This episode features an edited recording of a live panel discussion hosted by the Niagara Falls Museum on November 19, 2025. The discussion was all about Spirit Walks and featured representatives from the St. Catharines Museum, the Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum, and the Niagara Falls History Museum.

Throughout our celebration of season 10 we've put together a few "supercut" episodes looking back at some of our favourite moments and episodes. We revisited the series we put together about the history of the bridges of the Welland Canal, and we revisited the series about the Victorians called Victorian Tweets. On today's last episode of season 10, we bring you a supercut compilation of our favourite instances where we used primary sources on the podcast. Using primary sources in this way is fun because we can voice them by welcoming other staff or volunteers to read out the source for our listeners. Additional enjoyment comes from hearing (rather than reading) the source, almost as if we get to meet the person who wrote the source or experienced the event firsthand. Since bringing history to the public's attention is our core purpose, we do use a lot of primary source material on the blog so we chose our four favourite instances. You can hear more by listening to past episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening! Links to the episodes featured in this episode: E205 Spooky Halloween Episode E310 The Fallen Workers Part 5 E906 Merritt’s Speech at the Turning of the Sod E103 Minnie Phelps and International Women’s Day

This podcast episode includes an interview with Foster Festival playwright and actor Jamie Williams and director Emily Oriold. Representing the museum are Visitor Services Coordinator Adrian Petry and Public Programmer Sean Dineley. The group discusses the exciting upcoming production, A Niagara Christmas Carol, which is a reimagining of the classic Charles Dickens tale set around the Welland Canal in the 1840s.

On this episode of Hearing History, Sean explores the sound of a pry-cap bottle and the history of carbonated beverages in St. Catharines, including breweries and soft drink makers.

This episode in the Hearing History series explores the history of the Lakeside Park Carousel through the sounds of its incredible band organ!

It's time for the big reveal. After an interesting discussion about pablum (ironic, we know), Adrian reveals the theme (and subthemes) that linked together the episodes of this season! For footnotes to this episode, please visit stcatharinesmuseumblog.com

In the most scientific episode since the infamous gyroscope episode in season 7, Kathleen and Adrian try to tackle the fascinating and very technical history of the wirephoto. For footnote to this episode, please visit stcatharinesmuseumblog.com

Bet you didn't know how an electronic organ works! Well, now you do! In another attempt at explaining science, Kathleen and Adrian explore the history of this impressive instrument, talk family electronic organs, and sports! Footnotes to this episode can be found at stcatharinesmuseumblog.com

How does the mail get sorted? One of the first computerized and automated mail sorters was the Route Reference Computer. Despite its "state secret" level of confusing technical aspects, we learned a lot about the mail in this episode. Please visit stcatharinesmuseumblog.com for footnotes to this episode.

On this episode we're explore the important history of the electric powered wheelchair, and our research takes us through the history and importance of mobility aids today. For more info and the footnotes to this episode, visit stcatharinesmuseumblog.com

We're cracking open season 8 of One Hour in the Past with the history of the egg carton. The episode is filled with a surprising amount of unintended egg puns and lots of egg-sellent history. Enjoy the episode! For more info and the footnotes to this episode, visit stcatharinesmuseumblog.com

Throughout our 10th season, we will be including several “supercut” episodes which revisit clips from some of favourite episodes, themes, and series over the last ten years! Enjoy this look back on our Season 6 miniseries about the Victorians which was produced during the run of our temporary exhibition Victorian Tweets. The exhibition translated Victorian happenings from newspapers, diaries, letters, and more in the Museum's collection into modern (at the time) tweets. The tweets themselves acted as windows to the past but also helped visitors to see themselves in the "issues" of the Victorians. This three-part podcast series further explored notions of identity, tradition, and our modern understanding and perspective of the Victorians.

