Themuseum

[nms]

There are a lot of small regional museums that focus on the history of one particular area, but it seems that there is a gap in there not really being a museum that covers the early settlement history of Ontario very well. You get fragments here and there, but as I've read more, there is an awful lot that could be covered that seems to be missing.

I can imagine that it could be difficult to try and have one museum to tell the complete settlement history of Ontario, particularly since there was a such a diversity of ways that the province was settled: Explorers and Traders encountering Indigenous Peoples; Resource Extraction (Mining and Forestry); Farm Settlement; Industrial Expansion & Contraction. Along the Great Lakes, this history is likely to focus more on the era around the War of 1812 (I'm thinking of Fort York (1812) in Toronto and Fort Henry (1832-29) in Kingston among others).  A place like Upper Canada Village chose to focus on English Canada in 1866 while locally Doon is set in 1914 and Schneider House is 1856. Saint Marie Among the Hurons is set around 1649.  The Royal Ontario Museum has 168,000 objects catalogued as "Archeology of the Americas" of which a subset includes a significant collection of Indigenous artifacts.

Geography also plays a part in telling the story.  For instance, the United Kingdom is 0.23 times the size of Ontario and yet it would be difficult to have one Museum in the UK attempt to focus on the entire country for one period of time without the significant support of the national government.