A private working concept for the Historical Society board. Not the public site.
For forty-two years this building cared for Birch Hills. Since 1996 it has held the town's memory instead — room by room, in the same rooms where it all happened.
The Birch Hills Memorial Union Hospital opened in 1951. The word Union in its name was not decorative — it described how the building came to exist. Under Saskatchewan's Union Hospital Act, neighbouring municipalities pooled their limited tax bases to build and run a hospital none of them could have afforded alone. This building was raised by a district, not by a single town.
In April 1993, the province withdrew acute-care funding from fifty-two small rural hospitals. Birch Hills was among them. Three years later the local governing bodies made the building and its grounds available to a newly formed historical society, and the doors opened again.
Everything in this museum sits inside a room that used to do something else. That is not an accident of the building — it is the reason the collection is worth visiting in person.
The museum is laid out the way the hospital was. Choose a room from the plan — or from the cards below — and step inside.
The room that explains the building. Preserved as a ward, it holds the story of the forty-two years this place spent as the district's hospital.
The hills south of town gave the place its name long before there was a town to name. This is the record, as the community has kept it.
The seniors' residence sits a short walk from the museum's front door. Between those two buildings live the last people who can describe Birch Hills before the highway, before the water lines, before the hospital that this museum now occupies.
This is a filmed interview series, recorded on site and preserved permanently — the single most time-sensitive part of everything proposed here. Every conversation not recorded is a piece of the town's history that leaves with the person who carried it.
Worth exploring: partnering with the school so senior students help conduct the interviews as a class project — and an open invitation for anyone to send in written memories, not only those filmed.
What was growing up in Birch Hills like?
What has changed for the better?
What do you wish had stayed the same?
What would you tell someone younger about this town?
A code on the wall of each room opens that room's page on the visitor's own phone and starts a short audio tour — recorded not by a computer, but by a volunteer, a board member, a longtime resident.
Years from now, that recording will not be a description of the collection. It will be part of it.
Each room carries a printed code. Scan it standing in the room, and the room tells you about itself.
The museum is open two days a week, and by appointment any other day. The website is open always.
Groups, families, classes and researchers all welcome. Tell us roughly when, and someone will be in touch.
Contact details submitted here are used only to reach you back. They are never published on this site.
Everything here was assembled, catalogued and kept by people from this district, on their own time.
Front desk, thrift shop, grounds, events, cataloguing. Any amount of time is useful — and every volunteer is recorded on the Society's own history page.
A memory, a photograph, a name we should know. Written, recorded or told over coffee at the museum.
Memberships support the Society directly and keep the doors open two days a week.
The Society is a registered charity, so gifts can be receipted for tax purposes.
The Centennial Memorial Wall already honours the people who built this district. This site extends that idea forward: a permanent page for every volunteer and board member — their name, their years of service, and what they contributed.
When a room's audio tour is narrated by one of them, their name links here. They stop being anonymous voices and become part of the record they helped preserve.
Scan the code in this room to open this page and start the tour.