Museums - McCord Museum of Canadian History

Opened in 1921, the McCord is the result of the efforts of a visionary collector named David Ross McCord. For half a century before the museum’s formal opening, McCord had been actively collecting art and artifacts relating to Canadian history. Eventually the collection grew to such size and stature that it became appropriate to be used as the basis for the foundation of a national history museum. The McCord National Museum was first housed in a building provided by McGill University in Montreal. The university administered the McCord for over sixty years until it became an independent museum. Today, the McCord is supported by regional and national government funding, and by a large network of members, donors, and sponsors.
The McCord conserves and presents over 1,213,000 objects, images, and manuscripts relating to the social history and material culture of Montreal, Québec, and Canada. Objects in the collection range from glass negatives to hoop crinolines to pieces of fine china to Native artifacts. It includes some 13,000 ethnographic and archaeological objects from Native populations in Canada and, to some extent, the northern United States, and is one of Canada’s major collections of this kind of material. Its historic period collection contains more than 7,000 Aboriginal objects dating from the early 1800s to 1945 and representing Native groups from across Canada: the Eastern Woodlands, the Prairies, the Northwest Coast, and the Subarctic and Arctic regions. There are also more than 6,000 archaeological objects (largely stone tools and pot shards) dating from as long as 10,000 years ago.
The McCord also houses the Notman Photographic Archives, which contain more than a million images relating to the history of Montreal, Quebec and Canada from the 1840s to the present.