Little museum on the prairie
By Joan Janzen
What does a nine-year-old Saskatchewan girl do on weekends throughout the spring and summer? Nine-year-old Reese McCallum will be spending her weekends giving tours of the little museum out on the prairie she and her mom Kyla opened during the first weekend in May. It’s a rock and gem museum which they have called “Ore Junction” located at Liebenthal, Sask.
Reese has been featured in previous articles for some of the “out-of-the-box” projects she has done. It’s those projects, as well our shared hometown of Liebenthal, that continues to capture my attention. Having grown up in the tiny hamlet, I would never have anticipated it would be the home of a rock museum, but Reese and her mom have proved otherwise.
PHOTOS BY JOAN JANZEN, click for larger images
“I started doing shows in Leader, but hauling rocks back and forth was a lot of work so we decided to open our own museum,” Reese explained. With a lot of help from her mom and dad, the family started transforming their quonset into a museum in October of last year.
“We turned the front of our quonset museum into a giant Geode,” Kyla said. “You can see it from a mile away!”
The art work is impressive and it took Kyla a week to complete the mural. “I painted it during the warm weather we had over the Easter weekend. It was the perfect temperature to set the paint,” she said.
At the admission booth, visitors are invited to give a donation for entry into the museum, where Reese conducts tours. There you will see her crafts and further along there is a map of the Palliser Expedition hanging on the wall. “I am showcasing this because of the metals and fossils that were found on that expedition and we go close to where the expedition took place,” she said.
There are also displays of gem stones, metals, minerals, rocks, fossils, petrified wood, limestone and all sorts of glow in the dark minerals. Pictures adorn the walls and displays feature the evolution of clay, information about coal, natural gas, oil refining, and other resources.
There’s an education section where people can watch videos and browse through a book from the museum’s library. Reese also has a facebook page and a website where people can learn and see a whole lot more.
Reese invited visitors from Sceptre, Maple Creek, Medicine Hat, Kindersley, Regina and Leader to the grand opening of her museum at Liebenthal.