The Discovery North Bay Museum is working on a new display for next year. Curator Naomi Hehn calls it Main Street North Bay. The museum is trying to create an exhibit that depicts North Bay’s downtown during the 1920s and 1930s. Hehn says what the museum is looking for are pictures of that era especially if people have images of shoppers inside a store. Hehn says streetscapes pictures are also welcome. Also, in an effort to create an image of what furnishings were like, Hehn wants to hear from people with antique furniture. She says the furniture could have been bought anywhere in Canada just as long as it’s antique in nature. The other component of the exhibit involves a display that tells stories of the early residents of the community. In this instance, Hehn says the museum would put together stories of people connected with sectors like the railway and military and feature their lives on interactive displays through an iPad.
Hehn says one person that would definitely be featured is John Ferguson, who is considered one of the founding fathers of North Bay. There was a time when Mattawa and Sturgeon Falls were much larger than North Bay. Those were the pre-rail days. But Hehn says when Ferguson heard that North Bay would become a divisional railway point, he bought much of the land along the railway yards and later sold it to early settlers. Hehn says Ferguson had the foresight to see that North Bay would become an important community and would grow. All this happened while North Bay was still recognized for its fur trading and logging endeavours. However those enterprises eventually gave way to the early European settlers who moved to the community as rail became a reality. Hehn says many of North Bay’s streets are named after the early settlers and Ferguson is no exception.
In a homage to Ferguson, the street that bears his name takes residents and visitors to the museum which used to be the Canadian Pacific Railway station.
