Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic was established in 1948 and is the oldest and largest Maritime Museum in Canada. The idea of this maritime museum can be credited to a group of Royal Canadian Navy officers who envisaged a maritime museum where relics of Canada's naval past could be preserved. Starting with a small space at HMC Dockyard, the museum moved to quarters in the Halifax Citadel in 1952 and became the Maritime Museum of Canada in 1957. Floods and fires in the early 1960s caused temporary relocations to a variety of sites until 1965 when a home was found in a former bakery building at the Navy's Victualling Depot. The museum became the Marine History section of the Nova Scotia Museum in 1967. The exhibits remained on Citadel Hill while the offices, library and some of the collection moved to the new Nova Scotia Museum building on Summer Street in Halifax in 1970. Through the 1970s, a long search for a permanent home ensued. On 22 January 1982, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic opened on the site of the historic William Robertson & Son Ship Chandlery and A.M. Smith and Co. properties on the Halifax Waterfront. The museum includes exhibits on the age of steamships, local small craft, the Royal Canadian and Merchant Navies, Second World War convoys and The Battle of the Atlantic, the Halifax Explosion of 1917, and Nova Scotia's role in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster.