The Long Term Plan

Our museum was brought on to the property in the 1980's. The building was the old totalisator building from the Hororata Race Course. The then volunteers remodelled it and turned it into a small museum. Our unique collection comes from all over new Zealand and largely reflects the history and heritage of rural Canterbury and the Hororata area.

Our volunteers also took up the project of restoring Cotons' Cottage a cob house which was the original church for the area. The 2011 earthquake caused huge damage to the restored cottage and Heritage New Zealand agreed to take on the responsibility of another restoration and ownership of the cottage. The Historic Society provide the furnishings for the cottage and open the cottage as part of their open days in the summer season.

The museum itself has had very little done to it since it was built and the ravages of time are taking their toll. Our back storage room is full of heritage items but it is subject to condensation, dampness and vermin.

We need to purchase specialised museum quality shelving to store our collection. We also need to store items especially paper and textile items in specialise museum quality containers which do not give off harmful chemicals overtime.

We have managed to purchase a 40ft insulated container to house heavy items and items of farm machinery. The container needs roofing to weatherproof it and it also needs specialised shelving installed.

We would also like to create a forge in part of the container as we have many suitable items in the collection.

We are also digitally re cataloguing the collection as over the years things have been donated and loaned but have not been added to the catalogue. Our collection will go on to E Hive a national database so that other museums can access our collection and loan or examine. We have currently been using a members computer but would like to purchase a lap top, external hard drive and a printer. This would also mean members of the public could access family heritage photos and documents which are housed by the museum scanned and loaded onto the computer in order to preserve the originals.

We are desperately trying to raise money to protect our collection for future generations.

We feel with our new projects we can inject new life into the museum and encourage the younger generation by providing items for study at school and great digital stories for our interesting items.

Any contribution no matter how small will help with one part of our project. One container, one pack of acid free tissue paper it is true that "every little bit helps"