The event is called May Is Museum Month and the Simcoe County Museum has events in place for the whole family to enjoy.
Since 2000, May Is Museum Month has been a program of the Ontario Museum Association and celebrated by Ontario’s 700-plus museums, galleries and heritage sites.
The annual event coincides with International Museum Day on May 18, a worldwide program of the International Council of Museums to highlight the importance of the role of museums as institutions that serve society and its development.
Simcoe County Museum events programmer Kate Hurley told BarrieToday there are great programs starting this weekend.
“Saturday, we start our guided tours, which isn’t something we normally offer to the public regularly, so it should be a really fun activity,” said Hurley. “The really cool thing about them is we have a thing called Behind the Ropes, where we will pull away the ropes at our heritage buildings and people go to spots they normally wouldn’t be able to.
"I’ll also take guests behind the doors of the collection space and they’ll get to see how things are stored and learn the importance of the museum," she added.
Simcoe County Museum is home to 10 heritage buildings that have been relocated to the grounds from various locations around region, such as the 1834 Spearin log home, the 1922 Cedar View cottage, and the schoolhouse, which was featured in the filming of the 1985 Anne of Green Gables movies.
Every year, more than 30,000 people visit to Simcoe County Museum to experience and learn about the more than 25,000 artifacts on display.
Just being assembled now is the Clovis exhibit. Clovis, the Caribou Hunters, is a travelling exhibit from Musée Nature Sciences in Sherbrooke, Que. The interactive exhibit is scheduled to open on May 11, and goes back 12,000 years to bring visitors to the tundra to discover the lifestyles of the first nomadic peoples to have travelled in the southeast of Canada.
Hurley hopes that visitors to the museum are as excited as she is to see the exhibit.
“I have yet to see the Clovis exhibit and am so excited to learn more about it,” she said. “It is one of the really neat things about working here, seeing things that I haven’t seen before and learning about them sometimes just before others do.”
The museum is admission by donation and visitors are encouraged to check the website for more information.
