Charleswood Museum: Area History From Fur Trade Route To Agricultural Community To Winnipeg Suburb

Charleswood Museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada tells the story of the Charleswood area, once its own municipality until amalgamation with the City of Winnipeg in 1972

Before 1972, what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada was a collection of 13 different municipalities. Charleswood was one of those municipalities. The Charleswood Museum tells the story of that community.

Charleswood is a suburban community located in the southwest corner of Winnipeg south of the Assiniboine River.

Historically, the area was known for The Passage, a natural ford at the foot of what is now Berkley Street, where the water in the Assiniboine River was shallow enough to cross.  For thousands of years, bison and First Nations peoples crossed the river at this point. First Nations hunters guided European fur traders here. The Passage became a main crossing for Indigenous and Métis traders, Red River Settlers travelling to Pembina, and independent traders who wanted to bypass the Hudson’s Bay Company at The Forks.

In 1870, when the Province of Manitoba was created, the Rural Municipality of Assiniboia was incorporated. It included what is now Charleswood as well as parishes on the north side of the river. The Rural Municipality of Charleswood was incorporated in 1913.

Prior to World War II, Charleswood was largely rural with residential pockets scattered throughout. The local economy was primarily agricultural with dairy and poultry farms, market gardens, and mink farms. Charleswood grew rapidly after World War II and became more suburban.

The Charleswood Museum is one room filled to the rafters with artifacts, pictures, and memorabilia. You’ll find ancient tools, agricultural implements, household goods, clothing including wedding dresses from the 1930s and 1940s, vintage toys, sporting memorabilia, remnants of business history, and a lot more.

A number of paintings depicting historical Charleswood scenes and places hang on the walls. Photographs and framed sheets of historical information are interspersed throughout the displays. Sometimes the listing of who donated specific items becomes the opportunity to tell the story of an important family and/or business in Charleswood history. If you have any history with or connection to the area, you will recognize some of those names. If not, you will still find items to attract your interest. There is a varied collection of historical and vintage items that speak to ways of doing things in times gone by.

I came across a couple of items I hadn’t seen before. One was a dough box, a wooden trough-like piece with a removable wooden lid. (It is on the left in the above photo with a couple of items sitting atop the lid.) It would be placed near the outdoor oven where the rising bread dough in it could benefit from some of the warmth of the oven. A museum volunteer told me this item had been brought to Manitoba by a family who’d moved from Quebec. I got the impression that dough boxes were not a particularly common item in Manitoba.

Another item that caught my interest was a kerosene stove (shown in above photo) from the early 1900s. It might have been used for summer canning to avoid the heat of the wood stove.

From 1870 to 1908 a ferry ran across the Assiniboine River at The Passage. The ferry was pulled across the river by cables. An original pulley from that ferry is on display in the Charleswood Museum. In 1908, the ferry moved further west (to where Caron Park is now) because of low water. That ferry operated until 1959 when the Perimeter Bridge was built.

The volunteer-run Charleswood Museum opens on Saturday afternoons. It is not a large space and will not take a large amount of time to go through (an hour or less). However, with so many artifacts packed into it, you should take time to look carefully at the displays. You’ll likely to find fascinating things tucked into them. Volunteers will gladly point out items of interest and tell stories about them, Charleswood families, and Charleswood history.

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