By Erin Isaac and Cady Berardi
The ideas and sentiments shared on this essay are our personal and don’t characterize the Nova Scotia Museum or Shelburne Historic Society.
As a part of the numerous cuts set out within the 2026-2027 Nova Scotia provincial finances, the Division of Communities, Tradition, Tourism and Heritage introduced final week that they wanted “to focus [their] efforts the place they may take advantage of distinction.” These efforts will now not lengthen to the 12 rural museums they abruptly, and with out warning, determined to completely shutter. Shelburne’s Ross-Thomson Home & Retailer was among the many casualties.
Of their assertion, the division indicated that they thought-about a number of elements when deciding which museums to shut, however famous particularly that these websites had low customer attendance. This measure doesn’t acknowledge the worth of those heritage areas to their communities or the vital histories they protect.
The Ross-Thomson Home & Retailer has been a community-run museum for almost 70 years. In that point, the constructing has been valued for its Georgian architectural properties, the histories it represents, and as a gathering place close to Shelburne’s waterfront.
As famous within the Shelburne Historic Society’s official response to the Nova Scotia Museum’s resolution to shut Ross-Thomson, the constructing “was the primary artefact donated to the Shelburne Historic Society.” Constructed in 1785-7, the constructing’s earliest identified occupants have been the bachelor service provider brothers George and Robert Ross, who in 1816 handed the constructing to their former clerk’s spouse, Dorcas Thomson. The constructing was occupied by Thomson descendants till the Twenties.
Whereas visiting buddies in Shelburne, Harvard professor Dr. Kenneth G T Webster encountered the Ross-Thomson Home. He had a private curiosity in preserving constructed heritage, and a private connection to Nova Scotia, being from Yarmouth. The constructing had been empty for nearly a decade by that time, and was the more serious for put on with boarded up home windows and crumbling clapboard. Webster noticed it as a uncommon survivor, and a monument to the loyalist refugees whose founding of Shelburne had been acknowledged as a Nationwide Historic Occasion. He purchased the property in 1931 and supplied it to the City, or to any everlasting group who would function it as a Museum.
After Dr. Webster handed away, the Shelburne Historic Society fashioned to reply his name to revive the constructing, and accepted the donation from his heirs. They appealed to the Historic Websites Advisory Council to assist fund this enterprise, utilizing the actual argument that it might be a vacationer draw. Deborah Webster, Dr. Webster’s widow, wrote asking, “Is it an unopened mine?” They have been profitable of their appeals, apparently counting on the constructing’s historical past as a submit workplace and faculty in the course of the nineteenth century somewhat than its 18th century origins.
Volunteers together with Raymond Standefer, CW Crowell, Rev. Allan Beveridge, Donald M Bower, Lewis Thomson, and Marion Robertson (who, specifically, devoted her life to researching and writing about Shelburne’s historical past) started to fill the constructing with artefacts and paperwork of Shelburne’s previous. In The Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Muriel Hipson wrote, “The constructing itself is a doc in wooden and stone of social historical past.” The museum formally opened on the finish of July, 1957.
In the course of the Seventies the museum entered its subsequent part as a part of the Nova Scotia Museum and was redeveloped from our native historical past museum into an immersive heritage Home & Retailer. In line with its heritage designation in 1983, “[t]he Ross-Thomson home is valued for its age, as a typical instance of buildings constructed in the course of the first years of Loyalist settlement within the space, and because the solely remaining eighteenth century retailer in Nova Scotia.” Its architectural options together with unique {hardware}, mouldings, and birch bark window flashing have been significantly prized.
The historic interpretation supplied on website since then has continued to emphasize the traits that originally persuaded Webster to protect it. Scholarship concerning the loyalists has grown considerably within the many years for the reason that Home & Retailer grew to become a museum and we have now grown extra conscious of early Shelburne’s many connections to techniques of slavery within the Atlantic world and dependence on unfree Black labour regionally. We really feel strongly that this house is the best location to each rejoice our heritage and negotiate difficult discussions about our historical past.
This was the motivation behind the Ross-Thomson Renewal Venture, an unfunded multi-year initiative proposed from inside the Shelburne Historic Society. Its targets have been to make the museum extra immersive and interactive, in addition to to unflinchingly acknowledge the home as a website of slavery as mentioned in this 2023 Lively Historical past submit. Significantly, we had deliberate to interpret the day by day touchpoints between rich white loyalists just like the Ross brothers and individuals of various financial, racial, and non secular backgrounds.
The plans we had for the museum renewal constructed on the foundations laid by passionate researchers together with Mary McKay Harvey and Marion Robertson, and others from our neighborhood, who labored arduous to protect this piece of Shelburne’s historical past.
In our refreshed museum, guests would have been invited to discover the products traded by the Ross Brothers, how their costs could be borne by these in numerous professions, and their ties to West Indian plantations. They might have realized concerning the day by day labour carried out by free and unfree servants like Catherine Edwards, a Black ladies enslaved by the Ross Brothers. In companionship and distinction with the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre up the street in Birchtown, a museum that celebrates Black freedom, our renewed museum would have deepened discussions about Black unfreedom in Nova Scotia and white complicity or energetic participation in techniques of slavery.
The various hours we have now spent with the colorful characters who occupied this constructing, by studying their papers and tracing them by way of courtroom paperwork, log books, and newspaper commercials won’t be wasted. However this analysis won’t profit our neighborhood, current or future, within the methods we had hoped. The Ross-Thomson is the one museum in Shelburne commemorating the loyalist expertise and colonial historical past. We remorse that this a part of our historical past should be instructed on a a lot smaller scale, particularly as a result of this stays a defining second in our previous and a historical past guests search out.
Over the previous week, lots of our neighborhood members have shared their recollections of visiting or working on the the Ross-Thomson museum. We share of their grief, and their anger. We admire their optimism that this resolution will probably be reversed. In a single day, the many years of partnership between our neighborhood group and the Nova Scotia Museum as joint caretakers of this constructing got here to a sudden finish. The Shelburne Historic Society will proceed to function the Dory Store Museum, which stays a website of the Nova Scotia Museum, and the Shelburne County Museum, each of which can have extraordinarily contracted budgets for the approaching 12 months.
We wish to thank those that have supported us by way of this transition by writing to their native MLAs, the Minister of CCTH David Ritcey, and Premier Houston to specific their disappointment with this resolution. The Ross-Thomson Home & Retailer is a landmark in Shelburne and we lament that it’s going to now not be part of our museum advanced.
Cady Berardi is the Curator of the Shelburne County Museum.
Erin Isaac is a PhD candidate at Western College with particular pursuits in lived expertise in early Shelburne. Erin relocated to Shelburne in 2023 to take part within the Ross-Thomson Renewal challenge.
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