Museum Week: Nova Scotia’s experts talk about their favourite things

In honour of Museum Week we posed a simple question to people working in some of the province's museums: What's your favourite thing in your museum's collection? 

A simple question, but not an easy one to answer. In fact, many of those we asked says it felt like an impossible task. But, they played along. Curators and museum directors racked their brains for us to choose an artifact or piece of art from the thousands of items in their collections. 

And here — to borrow from a classic — are a few of their favourite things:

DesBrisay Museum, Bridgewater, N.S.

• Barb Thompson, director
• Favourite thing: A pair of pattens

Those who know Jane Austen's works well might know what pattens are, she wrote about them in her novels. For those who are not literature buffs, these artifacts chosen by Barb Thompson are probably unfamiliar.

The little platforms are some of the first incarnations of galoshes, attached to the bottom of shoes before streets were paved in Nova Scotia, used to keep ladies shoes and the bottoms of skirts off the muddy ground. 

"You can imagine a lady walking them in the streets in Bridgewater where there would be oxen and horses and wagons," says Thompson, who adds she loves the pieces because they're a part of women's history. 

Cape Breton Miners' Museum

• Mary-Pat Mombourquette, executive director
• Favourite thing: The mine

The first time Mary-Pat Mombourquette saw the mine underneath the museum, she was 5-years-old and visiting the museum with her grandparents. She remembers being frightened on her first visit down in the dark underground, but it has since become her favourite place in the museum she runs. 

All museum visitors go down into the tunnel with a 30-plus year veteran of the mines — workers who have endured terrible industrial accidents, some who have had to help rescue colleagues from their dangerous workplaces. 

They tell the stories that resonate with visitors, because as Mombourquette says: 

"Cape Breton is an island built on coal. You scratch the ground and there's coal underneath and you scratch a Cape Bretoner and they're related to an miner in some way, shape or form so it's very much a part of our history," she says.

"We are based on those stoic people who would go underground, in the dark for 12 hours a day with a shovel and pick and hammer out a living, a very bare basic living so they could put food on the table for their family."

Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

• Roger Marsters, curator of marine history
• Favourite thing: A marine chronometer

Roger Marsters picked an artifact he describes as "basically the GPS of the 19th century."

The artifact is a marine chronometer, built in Halifax in the 1820s by a jeweller and nautical instrument maker named Richard Upham Marsters. And yes, the two Marsters men are distant relatives, but that's not why he chose the object.

The artifact's place in history as a piece of Halifax's "high tech industry" is what drew Roger Marsters to it. It was made at a time when crossing the ocean for trade was coming of age and there was a push to make the voyage safer. What at first glace looks like a pocket watch, is actually linked to globalization. 

For those at sea, it meant being able to figure out where they were when they were sailing without a view of land. Which is, as Marsters says, very important because "if you don't know where you are at sea in the age of the sailing ship you're apt to run into things." 

Fundy Geological Museum in Parrsboro, N.S.

• Tim Fedak, director/curator
• Favourite thing: 200 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton

It's a good thing Tim Fedak likes his pick, a 200 million-year-old dinosaur fossil found on the shore of the Bay of Fundy so much. He's been studying the fossil material — which is one of Canada's oldest dinosaur skeletons — for more than 17 years and knows "every square millimetre" of the specimen.

The skeleton is from a herbivorous prosauropod dinosaur that would have looked like "Dino on the Flintstones with the long neck and long tail" if it was still alive today. 

The Bay of Fundy is eroding, so Fedak's team is on site researching the area every summer, finding new parts of this piece of history. In the cliff "you can actually sometimes see roots from the plants that are wrapping around the bones because they are after the nutrients," says Fedak.

Mahone Bay Settlers Museum

• Margaret Mulrooney, curator for the 2015 season
• Favourite thing: Sailor's Valentine

Saying goodbye to a loved one about to go to work at sea is something that still resonates with many Nova Scotians. It's what makes this pick timeless, even though the artifact is probably from the mid to late 1800s. It's a sailor's valentine — a wooden, shell-covered piece of art given to loved ones by seafarers. 

The one in the collection at the Mahone Bay Settlers Museum has a heart on one side. 

On the other, the words: Remember me. Mulrooney says the sentiment behind the piece moved her to chose it.

