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The living history museum will launch this summer a multi-million-dollar capital campaign as it aims to diversify its programming beyond European settler history that’s dominated its grounds for decades
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A little more than 50 years ago, when he was half his current height and had fewer cares, Jim Heaton and his friends would use their weekends to cycle all the way from their homes in Capitol Hill to Heritage Park.
Together they’d climb the fort walls and mill around the historical village on their bikes. When he wasn’t there with his friends, his parents would take him to the park.
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Those warm summer days at Heritage Park stuck with him. In 2006, back in Calgary after several years living in various parts of Canada doing non-profit work, Heaton wanted a job. Retired and looking for a new experience, he took a gig at the saloon in Heritage Park. Sitting on the porch with a whisky barrel propped beside him, Heaton sipped coffee and talked to people stopping in for a drink.
That role earned Heaton a white hat, the award handed out every year to people in Calgary’s tourism and hospitality industry.
“I think the funniest part about that is I was slinging beer and pop, and I beat out all the baristas who were making the fancy coffee,” he said.
In many ways, the sprawling village on the banks of Glenmore Reservoir remains the way he remembers it all those years back. But he’s recently embraced the fundamental change the park is attempting to tell Alberta’s history — an effort that will soon be backed by a major capital fundraising drive to celebrate its 60th birthday.
“I think that’s part of the excitement of working here: It’s not stagnant. It grows and evolves,” Heaton said.
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That’s indeed the case — even for a park so dedicated to reliving the past.
The living history museum, opening for the summer on Friday with an opening ceremony at 11:30 a.m., was originally conceived in 1964 as a children’s pioneer park. Due to Calgary’s size at the time, it was a considerable distance outside the city’s main thoroughfare. Travelling there was a trek, given the city’s lack of public transit.
The 65-acre village at the time had 20 buildings and a 4,300-foot-long train track. Sixty years on, the park has 183 buildings and is Canada’s largest collection of historic buildings. Over the summer, about 500 employees — most dressed in old-timey garb — spread out across the campus to help make the park a living time capsule. (Heritage Park has 17,000 pieces of costume on its racks to clothe employees.)
That scale has allowed the park to become one of Calgary’s top educational resources: About 60,000 students each year walk down the village’s old western streets.
About a decade ago, Heritage Park started leaning into telling more Indigenous history, setting up a permanent teepee encampment and revamping how it tells local First Nations’ history. It has also started a podcast called Stories from the Park that’s dedicated episodes to Sikh history in Alberta, Métis origins and their relationship to Heritage Park, and Black settlers’ history in the Prairies before Alberta was even a province.
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“I was told when I came here, if we’re still telling the same stories in a year, we’ve failed,” said Dominic Terry, strategic communications manager at the park who joined the organization in early 2022.
Until recently, Heritage Park’s storytelling was overwhelmingly centred around European settler narratives. But management at the park has been overwhelmingly in favour of revamping its offerings in recent years, giving staff the runway to take chances, said Sarah Edwards, director of programming.
“That’s really our major focus for the next several years,” Edwards said.
That shift isn’t an abject dismissal of the history that has dominated Heritage Park’s programming for decades, Terry said.
“(Some) would say, ‘You’re forgetting the people that did come here.’ That’s not at all what we’re doing,” he said. “The story of Peter Prince will live on; the story of the Thorpes will live on in this park as long as those buildings are here.”
Edwards said their guiding principle has been “plus-more.”
“We’re not removing anything in order to add. We don’t have a finite amount of stories that we can tell,” she said.
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Even as it celebrates its 60th birthday, Heritage Park is already in the process of planning for its 80th.
Later this year, Heritage Park will announce a 20-year plan that will cost several million dollars and be supported by a sweeping capital fundraising campaign, Terry said.
The park is avoiding teasing out how those changes will take shape, but new construction could be on the way, Terry said.
“We don’t want to lose the esthetic of the living history museum, but it could use a refresh and an update,” he said. “We know there’s more we can do with Indigenous programming . . . there may be a new building that comes with that. There is a move afoot.”
As the village prepares to open for another summer — this one landing on its 60th birthday — Heaton, now in charge of donor engagement, is excited by the changes to come. As someone who’s watched the trees grow from six feet to double digits, and remembers when the land was more bald-headed prairie than a small metropolis of old-time buildings, he still finds it remarkable how the area has grown.
“I think that’s part of the excitement of working here is it’s not stagnant. It grows and evolves.”
mscace@postmedia.comX: @mattscace67
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