I chose for this display were of different heritage buildings and sites along Columbia Avenue and First Avenue as well as buildings on the streets between, however, there will be even more properties on the new audio tour. The photos displayed ranged in dates with the earliest being from 1895 and the latest being from 1936. The photos were also a variety of sizes from large portraits to small postcards. These pictures were able to give people additional context as visual historical background of the city.

For the great support and help in creating my display, I would like to thank the Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre staff, and I was privileged to have access to the Rossland Archives to complete my research for the project display photos. I would also like to thank anyone who came out to see my display as well as all the summer students’ exhibitions and displays. I enjoyed talking with everyone and seeing people engaged with our projects.

The written part of the audio downtown tour has been created, though we are still in the process of creating the audio for it and incorporating stories from the Rossland Memories Project. The tour should be available in the coming months so you will have the chance to do the tour yourself and listen and view the completed version of that project. Be sure to watch our social media sites for updates on the tour!”