Heritage is ...

Hello, my name is Helen Chimirri-Russell and I have been the CEO of the Ontario Heritage Trust since January 2024. I want to welcome you to the Trust’s main website and invite you to explore the many things the Trust does.

As a provincial heritage agency, our emphasis is on items of provincial significance. But we aim to create a framework for anyone who wants to explore or amplify their own stories and experiences. Some of our sites are museums where visitors come to learn about the past. And some spaces are made available to folks like you to create your own meaningful experience in a historical setting. We also support others to look after their own properties, creating their own unique connections to the past.

It takes a lot of effort to look after our holdings. Sometimes it requires learning an old craft or an old skill to maintain a heritage feature. Or maybe we have to adapt our knowledge and skillsets and come up with a wholly new and innovative, modern approach to tackle an unforeseen issue. But it is worth every penny, every ounce of effort, every thought to ensure that we continue to explore, protect and unlock the secrets of these remarkable spaces.

But what is heritage?

Heritage is the result of many decisions over time — priorities and actions of those who came before us. Heritage is a legacy of change that shows us how we got to where we are today. The worldview of the time is baked into our architecture. It shaped our landscapes and informed how our communities integrated and fit together. It didn’t all just happen. And it hasn’t always been this way. People made decisions to make it the way it is. Over time, we have innovated and adapted to life’s ever-changing circumstances.

And when we begin to realize that things haven’t always been this way, we also realize that they don’t always have to be. This is a wonderfully liberating feeling — heritage as the embodiment of change. It is not a static collection of things to be preserved or stored under glass. It is not an immovable and impenetrable notion of our history. Instead, it’s a map to understand why our world is the way it is today. It chronicles our relationship with the land, with our communities, with each other. It lays the framework for our collective journey.

Heritage is a reminder of what’s possible — resistance, creativity, innovation, collaboration and grit. It also reminds us that we sometimes get things wrong. It gives us space to remember and reflect together about who we have been and how that sets us up for who we are, and who we want to be.

And that story continues today — with a new chapter and another new chapter on its heels. Our past has created opportunities for us. It brings us together, it explores shared experiences, and it enables understanding of how the way we were as a people in the past influences the way we are today.

At the Ontario Heritage Trust, we look after some pretty cool old buildings. We put up plaques about stuff that happened a long time ago. We run some of our sites as museums and visitor attractions.

We’re committed to looking after all these things, not because we want things to remain as they were before but because we want to understand why our world is the way it is, and to inspire us to work together to make the world what we want it to be in the future. We need these spaces, places, objects, buildings and stories. We need them there for tomorrow when we have new questions to ask about the world. We need them because what we wonder about today only creates more questions for tomorrow.

Our heritage is made up of stories about conflict and union, oppression and liberation, and destruction and restitution. There are also stories of intense kindness, innovation, creativity and resolve. Because learning from our past today sets us up for success tomorrow.

As you explore this website, you are going to discover some things that you always knew about, and a few things that you may have never heard about before. That’s what makes heritage so compelling. It connects us to the past in so many ways — and gives us the chance to see how we all fit into this fascinating story of Ontario.