Cumberland Heritage Village Museum

The Cumberland Heritage Village Museum is a regional museum located just east of the City of Ottawa. It consists of over 29 buildings on 25 hectares and seeks to preserve, study and interpret the history of Cumberland and the emerging technology and social change that occurred in a rural village in the 1920s and 1930s. The Museum contributes to the telling of the “Greater Ottawa Story” and its interpretation of rural Ottawa during the 1920s and 1930s is unique to Ottawa and Ontario. The interpretive themes that tell the story focus on 1901-1945 period of growth.

Lord Cultural Resources was contracted to complete the Development Plan for the complex over the next ten years. Heritage villages are unique museum sites with a vast potential for innovation in interpretation and revenue generation. Our planning process recognized the need to find creative ways to renew the Cumberland Heritage Village Museum through visioning, program enhancement and optimal facilities development that respond to Museum’s the audience and mandate. New strategies were recommended for physical infrastructure development, collection development, programming, community engagement, and marketing and communications. We were asked back in 2011 to develop an Interpretive Plan for the site and completed this work early in 2013.