"It would have just been a very lonely or sad thing to go away for long periods of time on the sea."

It is not known which sailor brought back this particular souvenir, which was likely purchased in Barbados on a break from the ship. But that's another thing Mulrooney likes about it.

"I kind of like to wonder whose it was."

Antigonish Heritage Museum

• Jocelyn Gillis, curator
• Favourite thing: Historic bow, from a bow and arrow

Jocelyn Gillis's pick is a very recent addition to the collection at the Antigonish Heritage Museum. She says the object's back story drew her in. 

The man who donated it in December told Gillis his great-grandfather had purchased it in 1876. Hector Grant bought the bow from an aboriginal man living in Jane's River for his 6-year-old son Norman.

In January, Gillis was contacted by a woman in the U.S. about some photos she wanted to donate. Among the pictures was one of Hector Grant. The photo and the bow are now displayed together at the museum, a donation reunited with its original owner.

Gillis says people in Antigonish often drop pieces for the collection off at the museum's door, but their tales don't often come together like this one. When something magical does come in "it's like Christmas," she says.

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

• David Diviney, curator of exhibitions
• Favourite thing: Harbour Ghosts, HFX By David Askevold

Exhibitions curator David Diviney first saw his favourite piece, which is filled with historical and Halifax pop-culture references, while it was being created. The artist, David Askevold, was the inaugural artist in residence at the province's art gallery. 

The piece takes on a familiar subject — Halifax harbour — and uses sonar resonance images from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography's files to show it "in a completely unexpected" way, he says.

Diviney says he's always been inspired by Askevold's willingness to try new forms. This was the artist's first digital work using computer technologies and the result is "quite imaginative and vivid in its imagery." 

The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21

• Dan Conlin, curator
• Favourite thing: RCMP doll

Curator Dan Conlin's favourite piece is a little toy with a big story. A tale of Canada as a place of refuge, wrapped around a tiny Mountie doll, with a little hockey mixed in for good measure.

The Saujani family were refugees from Uganda, made to leave Africa after dictator Idi Amin expelled Asian families in 1972. That brought Shanta Saujani, her husband and three children to an immigration processing facility in Montreal surrounded by people — and televisions. 

Everyone around them was cheering. The family couldn't understand why.

Conlin says Shanta remembers "the family standing around like zombies" until immigration officers explained: The night they arrived happened to be the same one Paul Henderson scored his famous goal against the Russians. 

The figurine is on loan to The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 from Shanta's daughter Sheyfali, who continues to find meaning in it, says Conlin.

"It symbolizes Canada's capacity, sometimes troubled, to accept and adapt to newcomers, as symbolized by the Baltej Singh Dhillon case in the 1980s and 1990s," says Conlin. "He challenged the status quo by successfully asking to wear a turban as a RCMP officer.

Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic

• Hilda Russell, interpreter
• Favourite thing: Topographical map

Interpreter Hilda Russell has been telling historical stories at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic for 27 years and her pick, a topographical map, has helped her do that. Her choice isn't really a historical piece, but it allows her "to bridge the gap to get into historical stories" when she's talking to visitors. 

The map shows the seaboard of the East Coast, including its continental shelf. 

People are fascinated by geography and "the sense of place" that comes with figuring out where you are on a map. The piece serves as a springboard for many discussions, says Russell. Everything from where people went fishing, to why they fished there from a scientific perspective, from rum running to disasters at sea.

Natural History Museum

• Marian Munro, curator of botany
• Favourite thing: Pussy willows

Munro's favourite thing changes by the season. Why? Because in a botanist's world the collection changes each time the weather does. The Natural History Museum's collection of plant specimens tops more than 50,000.

But Munro made this pick because CBC asked, and an appropriate one in a province pining for spring weather. Normally, by this time in March, amateur botanists are out picking pussy willows. It was one of Munro's favourite pastimes as a child.

"The pussy willows to me indicate that the sun's been warm enough to break the winter buds and that starts the whole process for me of spring arriving in Nova Scotia," she says. But fear not frozen province, it may not be warm out, but Munro says the plants are out there for the picking on highway roadsides.

"You just have to be able to reach them ... maybe snowshoes are in order," she laughs.