On this episode of Museum Chat Live! we're chatting local food history and baking as we wrap up our (now beloved) Food, Glorious Food Blog Series. The series was a chance for Abbey Stansfield (public programmer) and Kathleen Powell (curator) to explore local food history by baking through historic recipes in our collection. This bake-off was a way to explore food history in a first-hand way and draw attention to our temporary exhibit of the same name, on display at the Museum through the autumn of this year. Listen in for a chat about food history, writing a blog series together, challenges in baking historic recipes, the things we learned, and most importantly: our favourite desserts!

On this episode of Museum Chat Live! Sean discusses trends in museum outreach programming. He explores how museum interpretation has evolved over the years, and how history is interpreted out in the community in St. Catharines, across Canada, and around the world. This episode includes an interview with Visitor Services Coordinator Adrian Petry and a peek into what outreach programming the museum has in store for 2025 and beyond.

In this 3-episode series, host Sean Dineley lets a sampling of long-time St. Catharines residents do most of the talking. The people whose stories you will hear have all been participants in the museum’s StoryLab program. This ongoing oral history project is all about getting the diverse experiences and perspectives of real St. Catharinites into the museum’s collection. By conducting, recording, and transcribing interviews with local residents, we hope to learn more about the wide array of people and communities who call this city home as well as how it has evolved in their lifetimes. Ultimately, the project supports our mission to collect and present a more complete story of St. Catharines. This episode is the third and final part of this series. Parts one and two provided a glimpse into the significant waves of emigration caused by the totalitarian regimes, famines, genocides, and World Wars that ravaged Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Even before this period of turmoil the ethnic makeup of immigrants in Canada had been overwhelmingly European, but beginning in the 1960s, the trend started to change. Race-based selection criteria was removed from Canada’s Immigration Policy in 1962, and new schemes like the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Canadian Multiculturalism Policy helped sow the seeds for new cultural communities. Take a listen and share your thoughts with us! The views and opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre and the City of St. Catharines.

Enjoy this look back on our series on bridges across the Welland Canal!

The 10th season of our Museum Chat Live! podcast is here! My, oh my, how time flies. It’s like one day you’re recording an episode about the Welland Canal and the next its… history… Anyway! Have a listen to this little preview to help set the stage for all the awesome things we have planned for the upcoming year on Museum Chat Live!

November 30th, 1824 is an important day in the history of Niagara. A handful of businessmen who had less than a year before formed the Welland Canal Company met at Allanburg to shovel and turn over the first sod, marking the beginning of construction of one of the most important infrastructure projects in Canadian history. As those events usually go, speeches were delivered amongst the small group on that cold day. William Hamilton Merritt's speech has been shared and reshared many times over the years as it reveals not only the hard work the Company was about to endure, but also the vision of the project itself. This vision: a great canal linking the Great Lakes and facilitating trade and settlement, and linking the world to the interior of North America was a practical reality only realized with the third and fourth Welland Canals. But they hard to start somewhere, and so Merritt called on his fellow Niagarans to join the cause and celebrate this new beginning. Today's episode of Museum Chat Live! brings a reading of an excerpt of Merritt's speech from 200 years ago to our ears. Edited and read by museum volunteer Des Corran, you can hear the optimism with which Merritt would cling to over some very challenging years of construction ahead. Enjoy the episode. Listen

This podcast episode is in our Hearing History series, exploring local history through sound. Today’s sound is the film projector, which has been a constant feature of downtown St. Catharines for nearly 130 year! This episode follows the history of film and traces this medium’s presence in the Garden City, including cinemas, drive-in theatres, and our own home-grown stars of the silver screen! Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show! Take a listen and share your thoughts with us! The views and opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre and the City of St. Catharines.

We are thrilled to bring our hit Virtual Museum Lecture Series to the podcast. With over 40 lectures on Youtube, we’re so happy to bring the lecture audio to the podcast format so that more of you can enjoy these fascinating stories and join in on the historical adventures. On today’s episode we’re sharing to provide a lecture presented on December 13, 2022 which provided an update on her work at the Shickluna Shipyard archaeological dig. After two long years away from the site, Dr. Monk will be back on the dig this summer and we’re looking forward to welcoming her back to hear more about this fascinating history. This lecture was originally recorded on December 13, 2022