Fashion, fossils and old-time family-friendly fun activities will be on offer at Sombra Museum throughout this summer.
The museum opens its doors to the public on June 1, and after two years of the pandemic playing havoc with its schedule, curator Kailyn Shepley hopes visitors will return to take in a host of new exhibitions as well as engaging events.
“I’m pretty excited about this summer,” she said. “I’m happy to get back to it, it seems like it’s been so long.”
Shepley – with the assistance of two student curatorial assistants Julie Grant and Mara Garva – has come up with a number of new exhibitions that touch on a host of themes, all drawn from the region’s rich history. Agriculture, communications, local education and fashion are among the topics to be explored in detail at Sombra Museum this summer.
“We’ve got an agricultural exhibition; it’s about hand tools and animal use on the pioneer farm,” she said. “We used to have a whole agricultural room but we hadn’t done anything like that since we got (the cultural centre), so I thought we should bring some of that back for people.
“We also have a really rare 1927 sectional canoe, which is new since COVID,” Shepley added. “The canoe is from an antique boat club, they found it and they donated it to the museum – they thought it would be a good fit.”
Typewriters, old-style televisions and examples of the ancient art of handwritten letters will be part of the museum’s new communications exhibit, Shepley said.
“It’s about everything from handwriting to stamps and letters all the way up to televisions and cell phones, all technology used by people here in the village. We have artifacts from the 1850s up until the early 2000s,” she said.
“I really like the typewriter and the letter stampers, which came before the typewriter – they come in individual letters,” Grant added.
“It’s like a craft thing – we had the Thistle Rubber Type Works in Sombra and they invented a kind of typewriter and they produced stamps that you could use for businesses. They also had a little box set … with punctuation marks and letters and you could stamp out your own message,” Shepley added.
“I also like our 1940s television. It’s the size of a cooler and the screen is only three inches wide. There was a warning because children would sit close and their eyes would actually burn because the temperature was so hot from the TV. That’s why for years parents told their kids not to sit too close to the television.”
Skirts decorated with fish and ridiculously flamboyant, colorful seventies apparel will be showcased as part of the museum’s fashion exhibition, which will be set up on the second floor of the museum’s Bury House.
Visitors will get the chance to see the kind of clothes stylish Sombra residents sported over the years, from the 1880s until the 1980s.
“Basically we have all sorts of dresses and one power suit from the eighties,” Shepley said, smiling. “The working title for the exhibition is the highs and lows of hemlines, because we noticed that the collars went down and the skirts went up as time went on.”
Fans of pre-historic times will have their hands busy at Sombra Museum this summer, as the museum is bringing in some seriously ancient fossils found at the Rock Glen Conservation Area.
“One of the members of the Rock Glen facility, they have a large fossil collection and they donated over 100 fossils to us, all found in the winter formation near Thedford and Arkona,” Shepley said. “They’re from the Middle Devonian Epoch (390 million years ago). These are our first fossils; we’ve never had something like that in our collection.”
The museum also plans to host an educationally-themed outdoor exhibit beginning in mid-summer, Shepley said. The exhibit will feature local items from the past such as the old steeple of Wilkesport School No. 8, a turnstile from Bethel School (“It was used to block cows and livestock from getting in the schoolyard,” Shepley said), the name stone of Sombra School as well as a school bell.
“We’ll be putting together a storyboard to tie it all together,” she said.
Events aplenty will also be taking place at the museum this summer. On June 4 the museum will be participating in Tourism Sarnia-Lambton’s Unlock Lambton self-driving tour.
On June 19, Sombra Museum will be host to an open house in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the opening of its cultural centre.
“That’s celebrating the 10th anniversary of the cultural center building,” Grant said. “We’re going to have free admission, some light refreshments and the mayor will be saying a few words, along with some people who were involved in getting this center built.”
On July 9, the museum’s Blueberry Social event will take place. Featuring delicacies made with blueberries, music and general merriment, plans are to make it a more outdoor than indoor event this year.
“We’re hoping to set up outside this year – we’ll have some tables indoors but we want to allow people with different comfort levels to attend and we’re also hoping to catch the traffic for people attending Sombra Days weekend,” Shepley said.
The museum will be involved in Sombra Days on July 10, holding an interactive fossil bin where kids can dig their own fossils and find out about the fossils on display at the museum. On Aug. 20, Sombra Museum will also be representing at the inaugural Mermaids and Mariners event showcasing some nautically-themed activities.
And on Aug. 4, the museum will host a book launch of Lights Out!: The Adventures of Sam & Grandpa, a book written co-written by Shepley and former summer student Ellita Gagner which deals with toys and items used by children in past eras.
“In 2020, Emily and I wrote this book,” Shepley said. “Unfortunately because of COVID we weren’t able to have a launch event, so hopefully we’ll have a book signing and have some craft activities too.”
On top of all the new exhibits and events, the museum has also developed a brand new, interactive website (sombramuseum.ca) set to be launched in June, a brand new logo as well as a revamped gift shop that has local history books galore , historical postcards, DVDs and maps.
Local residents can also do in-person research at the museum (either by appointment or walk-in) and members of the public can become members of the Sombra Museum in order to receive free/discounted admission to all Heritage Sarnia-Lambton institutions, gift shop discounts and a subscription to the Lambton Musings quarterly newsletter ($20/year for individuals, $30/year for families).
All in all, 2022 will likely be a busy summer at Sombra Museum, something which Shepley relishes.
“We’re really excited about welcoming people back,” she said.
Sombra Museum will be open daily from 11 am to 4:30 pm, The entry fee is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors, $3 for students/children, free for preschoolers and families for $15.