New museum storage facility to be investigated by Huron County staff

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Huron County Council is hoping to further investigate building a new storage facility for the overflowing collection of the Huron County Museum, which has only grown in recent years.

 

Council discussed the issue at its Oct. 2 meeting, spurred on by a report prepared and presented by Director of Cultural Services and Huron County Librarian Beth Rumble. This comes after she had reported that the county’s museum collection has been growing recently with the closure of museums in lower-tier municipalities and that proper, safe storage for artifacts was becoming more of a concern as a result. 

 

“Currently, collections are housed in main storage at the museum, archives storage at the museum, as well as two off-site storage buildings located just outside of Goderich in Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh. The items stored at the museum benefit from heating and cooling and humidity control. The off-site storage buildings (typically used for larger artifacts) are not climate-controlled, but do shelter items from the basic elements. All of these locations are at or close to capacity. Staff will be reorganizing main storage over the coming months to best utilize the space vacated by Corporate Records. It is anticipated the incoming North Huron collections will fill much of the space,” Rumble said in her report to council.

 

“In 2020, upgrades to one of the off-site buildings included adding a concrete floor, as well as improvements to the second-storey mezzanine. These improvements allowed artifacts to be more efficiently stored and also enhanced general conditions in the building. These upgrades did not result in increased square footage.”

 

Rumble then presented council with a terms of reference for the issue, which included three potential options. The first option was to do nothing and leave things status quo, while the second option was to investigate the cost associated with upgrading the current off-site storage facilities and the third option was to investigate the cost of a new off-site storage building.

 

Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh Deputy-Mayor Bill Vanstone and Central Huron Mayor Jim Ginn both immediately spoke in favour of investigating the third option further. Ginn said he had been out to tour the off-site facilities in the past and he felt that attempting to repair them would be throwing good money after bad and that a new facility was the only way to proceed. That is, he said, if the county wanted to remain in the business of running a museum. If the county wanted to have a museum, it should be done properly, he said.

 

Council then directed staff to prepare a report on the cost of a new facility to be considered in 2025 budget deliberations.