treasures simply because they came through the doors for something else. “Museums are more than bricks and mortar and steel,” he says. “Museums are emotional.” The numbers demonstrate what can happen when the building is activated. Wil recalled that when the effort began several years ago, the museum was seeing approximately 2,200 visitors annually. At one event last year, nearly 4,000 people came through the doors in a single day. The Christmas Tree Spectacular provides an even bigger example. What started as an idea inspired by decorated Christmas trees that Wil saw while travelling in British Columbia grew from roughly 2,000 visitors in its first year to 37,000 last year. Overall, Wil estimates approximately 57,000 people walked through the museum last year. His dream is eventually to see the Christmas celebration become a regional attraction, bringing visitors from communities well beyond Elgin County. He has already seen visitors arrive from Woodstock, Brantford and Kitchener-Waterloo, people who may visit the museum and then ask the important tourism question: where should we go for dinner? “That’s tourism,” Wil says. The vision for restoring the museum has changed as well. Rather than trying to complete everything at once, the current plan is to move forward in phases, much like the restoration of CASO Station and development of the St. Thomas Elevated Park. “Dream big, figure out what it is – then, okay, this is what we can afford to do,” Wil explains. The current plan is in the $8 million to $10 million range, with the possibility of continuing to build upon it in future years. For Wil, however, the bigger conversation isn’t really about a museum; it is about creating what urban planners sometimes
call a ‘third place’, somewhere beyond where we live and where we work, where people gather, socialize and feel connected to their community. “This is the place that we come to celebrate our heritage and do many different things,” he says. “It’s the place that you come back to and revisit over and over and over.” And perhaps that is what the centre of a city really is. Not a dot you can find on a map, but a place where people naturally come together. For a community that proudly calls itself the Railway City, maybe its heart has been sitting along the tracks all along.
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Hometown St. Thomas • September 2026 • Page 9
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