At the Canso Causeway which connects Cape Breton to Mainland Nova Scotia, is the town of Port Hawkesbury which is Atlantic Canada's ten-mile long superport. Ocean-going vessels and fishing boats find berth there. Port Hastings is the neighboring community overlooking the Strait of Canso, and here you will find a museum in a small house with a whole lot of history inside.

Overlooking the Strait of Canso on Church Street is a small old house, built in the late 1880's. Its physical size is deceptive because sheltered under its roof is a huge amount of history which not only tells the story of the village of Port Hastings, but also the surrounding communities, mainly Port Hawkesbury and Point Tupper. The Port Hastings Museum & Archives was turned over to the Port Hastings Historical Society in 1981 by the estate of Daniel MacIntosh and was officially opened on August 28, 1982.

Among the main exhibits is a well-organized display highly popular with tourists. Composed of photographs taken by Angus Walker, and the companies involved, it tells the story of the building of the world's deepest causeway which was gouged out of nearby Cape Porcupine. Incorporating a railway, highway and a canal, the mile-wide Canso Causeway created an ice free harbour capable of handling the largest supertankers. Navigated by the first commercial vessel in September of 1955, the Causeway profoundly influenced the economic development of both the Strait area and all of Cape Breton.

"Visitors - and our own children growing up here - often do not fully understand how different life used to be here," says museum curator Beryl MacDonald. "They may not bother to think about how things developed to the way they are now - they just take it for granted. What this museum does is show us our past - before and after the Causeway - and the various influences on our way of life. We always had so much going on here - shipping, farming, fishing, the railway - it is really interesting. But if none of this was here to look at, or if young people don't come to see it - how will they come to appreciate their own heritage?"

A new pictorial exhibit is also generating high interest among visitors who have employment or family connections in the area: the story of Stora Forest Industries at Point Tupper which currently employs 1500 plant and woodland employees. In 1997, the Museum acquired a mass of newspaper clippings, photographs, and records from the company which also included a donation to help with the costs of setting up the display. The photographic exhibit was accomplished with the assistance of Randy Snow and his staff at Snow's Econoprint.

The museum contains many elements other than the commercial development of the area, however. The general emphasis is the Cape Breton way of life as shown through photographs and artifacts, but each room has a specific theme. The MacIntosh Room, for example, tells of the family who lived in and donated the house, spanning the time from the first settler Neil MacIntosh who came from Canna, Scotland to settle in River Denys to Daniel MacIntosh who was the last to live in the house and who died in 1967. It was Daniel's grandfather, Donald who built the house. The room also features several individuals who contributed to the musical heritage of the area, including Donald Beaton Riley - the man often called "The Lord of the Dance" whose bronzed shoes are displayed.

There are substantial archival holdings of interest to genealogists such as records on marriages, births, baptisms, deaths, deeds to lands, census records, school registers, photographs, and scrapbooks. This information is continually growing as current information is added year after year. A particularly interesting feature are the binders containing photographs of the older houses of the region along with the history of the people who lived in them. The Pioneer Room contains artifacts revolving around the work and leisure of earlier times, and a display in the upstairs hall features two of the oldest holdings in the museum, a century old quilt and a wedding dress.

Museum Hours
May and June - 8:30 am to 4:30 pm
July and August - 8:30 am Monday to Friday; and weekends 2-4 pm and 6-9 pm.