By Lisa Terech, Community Engagement
The Oshawa Museum has developed a number of virtual exhibitions throughout the years – you can find them listed under the ‘Online Resources‘ tab at the top of our blog. In 2021, we were excited to launch Discover Historic Oshawa, an interactive mapping site, plotting places of interest in our community.
Adding places of interest, both historic and current, has been ongoing. When I first wrote about this site in 2022, there were around 40 listings, and two years later, almost 100 more have been added.
This has been an interesting project to work on through the years, not only by researching and writing about places of interest, but also by thinking of creative ways to showcase Oshawa’s history. For example, to complement exhibits, categories have been created to showcase sites that relate to the exhibit theme. Under the Leaving Home, Finding Home category are sites that were significant to Oshawa’s eastern European communities and to Displaced Persons. The Be Prepared category has sites like Guide House and Camp Samac featured as they relate to themes of guiding and scouting in Oshawa.
Using Discover Historic Oshawa has offered a chance to highlight particular collections. I’d like to give a shout out to our high school co-op student, Zara, who wrote up the listings for Oshawa’s Fire Stations (past and present), an opportunity to highlight images from the Oshawa Fire Services collection (A019.2).
If you look at the Heritage Oshawa Designated Properties category, you can read more about different places in Oshawa that have been added to the register of properties with cultural heritage value or interest.
New sites are added to Discover Historic Oshawa frequently. If you have any suggestions of places to features that are not on the site yet, please let us know!
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