Eye on the Esplanade: Museums collect stories more than ‘things’

By Medicine Hat News on July 28, 2017.

The Esplanade Museum has about 22,000 objects in its collection. Around 2,000 of these are on long-term exhibit in our Medicine Hat gallery — that’s a pretty high percentage compared to other museums of our size.

Nearly every week we’re offered more items for the collection. More often than not, we have to turn down these generous offers; sometimes the items are too big for us to store, many times we already have examples of the piece in our collection, and sometimes owners don’t know the history of what they are offering to donate. That last one is really important to us. We collect stories more than we collect “things.” The “things” stand as physical evidence and witnesses that connect us to the stories.

Take the desk pictured above, for example. It’s a bit small by today’s standards — five feet, or 1.5 metres long. It might remind you of the kind of teacher’s desk that stood at the front of every grade school classroom (at least in the 1970s and early ’80s, when I was in grade school myself). It’s solid wood, likely oak, from around the beginning of the 20th century and otherwise looks rather unremarkable.

What you can’t tell by looking at it is that this was a lawyer’s desk. Specifically, it’s the desk of Ivan C. Rand, of the firm Laidlaw, Blanchard & Rand, Medicine Hat. Rand was from New Brunswick, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1912. That same year he made his way to Medicine Hat. The city was a booming manufacturing centre then, dubbed the “smokeless Pittsburgh of the west” due to its huge reserves of cheap natural gas.

Unfortunately, his timing wasn’t great. Medicine Hat’s boom went bust by 1914; world war, drought and the Great Depression followed.

Rand stuck it out in Medicine Hat longer than a lot of other people, though. He continued to practise law here, at this very desk, until 1920, when he returned to New Brunswick (leaving the desk behind).

He did well for himself — he was named Attorney General of New Brunswick in 1924, and served as a member of New Brunswick’s Legislative Assembly. In the 1940s he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and developed the “Rand Formula,” a cornerstone of Canadian labour law.

Following the Second World War, he was on the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, chaired a Royal Commission on improper stock trading, and was the first dean of the University of Western Ontario’s law school. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada shortly before his death in 1969.

So, Rand wasn’t a native Hatter, didn’t stick around town all that long, and all of his major accomplishments were made elsewhere. But, Medicine Hat is where he first practised law, which laid the foundation for his illustrious career.

More importantly, this piece represents all those who brought their hopes and dreams to Medicine Hat during the boom years of 1908 through 1913, only to leave again when the Hat fell on hard times.

Tim McShane is Museum Curatorial assistant at the Esplanade.

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