As my semester as a Masters student is wrapping up, I would like to reflect on my GSA position at Fanshawe Pioneer Village since I will be moving on to another museum in January.
I chose Pioneer Village as one of my top choices for my GSA position because of the connection to local history, which I am quite familiar with. The last two museums I worked at, in Elgin and Oxford County, also had artifacts from the mid 1800s to early 1900s and shared a similar historical narrative on South-Western Ontario.
Along with my familiarity with the time period, artifacts, and historical narratives, I am also accustomed to working at Museums with an outdoor aspect. While working at Beachville District Museum, we had two barns on the property that held farming and industrial artifacts and there were several large pieces of agricultural equipment on the premises. While working at the local museum in Port Burwell, we had several artifacts outside such as boats and boating equipment. Fanshawe Pioneer Village is very similar in the way that there are several buildings that make up the village, and they all sit on the property of Fanshawe Conservation Area. During my time there, we worked extensively on a building inspection report and spent a lot of time outside checking on the condition of these historical and replica buildings. On the site of Fanshawe Pioneer Village, there are also a lot of barns and a close connection to agriculture, which I can connect with. Because of my experience working somewhat outside at museums, I was not very shocked when I had to help clean out a squirrels nest in the Printing Press building, or when we had to report on several "possible critter entries" while completing the building inspections. Most museums probably do not have to worry about bee and birds nests, squirrels, raccoons and even gardener snakes entering the very same place where artifacts are housed, but I certainly enjoyed this aspect of working at Pionner Village.
One of my most memorable experiences from Fanshawe Pioneer Village, was assisting in setting up a temporary exhibit called "Downtime at the Village." This exhibit focused on what people in the London area, during the time period of Pioneer Village, would have done in their free time. I started by completing research on some of the artifacts that we planned to use in the exhibit which included popular children's toys manufactured in South-West Ontario, musical instruments also manufactured in South-West Ontario, and my personal favourite was the research on early cameras and photography. After the research was finished, I helped pull some of the artifacts from storage to prepare for the exhibit. Next we were ready to start placing the artifacts in glass cases. This was the part I was especially looking forward to as most of my past experience in museum work has been during Covid, where the majority of my work was focused on collections management. It was more difficult than I expected to arrange some of these objects in an aesthetically pleasing way in the display cases, especially since the entrance to the cases is in the back, so I had to arrange everything backwards. It involved a lot of re-arranging and tinkering around but it was quite fun and I was very pleased with how the cases I designed turned out. I included photos of the Painting Case and Games and Playing Cards Case which I designed, and the Camera Case which I did a lot of research on.
I am sad to leave Fanshawe Pioneer Village as I have worked on a lot of interesting projects there and have enjoyed working with a large, diverse group of volunteers and staff, but I am excited to start my next position at the Royal Canadian Regimental Museum in January.