Historic Places Shaped by Communication

300 years ago, Boyd’s Cove was a Beothuk village. Today the interpretation centre helps visitors learn about and connect with this history. Visitors are invited to pay their respects by leaving an offering in the Spirit Garden, creating a meaningful connection between past and present. Boyd’s Cove reminds us that while time may separate us from the Beothuk people, their stories continue to be shared, remembered, and communicated.

After the death of her husband Richard in 1893, Emma Hiscock was left to raise six children on her own. Rather than remarry, she transformed her home into a hub of business and community life. Emma operated a general store from the property, opened a post office, and rented part of the house to a bank. The Hiscock house became a place of community and connection. Today, visitors can explore the restored house and discover Emma’s impact.

For generations, fishing has been an important part of life on Prince Edward Island, connecting costal communities to each other. At the Basin Head Fisheries Museum, visitors can explore the history of the province’s fishing industry through artifacts, photographs, and personal stories that reveal how knowledge and traditions were passed on. Today, the museum continues to preserve the voices and experiences of those who shaped PEI’s costal communities.

This museum was the former house of Cory O’Dell, a rider of the Nova Scotia Pony Express. Over May through September 1849, mail steamships would arrive in Halifax every week. The riders would pick up these news and rapidly travel distances. They carried news to Digby, then by ferry to Saint John, then by train or rider to the U.S. border where telegraph lines existed.

However, after the completion of a telegraph line from Saint John to Halifax, the Pony Express became obsolete.

Built in 1900 as part of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s main line into Atlantic Canada, the McAdam Railway Station was one of the region’s most important transportation hubs. The station’s telegraph office, mail facilities, and passenger platforms were all part of a communication network that shaped daily life in the early 20^th century. The station is a beautifully preserved historic site where visitors can explore exhibits and discover how railways connected people across time and place.

The Morrin Centre has had a long life, once housing a prison, a college, and now a cultural centre. The building houses an exquisite Victorian library, home to thousands of books collected by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. These volumes preserve centuries of knowledge, ideas, and stories.

Messages can also be found in unexpected places, like the graffiti in the preserved jail cells. Visitors can tour the cells and explore the marks left behind by its past inhabitants. Together, the books of the library and the graffiti left by prisoners show how communication can come in many forms for many different reasons.

This bunker was equipped with the latest 1960s technology to ensure both underground governance and outside communication. To keep their location secret, the bunker was connected to five other satellite bunkers through 90km of copper wire. By relaying messages through these satellite bunkers, they made it seem like messages came from those bunkers.

They also used rotary telephones for uninterrupted communication, radio rooms, and the Top Secret Super Computer Room where signals could not leak in and where the military would communicate and process information between bases and Allied countries.

Back in the 1830s where letters were the only form of long-distance communication, the post office was an important financial and communications hub for the city’s 9,000 residents. The post office now operates as a museum, run by the Town of York Historical Society, to share stories of the old Town of York and the early days of Toronto.

Fort la Reine Museum is a living history site with more than 25 heritage buildings, tracing prairie life from early Indigenous presence and fur trade networks through mid-20^th century rural communities. This site offers a record of how communication and community formed in the Prairies, from Indigenous trade routes to print culture and rail networks.

Duck Lake Regional Interpretive Centre focuses on Saskatchewan history from the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries, with particular emphasis on the North-West resistance of 1885. The site helps visitors understand how messages, decisions, and alliances moved between Indigenous communities and the federal government, often across vast distances and under immense pressure.

Métis ancestors served as guides, interpreters, and negotiators for major trading companies, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company. Their language, Michif, combined both Cree and French elements to create a unique linguistic heritage. This site is designed to engage visitors with Métis history, offering a wide variety of events to participate in.

The museum’s exhibit The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act demonstrates that paper was used as both a tool of communication and used for control. The Canadian government had issued specific identity papers (CIs) to control, contain, discourage and exclude Chinese Canadians.

The registration required any Chinese Canadian wishing to leave and re-enter Canada to bring in their landing certificate, present it and go through an interrogation. If they were approved, the back of those certificates would be stamped.

Built in 1900, this church offered a place of worship in the community at a time when Yukon was rapidly changing. Today, the Old Log Church Museum brings together photographs, artifacts, and oral histories that trace encounters between missionaries, explorers, whalers, settlers, and Indigenous peoples. It is a space where voices from different regions of the Yukon are brought into conversation with each other.