12/22/2025
Visited the museum today and learned so much about the settlement of Montreal, from the indigenous use of the island as a hub for trade and fishing, to the establishment of Ville Marie as a Catholic missionary community. It evolved into a fur trading post, busy commercial shipping port, and the window to the interior territories with canals allowing for Atlantic shipping to reach all the way to the Great Lakes.
The museum had so many interesting exhibits on the transition and conflicts from the regional tribes, the French, the British, and eventually the negotiation of a vast treaty that facilitated peace among all the people in the region.
One of the highlights is using a former sewer as a tunnel to a nearby building to continue our tour. It's wild to see the evolution of a open waste ditch, covered to make it more sanitary and built out of stone to transition it as a sewer under a road and now eventually an experience to traverse the museum.
You can explore the archeological finds and foundations of several forts, fortifications, and buildings over the years at the heart of Old Montreal. It was fascinating!
There also was a special exhibition on Sherlock Holmes (how lucky am I?) It displayed personal items on loan from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's estate, highlighted his education and influences on his writing, and discussed all the connections to Canada in his stories along with his visits over here. Then a workshop on early forensic analysis and deduction to solve a mystery from a staged crime scene. Had a laugh over their experiments to identify blood spatter patterns, you complete a booklet to aid you in solving the mystery. All in all, it was a great visit, I would highly recommend to other visitors.
