Shawnigan Lake Museum sits in Shawnigan Lake village, about 11 minutes from the Kinsol Trestle parking lot. It reopened in July 2025 after an expansion that tripled its floor space, and learning about the bridge and region’s history makes for the perfect stop before or after the walk out to the real bridge.
The Shawnigan Lake Museum is a community history museum in Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia, in the Cowichan Valley Regional District. Housed in a 1950s former firehall that was expanded in 2025 from about 2,100 square feet to roughly 6,000, it covers the area’s railway, logging, and lakeside history, including a scale model of the Kinsol Trestle and a gallery devoted to Canadian painter E.J. Hughes. The museum is open Tuesday to Saturday and admission is by donation.
- Distance from Kinsol Trestle: about 11 minutes by car
- Time to allow: 45 minutes to an hour
- Cost: By donation
- Dogs: Service animals only
- Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, stroller friendly
- Phone: 250-743-8675
- Website: shawniganlakemuseum.com
- Best for: Families, anyone visiting the Kinsol Trestle who wants the backstory and rainy days
A solid stop for families, history buffs, and anyone pairing it with a Kinsol Trestle visit, and worth the short detour even if you’re just passing through the village.
The 1950s firehall behind the museum
The Shawnigan Lake Historical Society incorporated in 1977 with one purpose: open a museum. The Shawnigan Lake Museum opened soon after in a waterfront shed, moved a few times, and settled into its permanent home in 1983, a converted 1950 firehall in the village.
That firehall is itself a heritage building, listed on the Community Heritage Register in 2015 and the Canadian Register of Historic Places in 2020 for its original cinder block construction, hipped roof, and green, red, and cream colour scheme. The 2025 expansion connects a new wing to that original structure rather than replacing it, so the building a visitor walks into today is both the firehall and the addition.
Inside, the collection covers the area’s railway, logging, and lakeside history, including a scale model of the Kinsol Trestle, a gallery devoted to Canadian painter E.J. Hughes, and material on the E&N Railway.
Staff and volunteers often walk visitors through the collection personally rather than leaving them to read labels, which is why a quick stop often runs longer and becomes more interesting than planned.
We first visited before the expansion, on a rainy day when a change of plans at the Kinsol Trestle sent us into the village instead. Even our twelve-year-old daughter took a liking to the old phonograph and telephone displays, which says something about how the museum presents its collection.
Getting to the museum
The Shawnigan Lake Museum is at 1775 Shawnigan Lake-Mill Bay Road in Shawnigan Lake village, about 11 minutes by car from the Kinsol Trestle parking lot on Glen Eagles Road. It’s open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 3:30pm, and closed Sunday and Monday, worth knowing since Sunday is one of the busier days out at the trestle.
Parking is free in the museum’s own lot, on Shawnigan Lake-Mill Bay Road and Shawnigan Lake Road, and in the Community Centre lot when the museum lot fills up. The 2025 addition includes a sheltered entrance and two public washrooms accessible from Elsie Miles Park next door.
Plan your visit
- Walk the Kinsol Trestle the same day it’s about 11 minutes from the museum, and the scale model inside makes more sense once you’ve stood on the real bridge
- Compare places to stay in the Cowichan Valley Shawnigan Lake, Cobble Hill, and Duncan all sit within 25 minutes of the village
- Add a Cowichan Valley wine tour the wineries around Cobble Hill are a short drive from Shawnigan Lake, an easy pairing for the rest of the day
The E.J. Hughes Gallery
E.J. Hughes lived at Shawnigan Lake for more than twenty years before moving to Cobble Hill around 1970, and the museum’s expanded gallery includes a recreated version of his studio from that period.
Hughes went on to become one of Canada’s most valuable painters, and his work Entrance to Howe Sound sold at auction for $4.8 million in 2025, a record for a British Columbia artist, decades after he left the lake he painted so much of his career from.
The museum also runs a geocache project built around coordinates from Hughes’ paintings, so a visitor can walk out and stand where he stood to paint them, and sells more than 100 reproductions of his work in the gift shop.
What Shawnigan Lake looked like as a resort lake
Long before it was a stop on the way to the Kinsol Trestle, Shawnigan Lake was a resort destination in its own right. Around 1900, roughly twenty retired British army colonels who had served in China and India settled on the lake and built large estate houses with croquet lawns and tennis courts. The tourism that followed grew into hotels like the Shawnigan Beach Hotel, which by the mid 1900s could host 150 guests and ran its own lake tour boat.
The museum’s lake history displays cover this era in more depth than anything posted around the lake itself, including photographs and artifacts from the hotel years before the original buildings came down in the 1990s.
The new community room and entrance gallery
The 2025 addition includes a multi-purpose room with a kitchen, where the museum hosts its own community events, school programs, and workshops, plus an outdoor gathering space beside it. The new main entrance also gave the collection room it didn’t have before, with more display space near the door and a larger gift shop, so the first and last things a visitor sees are artifacts and local goods rather than a narrow hallway.
On our most recent visit, Executive Director Lori Treloar happened to be on hand and walked us through the updated building herself, pointing out details in the new spaces a self-guided visit would likely miss.
The E&N Railway and the “last spike” story
Material on the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway fills a corner of the museum, including an old station sign, a stack of period travel trunks.
The museum’s own account credits the E&N line with Canada’s true last spike, a claim distinct from the well known one at Craigellachie, and it’s worth asking a volunteer to walk you through the story since it’s told better in person than on a wall label.
More to Explore Nearby
