The Pitt Meadows Museum has expanded its digital archives with more than 500 historical photographs and documents from two of the community’s founding families.
Laura, a fourth-year archaeology and anthropology student at Simon Fraser University, spent the summer as a collections technician at the museum scanning and cataloguing photos, negatives, and postcards dating from the early 1900s to the 2000s. The materials came from the McMyn and Sharpe family collections.
“My job for the summer as a collections technician was to scan and accession hundreds of photos and documents that were on loan which pertain to the McMyn and Sharpe family,” Laura wrote in a museum blog post.
The McMyn family were early settlers who ran a truck line hauling milk from Pitt Meadows farms to Vancouver. The Sharpe family arrived in 1895 and were the first to purchase land outright in the area. Both families have roads named after them in Pitt Meadows.
Along with the new scans, nearly 800 existing photographs already in the museum’s database were organized, properly labelled, and corrected. The Pitt Meadows Museum now holds more than 3,000 photographs reflecting the community’s history, with archives accessible to residents and researchers by appointment.
The museum, operated by the non-profit Pitt Meadows Heritage and Museum Society under an agreement with the City of Pitt Meadows, is open Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM at its heritage sites on Harris Road.
