Rural Museums Matter: The Ross-Thomson House & Store

By Erin Isaac and Cady Berardi

The thoughts and sentiments shared in this essay are our own and do not represent the Nova Scotia Museum or Shelburne Historical Society.

As part of the significant cuts set out in the 2026-2027 Nova Scotia provincial budget, the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage announced last week that they needed “to focus [their] efforts where they will make the most difference.” Those efforts will no longer extend to the 12 rural museums they suddenly, and without warning, decided to permanently shutter. Shelburne’s Ross-Thomson House & Store was among the casualties. 

In their statement, the department indicated that they considered several factors when deciding which museums to close, but noted especially that these sites had low visitor attendance. This measure does not acknowledge the value of these heritage spaces to their communities or the important histories they preserve.

The Ross-Thomson House & Store has been a community-run museum for nearly 70 years. In that time, the building has been valued for its Georgian architectural properties, the histories it represents, and as a gathering place near Shelburne’s waterfront. 

As noted in the Shelburne Historical Society’s official response to the Nova Scotia Museum’s decision to close Ross-Thomson, the building “was the first artefact donated to the Shelburne Historical Society.” Constructed in 1785-7, the building’s earliest known occupants were the bachelor merchant brothers George and Robert Ross, who in 1816 passed the building to their former clerk’s wife, Dorcas Thomson. The building was occupied by Thomson descendants until the 1920s.

While visiting friends in Shelburne, Harvard professor Dr. Kenneth G T Webster encountered the Ross-Thomson House. He had a personal interest in preserving built heritage, and a personal connection to Nova Scotia, being from Yarmouth. The building had been empty for almost a decade by that point, and was the worse for wear with boarded up windows and crumbling clapboard. Webster saw it as a rare survivor, and a monument to the loyalist refugees whose founding of Shelburne had been recognized as a National Historic Event. He bought the property in 1931 and offered it to the Town, or to any permanent organization who would operate it as a Museum. 

After Dr. Webster passed away, the Shelburne Historical Society formed to answer his call to restore the building, and accepted the donation from his heirs. They appealed to the Historic Sites Advisory Council to help fund this venture, using the particular argument that it could be a tourist draw. Deborah Webster, Dr. Webster’s widow, wrote asking, “Is it an unopened mine?” They were successful in their appeals, apparently relying on the building’s history as a post office and school during the 19th century rather than its 18th century origins. 

Volunteers including Raymond Standefer, CW Crowell, Rev. Allan Beveridge, Donald M Bower, Lewis Thomson, and Marion Robertson (who, in particular, dedicated her life to researching and writing about Shelburne’s history) began to fill the building with artefacts and documents of Shelburne’s past. In The Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Muriel Hipson wrote, “The building itself is a document in wood and stone of social history.” The museum officially opened at the end of July, 1957.

During the 1970s the museum entered its next phase as part of the Nova Scotia Museum and was redeveloped from our local history museum into an immersive heritage House & Store. According to its heritage designation in 1983, “[t]he Ross-Thomson house is valued for its age, as a typical example of buildings constructed during the first years of Loyalist settlement in the area, and as the only remaining eighteenth century store in Nova Scotia.” Its architectural features including original hardware, mouldings, and birch bark window flashing were particularly prized. 

The historical interpretation offered on site since then has continued to emphasise the characteristics that initially persuaded Webster to preserve it. Scholarship about the loyalists has grown substantially in the decades since the House & Store became a museum and we have grown more aware of early Shelburne’s many connections to systems of slavery in the Atlantic world and dependence on unfree Black labour locally. We feel strongly that this space is the ideal location to both celebrate our heritage and negotiate challenging discussions about our history. 

This was the motivation behind the Ross-Thomson Renewal Project, an unfunded multi-year initiative proposed from within the Shelburne Historical Society. Its goals were to make the museum more immersive and  interactive, as well as to unflinchingly acknowledge the house as a site of slavery as discussed in this 2023 Active History post. Particularly, we had planned to interpret the daily touchpoints between wealthy white loyalists like the Ross brothers and persons of different economic, racial, and religious backgrounds.

The plans we had for the museum renewal built on the foundations laid by passionate researchers including Mary McKay Harvey and Marion Robertson, and others from our community, who worked hard to preserve this piece of Shelburne’s history.

In our refreshed museum, visitors would have been invited to explore the goods traded by the Ross Brothers, how their prices would be borne by those in different professions, and their ties to West Indian plantations. They would have learned about the daily labour performed by free and unfree servants like Catherine Edwards, a Black women enslaved by the Ross Brothers. In companionship and contrast with the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre up the road in Birchtown, a museum that celebrates Black freedom, our renewed museum would have deepened discussions about Black unfreedom in Nova Scotia and white complicity or active participation in systems of slavery. 

The many hours we have spent with the colourful characters who occupied this building, by reading their papers and tracing them through court documents, log books, and newspaper advertisements will not be wasted. But this research will not benefit our community, present or future, in the ways we had hoped. The Ross-Thomson is the only museum in Shelburne commemorating the loyalist experience and colonial history. We regret that this part of our history will have to be told on a much smaller scale, especially because this remains a defining moment in our past and a history visitors seek out. 

Over the past week, many of our community members have shared their memories of visiting or working at the the Ross-Thomson museum. We share in their grief, and their anger. We admire their optimism that this decision will be reversed. Overnight, the decades of partnership between our community organization and the Nova Scotia Museum as joint caretakers of this building came to a sudden end. The Shelburne Historical Society will continue to operate the Dory Shop Museum, which remains a site of the Nova Scotia Museum, and the Shelburne County Museum, both of which will have extremely contracted budgets for the coming year.

We would like to thank those who have supported us through this transition by writing to their local MLAs, the Minister of CCTH David Ritcey, and Premier Houston to express their disappointment with this decision. The Ross-Thomson House & Store is a landmark in Shelburne and we lament that it will no longer be a part of our museum complex.

Cady Berardi is the Curator of the Shelburne County Museum.

Erin Isaac is a PhD candidate at Western University with special interests in lived experience in early Shelburne. Erin relocated to Shelburne in 2023 to participate in the Ross-Thomson Renewal project.