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Workers Art and Heritage Centre

Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton Ontario sheds light on hidden history of working people

Hamilton, a.k.a Steel City, is known as a working class town, so it's the perfect setting for a quirky little museum devoted to the history of labour.

Although it's quite small in size (only one floor, with a main hallway and several small rooms shooting off it), the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre does pack in a lot of historical information. The displays consist mostly of blown-up photographs, lots of text and some memorabilia related to the labour movement (membership cards, strike buttons and posters, banners, etc).

One display, Gateway to the Workers City, approaches the history of Hamilton from the working person's perspective -- the development of industry, immigration, the creation of unions (including the famous 1946 Stelco strike), and, on a more personal level, the recreational life of workers at Hamilton bay (when it was still safe to swim in Lake Ontario!).

Another exhibit, Woman's Place is Everywhere! A Century of Women, deals with young girls and women in factories, both here in Canada, and abroad in Bangladesh, China, and India today.

Tucked into a corner of the main floor is a small display on the building itself, which has a very colourful past. Completed in 1860, it began as a Customs House and has been used over the years for many different things: a school, a homeless shelter, a YWCA, a factory, a martial arts school. It opened as a museum in 1996. It's said to be haunted and Haunted Hamilton offers ghost tours of it on occasion.

The museum hosts temporary art exhibits. For example, in 2008 they hosted one called Red Flags Red Skin: Aboriginal Working Stories which featured the work of Tania Willard, a young artist from BC. The single-panel comic-book illustrations told the poignant and mostly unknown story of the labour history of Native Canadians -- everything from mining to farm work to "skywalking" (building many of the steel skyscrapers of North America) to union activism. Another one from 2008, The Migrants' Journey, by Terry Asma and Katrina Simmons showed photographs of Mexican workers along the Mexican-American border.

Visitor Information:

For details about hours and exhibits, see the museum's home page at http://www.wahc-museum.ca/