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Sunday, 31 August 2025 18:24
Exploring History from Home: A Review of the Bytown Museum Virtual Tour
Callie Foster
Callie Foster, an HSO member and high school student, commends the Bytown Museum’s Virtual Tour as an excellent example of how technology can make history more fully accessible to all, and can contribute to preserving these important stories for generations to come. In the age where technology is able to connect us more than ever before, we now see history made accessible through virtual experiences. The Bytown Museum’s Permanent Gallery online tour offers a captivating way to explore Ottawa’s rich past without leaving your home. This resource is so valuable…
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You might be wondering what UFOs, a cursed box, and science have to do with each other. The answer: all can be found at the National Research Council of Canada on Sussex Drive. In mid-August, Steven Leclair, chief archivist at the NRC, kindly hosted a second group of HSO members on a tour of the NRC’s Sussex Drive facility. Leading us through this remarkable neoclassical structure built to the exacting specifications of Henry Marshall Tory in the 1930s, he pointed out its many architectural and design features. Most importantly, its…
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We are saddened to learn that long-time HSO member and WWII veteran Elsa Lessard has passed away at the age of 103. A “WREN”, a member of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, and Bletchley Park “Secret Listener” during WWII, Elsa has been described as a national treasure” by the CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault and by Admiral Topshee, Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy. Read the Ottawa Citizen obituary. Listen to a CBC interview with Elsa. Read more about the story of the WRENs in Bytown Pamphlet #104: Our "Capitol" Wrens.…
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On the afternoon of Sunday August 3rd, 2025, a number of members of the Historical Society of Ottawa’s Museum Club, along with several members of the Cumberland Township Historical Society, enjoyed a peaceful stroll through a village magically trapped in the 1920s. This village, the Cumberland Heritage Village Museum, located at 2940 Old Montreal Rd, Cumberland, ON K4C 1G3, features about two dozen buildings placed in a beautiful parkland setting. Unlike many living history museums that place themselves in a pioneer or settler timeframe, the Cumberland Heritage Village Museum represents…
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Thursday, July 24th, 2025 dawned sunny and hot as our Museum Club undertook its walking tour of Sandy Hill and its guided tour of Laurier House. In response to the extreme heat predicted for the day, our organizer, Callie Foster, a summer co-op student, and our walking tour lead, Ben Weiss, had arranged to split the group offering a walking tour both before and after the Laurier House tour, so some of our participants could avoid the hottest part of the morning, if they chose to do so. As such,…
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Given rising international tensions, sixteen members of the Historical Society of Ottawa’s Museum Club sought shelter in the Diefenbunker, Canada’s Cold War Museum, on the afternoon of Sunday, June 29th, 2025. Our guide informed us that the facility had been commissioned by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1959, though he never visited it, and that it became fully operational in 1962. Designed to protect 535 senior government and military officials, all men, it could survive a blast from a 5-megaton atomic bomb at a distance of 1.8 km. A full-scale…
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Let’s hear your stories about Bytown and the Rideau Canal as we begin to mark 2026, the 200th anniversary of the beginning of both! All contributions are welcome. Selected submissions will be shared on a special webpage on the HSO website for all to access, including educators. Eligible contributions can be submitted in a variety of formats, including written or audio/video. We request that submissions be received by November 30, 2025. We hope to also incorporate selected contributions into the HSO’s many other platforms – such as the HSO blog,…
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The HSO’s Ben Weiss was honoured to be invited to address the 200 or so Rotary Club youth gathered in Ottawa on May 25, 2025, for the opening day of the Rotary Club’s annual Adventure in Citizenship conference. The day also included a visit to the House of Commons by the conference’s 16-18 year olds, the day before the arrival of King Charles III and the Opening of Parliament. The “Adventure in Citizenship” program was established by the Rotary Club of Ottawa in 1951. Each year, approximately 200 senior high…
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For those with a passion for history, delving into the past becomes an exciting adventure in “Time Travelling”! These new 30-minute episodes of “Time Travelling… with the Historical of Ottawa”, recorded in collaboration between the HSO and Rogers TV, provide a phenomenal opportunity to sit back and enjoy some wonderful stories shared by more than a dozen the Ottawa area’s most engaging historians. Beginning in April 2025, a new episode was broadcast each week on Rogers TV Channel 22 (or Channel 23 in the case of the French-language episodes). And…
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