The Shelburne County Museum welcomed a new staff member earlier this year when Cady Berardi took over as the museum’s curator.
Berardi started her new job in March. She had a month’s training with the museum’s previous curator Allison Burnett before she took the reins on her own.
A native of Welland, Ont., Berardi received her bachelor’s degree in classical archaeology and anthropology from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo and her Ontario college graduate certificate in museum management and curatorship from Fleming College in Peterborough.
Before moving to Shelburne, she worked at the Niagara Falls Museum for five years in a variety of collections-based contract positions.
Berardi, who grew up near the Great Lakes, says the ocean is a big attraction to living in Shelburne.
“When I was 13, my mother brought my brother and I out to Nova Scotia as part of a family vacation,” she recalls. “Ever since I graduated, I’ve been looking at positions out here. This one was just a really great fit, and luckily they wanted me, so here I am.”
Berardi admits the pace of life here agrees with her. “It’s not as hurried as it can be in Ontario, and it is friendlier. The size of the town is perfect and the size of the museum, too.”
The museum recently installed a new exhibit featuring sports history artifacts from its collection. Berardi describes it as a kind of community scrapbook of sport in Shelburne County.
“I’m looking forward to getting more into the collections,” Berardi says. “We have some amazing collections that could be better documented, just because we’ve had so many [personnel] changeovers. One of my hopes is to get a more complete online presence for our collection, so it’s more accessible for us and for other people.”
Berardi has organized and tidied up the museum’s upstairs resource room to make it more accessible to researchers. The museum recently had a stairlift installed, improving accessibility to its second floor.
One of Berardi’s main goals is to help the museum gain in appeal not just to tourists, but to the local community. “We’re their museum, we represent their history and we’d like to be available for things they want to do. We want to be a place where they come to do research, to visit their artifacts, their history and we want to be a place where their kids want to come.”
The Shelburne County Museum is also sporting a brand new look.
The building has needed exterior repairs since 2015. Thanks to $18,750 in provincial funding, this $25,000 restoration project is nearly finished.
Rotting windows, a rotting door and siding on an extension to the museum’s original building were replaced by Little Viking Carpentry.
Funding for the repairs came from the province’s Community Facilities Improvement Program, managed by the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.
Shelburne Historical Society president Louise Lindsay said concerns were first raised in 2015, when ground floor windows on the extension began leaking.
Lindsay applied for the Community Facilities Improvement Program grant in April 2016. After discovering that the rot situation was even worse than expected, she amended scope of the grant application to include replacing all eight windows on the extension’s west facade, plus two windows and a door on the connector section and redoing all the siding.
Painting of the museum’s entire exterior was included in the original grant proposal. But because this project ended up being so expensive, the painting will have to wait until more funding is secured.
A door on the front of the original museum is also slated to be replaced later on.
The Shelburne County Museum is housed in a waterfront heritage property dating back to the late 1700s. The original structure was built in 1784 by David Nairn, a cooper from Fife, Scotland. Additions were built on the building’s rear and north sides. The house was later owned by shipbuilder Thomas Johnson.
The Shelburne County Museum opened in the Nairn House in 1979, after having operated out of the nearby Ross-Thomson House since the 1960s.
The Shelburne County Museum is open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Sunday. For more information, call 902-875-3219 or visit the Shelburne Museums by the Sea website at www.shelburnemuseums.com.
