Mennonite Heritage Village - Steinbach

By the mid-1980s the collections and activities of Mennonite Heritage Village had grown so vast that a new complex was required. This challenge provided an opportunity for the museum and its community to re-imagine what the museum could be. To enable the museum to reach its potential, the Board of Directors embarked on an ambitious expansion project. For its first 25 years, the museum had operated out of one main building (currently the Auditorium), which housed the staff offices, collections storage area, and exhibits space.

The new vision for the museum in the 1990s included a brand new building, the Village Centre. This building would fulfill the museum’s administrative needs, including offices, a museum gift shop, and space for social functions, rentals, and food preparation, as well as the expanding needs of the museum’s artifact collection. New gallery spaces were also built: the Main Gallery was designed to tell the full story of Mennonites from the Reformation in the 16th century to Canada in the late 20th century, and the Temporary Gallery (later re-named the Gerhard Ens Gallery) was to be a designated space equipped to host brand new temporary exhibits. This new vision for the museum also included an increased emphasis on maintaining professional standards of artifact collections care. To that end, the new curatorial facilities in the Village Centre, including a lab, exhibit design room, and collections storage spaces, as well as all the exhibit galleries, were built with integrated environmental controls. This environmental improvement would serve to better protect and preserve the museum’s irreplaceable artifact collection for the future. By 1989, the new Village Centre was opened to the public and with this expansion completed, the museum was officially re-named Mennonite Heritage Village.