Like much of Canada, a big part of Waterloo Region’s history is about the arrival and integration of newcomers. That history comes to life in a new travelling exhibit and play at the Waterloo Region Museum from October 15-20.
Journey of a Lifetime, presented by BMO Financial Group, tells the story of life on the colonist railway cars that brought millions of immigrants through Ontario to help settle Western Canada.
The original idea for the travelling exhibit was to transport a vintage colonist car owned by Calgary’s Heritage Park Historical Village from coast to coast so Canadians could see how many of their ancestors travelled when they first came to this country.
“It’s been part of Heritage Park for over 50 years, but once you start looking into the story of how it was used to transport thousands of immigrants across Canada, there are a lot of stories that come out of that. As a Canada 150 initiative, we wanted to look at ways of bringing those stories to life,” said Heritage Park Historical Village Interpretation Manager Susan Reckseidler.
“We couldn’t take a 112-year-old wooden train car across the country, but we wanted to share that story of the settlement of Western Canada with all Canadians because it really is a Canadian story,” added Heritage Park Historical Village Communications Specialist Barb Munro. “That is why we created this tour that would go across Canada.”
The tour features a recreation of the colonist car in the park’s collection that was built for Canadian Pacific Railway in 1905, the same year Alberta joined Canada, and is one of only two that have survived of the more than 1,000 originally built. As many as 60 or 70 immigrants would have crammed into these railway cars for the week-long journey while sleeping on wooden benches, having only two shared toilets and a single stove to cook the food that they brought with them.
Travelling with the exhibit will be a theatre troupe performing a play written by Alberta playwright Winn Bray, focusing on a cross-section of new Canadians who settled the West. The play will also highlight the story of the Bank of Montreal’s role in the growth of Western Canada.
“The Bank of Montreal financed the Canadian Pacific Railway to open the West for settlement and they helped a lot of the settlers coming out where with land purchases. They are also celebrating their 200th anniversary this year,” added Munro.
The population boom of the late 19th and early 20th century was part of a strategy by the federal government to develop western Canada, fuelled by the promise of free 160-acre plots of land. To improve the odds of success, Ottawa encouraged newcomers with farming skills to come, which is why so many Ukrainians, Romanians and Hungarians settled there.
While Waterloo Region was largely settled by that time, newcomers would have still drifted here from the West as the area began industrializing and started attracting workers to staff the growing number of factories.
“As you walk into the main gallery of the Waterloo Region Museum, the first place you visit is called Arrivals,” said Sean Jasmins, the marketing and partnerships supervisor of the Region of Waterloo Museums. “It’s a place that tells the stories of where people came from, why they stayed in Waterloo, what they did when they decided to stay and so on. We thought that since it’s a gallery about stories that connect us that the Journey of a Lifetime exhibit would complement that by telling a fascinating story from Canada’s history.”
The exhibit and the play ran this summer at Heritage Park Historical Village in Calgary and has since had stops at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax and at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. It has been a hit everywhere it has stopped.
“We had 6,000 people visit on Canada Day and we actually had to turn some of them away. People were lined up to get in and the venue was not huge. We have never had to turn people away from a performance before,” said Heritage Park Historical Village’s Munro.
“When I watched the play, I was in the auditorium with adults and children and it held everybody’s attention. It was informative; it was engaging; it was entertaining. I think everyone really enjoyed it,” she said.
While the exhibit mostly focuses on the European immigrant experience, it also features the stories of Asian newcomers who made journeys via rail to Calgary from western ports, and the challenges black settlers from the United States faced.
The exhibit also examines the impact these mass immigrations had on Canada’s original First Nations inhabitants.
“We talk about their perspective of when all of these European and eastern Canadians started coming to western Canada and how it affected them,” said Munro.
Visitors to the exhibit will also be invited to record their own immigrant experiences or those of their ancestors who might have travelled in a colonist car. Munro says they selected some powerful stories from visitors at each of the exhibit’s stops for people to watch.
“We captured a wide range of immigration stories, including one dating back to 1792,” she said. “We had children; we had senior citizens; we had lots of millennials all of whom were really excited to be able to share their stories,”
The exhibit stops at the Waterloo Region Museum from October 15 to 20 before moving on to the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, and the Visitors’ Centre at the Legislative Assembly in Edmonton before wrapping up its tour in mid-December at the Museum of Vancouver.
“We think it’s timely because immigration is such a hot topic right now,” said Munro. “This is the story of the hopes and dreams and hardships of immigration, then and now. And it’s a tangible reminder of those who migrated across the vast landscapes of a newly connected country, and the challenges they faced in both getting here and settling the western frontier. This was the largest wave of immigration in Canada’s history and we hope it will be an eye-opening experience for visitors.”
For more information visit: www.waterlooregionmuseum.ca