The museum's origins trace to 1974, when Nova Scotia began studying ways to preserve its industrial heritage before the last generation that remembered it was gone. A curator was hired in 1986, and the collection began to grow. Halifax architects Fowler, Bauld and Mitchell designed the building, which was completed in 1990 on a site beside the Trans-Canada Highway in Stellarton. The museum opened to the public in 1995. The location was chosen with purpose: Pictou County was the cradle of Nova Scotia's coal industry, and the land around the museum holds the physical evidence. The Foord Pit's shaft entries, the Albion Railway bed, and the surrounding industrial landscape are not exhibits under glass but part of the ground visitors walk on.

The collection numbers more than 37,000 objects, spanning the full arc of Nova Scotia's working life from hand tools to heavy machinery. The Samson locomotive anchors the railway gallery, a reminder that Pictou County had trains before most of the country had roads. Alongside it sits the Victorian, a horseless carriage that was the first gasoline-powered automobile built in the Maritime provinces. The museum's interactive galleries trace the evolution of industry and work across the province, from shipbuilding and fishing to forestry and manufacturing. These are not stories of distant corporate boardrooms. They are stories of callused hands, twelve-hour shifts, and communities built around whatever resource the land or sea provided.

Among the museum's exhibits, one carries a particular gravity. A display dedicated to the Westray Mine disaster tells the story of the coal mine explosion on May 9, 1992, that killed twenty-six miners in nearby Plymouth. The Westray mine had been open for only eight months. Safety warnings had been ignored, a whistleblower had been fired, and the coal dust that workers complained about became the fuel for a methane explosion at 5:18 in the morning. The museum sits close enough to the former mine site that the disaster is not abstract history here; it is local memory. Visitors who grew up in Pictou County may recognize names on the memorial. The exhibit does not shy from the failures of oversight and management that the subsequent public inquiry laid bare.

What makes Stellarton's museum unusual is not just what it contains but where it stands. Most industrial museums are built in converted factories or repurposed warehouses. This one was purpose-built on an active archaeological landscape. The Foord Pit, the Albion Railway, and the surrounding coal infrastructure form a palimpsest of two centuries of industrial ambition and its consequences. Pictou County paid a high price for its coal wealth, from the Drummond Mine explosion of 1873 through the Westray disaster more than a century later. The museum holds that entire story, the ingenuity and the suffering, the locomotives and the body counts, within a single site that refuses to separate the pride of industry from the cost of extracting it.