Collections & Virtual Exhibits

Acquiring, preserving and providing access to Elgin County Municipal Records is the Archives’ principal responsibility. These include council minutes, By-Laws, tax assessment rolls, maps, voters lists and other records of the county government and its sixteen former and current local governments dating back to 1852 (or earlier in some cases).

The Archives is fortunate to have a complete set of records from the Elgin County Clerk’s Office since its inception, documenting many aspects of the area’s social and economic development, including petitions on matters such as temperance, social welfare, justice and the need for infrastructure.

The Scott Studio fonds is a collection of national significance, comprising approximately 100,000 negatives created by three generations of photographers, documenting all aspects of life in Elgin-St. Thomas from the 1870s to the 1980s.

To learn more, read this brief history of the studio, or view our curated Flickr galleries presenting thematic selections from the fonds.

The Archives maintains the records of Alma College, the internationally-renowned educational institution for girls that operated in St. Thomas from 1877 to 1994. For more information, read a brief history of the college, or explore our curated Flickr galleries presenting thematic selections from the collection.

The Archives possesses records of several Elgin County Women’s Institutes, including “Tweedsmuir Histories” for communities throughout the County, providing a female perspective of life in rural Ontario throughout the twentieth century. Click below to explore our  Women’s Institutes Tweedsmuir Histories digitization project, which provides online access to a wealth of unique documents, photographs and memorabilia found in the more than eighty volumes of Tweedsmuir Histories contained in the Archives’ collections.

The Archives is the repository for a collection of over 1500 microforms formerly housed at the St. Thomas Public Library. This material includes province-wide census returns, Upper Canada Land Petitions, probate/surrogate court records, directories and local newspapers (including the Rodney Mercury, West Lorne Sun, Dutton Advance and Aylmer Express).

To access the collection, the archives has three microfilm readers that can be accessed in the Reference Room during our opening hours.

This collection includes Tremaine’s Map of the County of Elgin, 1864, a valuable resource measuring approximately six feet by three feet and documenting property owners throughout the County at that time. The map is available to purchase in atlas form.

The Archives also has a number of fire insurance plans documenting the built heritage of communities throughout the county during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Goad’s Fire Insurance Plan of Belmont, 1894.