The Beaulne is one of the many small museums spread throughout the townships. The museum was first established in 1964 when Coaticook celebrated it’s 100-year anniversary. The first exhibitions took place at city hall until later moving to the old post office, the same building where the Coaticook library resides today. With time, the scale of the museum began to grow as new exhibits were continuously added, until the town of Coaticook agreed to incorporate the museum into the old Norton house in 1976.
The director of the museum, François Thierry Toé spoke with The Record about the museums vision and its current situation during the pandemic.
“When the Beaulne museum was created, there were three avenues that we wanted to pursue. The first was to protect and promote local history, the second was to exhibit the history of our textiles as the Eastern Townships, especially Coaticook, used to be represented by a strong textile industry. The third was our visual arts program which was chosen to make sure that the museum would always have a contemporary exhibit to remind us to not only look back, but at the here and now as well.”
