High River museum assesses the damage
Of all southern Alberta’s cultural centres to be affected by last month’s floods the Museum of the Highwood may have got the worst of it.
A preliminary estimate says 80 per cent of the Highwood’s collection is lost forever. A large portion of what is left is salvageable but curator Irene Kerr says it can never be restored to its original condition.
“Things like Guy Weadick’s cowboy hat and saddle and all of those things have been saved but some of them are going to require quite a bit of restoration to bring them back. They’ll never be the way they were originally but they’re still there and of course the flood now becomes part of the story.”
Unfortunately for the Highwood the collection didn’t need any more natural disaster stories. A fire in July 2010 damaged the collection and shut the museum down for two years. Kerr says museum staff cannot even return to the old CPR station that houses the museum for another three weeks let alone speculate on reopening for business.
Kerr says volunteers from the Alberta Museums Association the Glenbow Museum The Military Museums the City of Calgary and the Royal Alberta Museum have assisted Highwood staff in rescuing museum pieces. “I’m sure they were horrified and grateful it wasn’t them.”
She says the museum doesn’t need any more volunteers right now but once it begins the process of restoring the collection it would appreciate help from the public.
