The Lacombe and District Historical Society's latest claim to fame is from a discovery found in the ceiling of the Michener House Museum. With the new space at the Flatiron Museum for storage, the heritage home was being reassessed for a new gallery space.

Inside the ceiling near the Michener House office, the contractor found piping to what appeared to be a bathtub which came as a surprise to the staff that work there. 

“One of our contractors just happened to ask where the bathtub was that was upstairs and we were just kind of sitting there being like what are you talking about? Then we looked, and I thought maybe he had just found some piping. But no, there is a full bathtub that is visible from the main floor of the Michener House. It's actually upstairs in the office side of things,” explained Melissa Blunden, Executive Director of the Lacombe District Historical Society. 

Blunden and the Historical Society took the discovery as an opportune time to post the story to the organization’s Tik Tok account. Their video on the Social Media app has seen nearly 100,000 views. Blunden took the time to uncover the tub from the storage closet it was located in to assess its value to the building.

Photo from the Lacombe Historical Society's Tik Tok video.

“The closet is full of all of our costume pieces for our summer students, as well as some archival and collection donations from the City and from a couple organizations that we haven't had a chance to fully process yet. The closet is used quite regularly, but we don't typically pull everything out and look at the at the shelving structure. That's not something we do on the daily. It was definitely a surprise when we pulled it out and saw a big white plywood box there and figured out that must be where the bathtub was hidden,” explained Blunden. 

Unfortunately, it was not the dreamy claw foot tub they were hoping for but a tub Blunden believed was from the 70’s or maybe the 80’s.  

“It's in pretty good shape, so we'll see what happens maybe there's a way for us to use it for something else, but chances are once we actually get the funding in place to do the work at the Michener House, it'll be removed and the plumbing properly removed and capped off,” said Blunden. 

She believes the bathtub is there from one point in history where the upper floor of the building was intended to be rented out. Due to lack of funding, Blunden says the tub was likely boarded up rather than removed in order to be more cost-effective for the Lacombe and District Historical Society. At this time, Blunden believes there is no risk to storing potentially archival pieces near the bathtub as there is no running water to that section of the house. 

Although the ‘bathtub mystery’ came as no surprise to some of the current Historical Society Board of Directors, it was a little shocking for some of the newer staff members as well as became a hit with the society's Tik Tok following. 

“It's funny because you can spend hours putting together content for social media and planning out things that are like fully researched, fully edited, and well put together. Sometimes, they flop and don't do so well and then, you can post this seven second video of a bathtub in the ceiling and suddenly you have 100,000 views and it's pretty interesting and hard to navigate,” added Blunden. 

You can check out their videos on the Lacombe and District Society's Facebook page here.