The Niagara Falls Museum has been located in five separate buildings during the last two centuries.  The 1^st museum established in 1827 by Thomas Barnett was housed in a brewery.

After about ten years, Barnett’s collection outgrew the brewery.  This resulted in the construction of the second museum in 1837.  It was a rough cast structure and served as the museum until 1858.  During that year, it was moved south of the museum lot and converted into the Museum Hotel.

Construction of the third museum began in April 1859.  Seeking the best possible building for his growing collection, Barnett sent to England for an “original” museum plan.  Like other museums built in the nineteenth century, the finished structure was quite ornate and elaborate.  Inside, Barnett arranged his collection in galleries, lighted in a novel, peculiar and most effective manner.  The artifacts were arranged in a pleasing and natural style, quite different from other museums.  Outside, the three-story museum was decorated with a colonnaded facade and a stained glass window above the entrance.  Other attractions on the museum premises included large greenhouses which housed beautiful gardens; a huge pond with waterfowl, zoological enclosures which contained buffalo, wolves, deer and birds; extensive picnic grounds, and huge Native American wigwams.

The museum complex was located on what was known as “The Front”, a high commercialized parcel of land adjacent to the falls.  In 1887, the Niagara Parks Commission was formed to convert “The Front” to the present Q.V.P. – Queen Victoria Park.  This forced the museum to be relocated. 

In 1888, no suitable location could be found in Canada so it was relocated to Niagara Falls, N.Y.  This fourth home for the museum collection (now owned by Saul Davis) was a 3-story building.  This new location housed the collection for seventy years, longer than any of the previous museums. 

In 1958, the museum was once again forced to move when the New York State Parks authorities planned to construct a parking lot where the museum stood.

The museum collection finally found its fifth home back in Niagara Falls, Ontario.  This time the only suitable vacant building capable of housing the over 700,000 artifacts was the Spriella Corset Factory adjacent to the Rainbow Bridge. 

The Niagara Falls Museum collection was temporally relocated in 1999 to its sixth home, located on Wellington Street in downtown Toronto. The present site is a three level 7000 square ft. newly renovated gallery warehouse is a historical building built in 1906. During World War I it was home to a Canadian military uniform manufacturer.

The Niagara Falls Museum is now de-accessioning some of its larger exhibits because of this relocation. We are focusing the attention of the museum on collecting old ethnographic material from the South Pacific, Indonesia , Africa and North and South America . We also have on exhibit and are collecting oddities and curiosities from around the world.