The Brockville Rifles Regimental Museum Mission Statement
The Mission of The Brockville Rifles Regimental Museum is to research, collect, preserve, interpret and exhibit military artifacts related to the history of The Brockville Rifles, its predecessors and other military-related organizations or persons, whose roots historically encompass the counties of Leeds & Grenville, and Lanark.
To display artifacts appropriate to the members of the military and the community in order to foster a better understanding of the military heritage of Brockville citizen soldiers in peace and war in order generate in the local community an interest and source of pride in the accomplishments of The Regiment and its fore bearers.
Message from the Curator
The enclosed photos and documents have been produced to assist the student and historical researcher in their quest for historical accuracy. The military history of Brockville and surrounding area can be traced back to a time long before Confederation. The Brockville Rifles and its predecessors have always been part of the social fabric of this area. Whenever our country was threatened, its citizen soldiers were there to answer their nation’s call.
Both as a student of military history and an educator by profession I have found that reference material of a local military nature has been lacking in our libraries and schools. There have in the past been a number of excellent books written about our community. Unfortunately very little reference within was given to the contribution of the Canadian military that has helped shape the identity of our city. This was not a shortcoming of the authors but simply due to the fact no local information was available. On the student side, illustrations or photos used for a historical project were not always relevant to the information found therein about Brockville and the surrounding area. A generic photo had to be used. The same reason is attributable here as well.
This package hopes to remedy that problem by offering the student/citizen a source of military photos and documents relevant to Brockville and area for research purposes.All photographs and official documents have come from the archives of The Brockville Rifles Regimental Museum. Since the museum’s official opening three years ago, its staff has discovered many archival photographs never seen by the public until now. Some of the photos and documents date back to the late 19th Century and therfore rare and in some cases very fragile. This is the first phase of our endeavour and one will find that there are no captions accompanying each photograph but it is hoped that the photo will be useful according to the time period it is grouped under. This is an ongoing project and the second issue will have each photo captioned and more photos to follow. The digitization of these treasures was done by a professional photographic restoration company, HalfPot Productions.
The project would not have been possible had it not been for the dedicated museum staff and the financial funding given by The Ontario Trillium Foundation. To this organization we are truly grateful for its assistance in keeping the military history of Brockville alive for future generations to remember. The freedom and life styles that they enjoy today were made possible by the faces that they see in our photo archives.
Major (Retired) Roger Hum CD
Curator