Fort Ostell Museum is giving visitors a chance to come in and have High Tea to honour the Queen as a part of its new exhibit.
In commemoration of the Queen’s 60 years of reign, the museum has created an exhibit of her and will also be serving High Tea, including scones, to those who attend the exhibit on the Heritage Day weekend in August.
Fort Ostell’s other recent exhibit is the Fleming Stuart House.
Sandy Allsopp, museum co-ordinator, is hoping to have another exhibit, Modes of Transportation for Baby, set-up in the next couple of weeks. This will include some older carriages and some newer ones.
Fort Ostell will open to the public Tuesday, May 22.
Also, as it has done in the past, the museum will host a youth day over the summer.
During this day those who attend get the chance to participate in activities such as making butter, making bannock and washing clothes using an old-fashioned scrub board.
Allsopp recalls one year a young boy had asked what school buses looked like in the early 1900s. She told him that there were no buses, the students had to walk to school, or, if they were lucky their family owned a horse.
“The boy lived about two blocks from the school,” Allsopp said. “He said, ‘I walk to school too, it’s just like the old days’.” To her it’s “the little things like that that are so cute.”
With the use of tours, children are also encouraged to frequent the museum throughout the academic year as well. Allsopp says the museum caters to school curriculums so the museum can be a resource that is accessible to them.
“We’re creating a partnership with the teachers,” Allsopp said.
But it’s not just the elementary students who are coming to the museum for their learning.
On May 17 a group of nursing students from Grant MacEwan University visited the museum to learn about medical practices of the past and the history of the Ponoka Insane Asylum.
University of Alberta nursing students will visit the museum in June.
Allsopp says the museum never used to have tours like these but eventually, due to Fort Ostell being a museum in Alberta that deals with mental health history and artifacts, Camrose students started attending and progressed to nursing students from many different institutions.
“Camrose gets to go, we want to go too,” Allsopp said, referring to the attitudes of the other institutions.
Allsopp said the museum was stagnant for the longest time, but now that it’s getting an array of different visitors exhibits are changing and new artifacts are being brought in and circulated.
By Amelia Naismith