Hunter Brothers General Store Refresh

May 29

The Hunter Brothers Store

We’ve been taking advantage of the downtime in the museum to refresh some of the displays in preparation for reopening! One of the biggest undertakings in a while is refreshing our Hunter Brothers General Store display.

The Hunter Brothers Store was not only one of Rossland's longstanding businesses supplying all other industries, businesses, and families from 1895 to 1959, but it is also now one of the largest of our permanent exhibitions. In both store and exhibit, patrons could find everything from carbide for their miner's lamp to women's fashion to candies to household gadgets/tools.

Recently our Collections Manager, Sara, took advantage of the closure to get her hands on the Hunter Brothers exhibit to give it a refresh. What started out as the yearly cleaning project, soon turned into a three-day long complete reorganization. Our main goal for the project was to allow the amazing artifacts displayed to shine. The shelves and cases in the Hunter Brothers exhibit have long been packed with interesting artifacts, but with all the clutter, it was sometimes hard to really see what was on display.

The artifacts were cleaned and reorganized into four major themes by our collections manager and summer students - housewares/hardware/mining, beauty/fashion, entertainment/toys, and luxury. The perfect opportunity to train our new summer students on artifact handling and cleaning. Surprisingly, they seemed to enjoy themselves! They even found some favourite artifacts in the displays that they like to point out to everyone.

For some crazy reason, Sara decided that she wanted to move the display cases around... let’s just say they made really great (and HEAVY) display cases in the 1920s-1940s! We now understand why everyone just painted around them in the past.. The Lowneys Chocolates display case will become a confectionary display in the future, so its most appropriate location is in the new entertainment/toy section. While swapping two display cases may be simple in theory, in reality, maneuvering them around the very narrow Hunter Brothers room turned into a bit of a game of Tetris!

Display case moved and floor being swept.JPG

Empty floor spot before case moved in.JPG

While we did end up putting away or relocating a large amount of artifacts, it has opened up the displays and allows for you to see the artifacts more clearly. We can also see the amazing new price signs more clearly - these were handwritten by our talented volunteer Laurie Broadhurst!