St. Mary’s General Hospital has been around for nearly a century – and artifacts from each era of that history were on display inside the hospital on Saturday.

The open house was organized by Jenna Lemay, a master’s student at the hospital on a co-op placement.

She had been asked to organize the hospital’s archives, and quickly learned that it wasn’t a task she could do herself.

“There is a lot of information that is missing for the artifacts that we have, so my job is to find out that information,” she said.

Thus came the idea for the open house. If former employees and patients were given a chance to see some of the items, the hope was, maybe they would be able to help identify them.

The collection includes photographs from the 1970s to the present, as well as a variety of equipment and items from the first half of the 20th century. The oldest piece in the archives is a microscope believed to date back to 1880.

Much of it had been donated by nursing graduates and other people who worked at the hospital, while some of the medical equipment went straight to the archives after it was no longer usable.