BINDLOSS, Alta. – As many collectors have discovered, antique collections can get out of hand. But few have been turned into whole museums.
That’s what happened to Susan Minor, who raises 300 Herefords and 25 Quarter horses on her Minor Cattle Co. ranch on the Red Deer River north of Bindloss.
Minor inherited her appreciation for antiques from her parents. They started her on many of her collections: crank telephones, lamps and clothes irons.
“They were from the Depression era and they didn’t throw anything away,” she said.
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Soon she was doing her own collecting, scouring auction sales, antique sales and even the odd garage sale for items that caught her eye.
She said she was motivated by a strong commitment to preserve western heritage.
“It’s easy to pick up things because if you don’t, they get thrown away.”
In 1972, with her collection outgrowing the house, she decided it needed a home of its own and chose one of the old log buildings on the ranch that she had moved onto in 1967 with husband Tony.
The barn, pump house, chicken coop and original ranch house were part of a wave of log building construction on Alberta’s Red Deer River in the early 1900s when flooding broke log booms upstream and washed logs down to ranchers on the eastern side of the province.
Minor cleaned out the chicken coop and set up her antiques, but 18 years later that building became too small, and when Tony moved his tractors out of the ranch house and into a new shed, her antiques moved in.
The collection eventually caught the attention of school and seniors groups and soon Minor had a fledgling museum on her hands. She named it the Oxbow Pioneer Museum after one of the original names for the ranch, and welcomed tour groups.
Five years ago it was mentioned in a provincial tourism book and the number of visits grew.
She especially welcomes school groups, outfitting the students in her antique hats and trying to make their visits as hands-on as possible. She said it’s important young people learn about the lives of early pioneers and how the West was settled.
“How would a kid ever know what a coal oil lamp is unless they see it?” she said. “Or one of those heavy old irons?”
The museum’s development came to a tragic halt three years ago when Tony died of cancer.
Between hospital visits while Tony was sick and now running the ranch with her daughter Cathy and Cathy’s boyfriend, Paul Munro, she hasn’t had much time for the museum.
But the collection is still there, a little dusty and unorganized but waiting to be put back into shape and ready for visitors.
Its sheer size is a problem and while walking through the jumble that spills its way through the building, it is difficult to pick out a discernible theme.
“It seems like I have to rescue everything.”
She does have preferences, including cowboy tack, lamps and clocks. She also goes on the occasional tangent, such as her recent efforts to save cocktail shakers from the 1920s and 1930s as well as old potato mashers.
Hiding in the overflowing rooms are a smattering of war memorabilia, a book collection and a small display of old photographs. A rope bed is believed to be 150 years old and a weathered oxen yoke hanging on a wall was found on a trail by her grandfather north of Jenner, Alta.
While the ranch is taking priority these days, she is committed to getting the building to where it can again be opened to visitors.
Her father and Tony’s mother recently moved into nursing homes and she acquired many of their antiques, which must also be prepared for display, either in the house or the museum.
“We’ll get it all organized,” she said. “It just takes a while.”
She has some ideas about what might happen to the museum in the future.
Minor’s daughter and her boyfriend now live in a small house on the yard called the guest house.
Her dream is to one day move another house on the yard where she would live, relocate her daughter to the big house and move the museum into the guest house.
Another scenario would unfold if the school in Bindloss ever closed. If that happened, she would like to explore the possibility of moving the museum there.
“It definitely needs to expand because I’ve got showcases that I would sure like to enlarge.”
For now, she wants to keep the collection together so that someday it can be given its proper due.
“I don’t want them to get lost,” she said.
“They should be preserved for the next generation that’s coming up.”
