Haileybury Heritage Museum

Nominee for an ACO Public Education and Engagement Award

The Haileybury Heritage Museum is a true, volunteer-run community archive. Since 1983, this museum has worked to keep Northern Ontario’s history alive with community fundraising.

It started as a single display case meant to remember the Great Fire of 1922. Today, entirely through local effort, it has grown to protect over 7,000 artifacts at 575 Main Street. This includes massive pieces of regional history that volunteers moved and restored themselves, like a 1904 streetcar and a historic logging tugboat.

The museum offers real, practical history. Volunteers run the front desk, manage the building, and spend hours helping residents research family genealogies and local property records using old newspaper archives.

By turning local memories into shared community projects, the Haileybury Heritage Museum shows exactly what a small group of dedicated neighbors can achieve. They deserve this award for their practical, hands-on dedication to saving Ontario’s northern stories for the next generation.