CCI Newsletter, No. 29, June 2002

Yarmouth County Museum and Archives

by Eric J. Ruff, Director/Curator, Yarmouth County Museum

The Yarmouth County Museum was established in 1958, and moved to its current site (a former Congregational Church dating to 1893) in 1969. The Archives, which were created in the mid-1980s, are situated next to the museum in a building that dates to about 1895. The final part of the complex is the former summer home of Alfred Fuller (the original Fuller Brush Man), which operates seasonally as a historic house museum.

The museum now has one of the largest collections of ship portraits in Canada. Of its approximately 125 paintings, all but one have a direct connection to Yarmouth (which was home to a large merchant fleet in the second half of the 1800s). Although its main focus is on the seafaring heritage of the area, the museum also houses rare musical instruments, glass, furniture, china, toys, and so on. The photographic and documentary archive is the largest non-institutional one in Nova Scotia.