Introducing Clifton Museum Park

A treasured Hants County museum has a new name that better reflects its history and role in the community.

Clifton Museum Park, formerly Haliburton House Museum, returns the original name to the property and helps address the complex legacy of its former owner. Located in Windsor, Clifton Museum Park is part of the Nova Scotia Museum.

“The Province wants to offer a historical description that honours the stories of all the individuals connected to Clifton,” said Allan MacMaster, Minister of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage. “The shift to Clifton Museum Park retains historical accuracy, without honouring the name of one individual whose treatment of others should not be forgotten.”

The Nova Scotia Museum consulted cultural organizations, local government and visitors before renaming the museum.

For more than 50 years, the museum was named after Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a businessman, judge and author who gained fame through his fiction. His work was noted for its racism, sexism and bigotry, even in the 1800s. Haliburton inherited significant wealth from slavery, seized land from Acadians and spoke out against the emancipation of slaves and education for African Nova Scotians.

The estate was built for Haliburton and named Clifton for the English birthplace of his wife, Louisa Neville. Clifton was dropped from the name in the 1970s, decades after the museum opened in 1939.