The Gopher Hole Museum — Where Taxidermy Meets Small-Town Pride
Weird Museums Week wraps up in Torrington, Alberta, population 239 — and roughly 82 stuffed ground squirrels.
A Town at a Crossroads
A hundred miles northeast of Calgary sits Torrington, Alberta — a rural farming community so small that its entire population could fill a modest wedding venue. By the mid-1990s, the town was in trouble. Railway lines had been decommissioned, grain elevators had shuttered, and Torrington was quietly fading off the map the way so many small prairie towns do.
Determined to reverse course, village leaders applied for a one-time $9,000 grant from the Government of Alberta to fund a tourist attraction — something, anything, that might bring visitors and keep the local economy breathing. They held three brainstorming sessions. At the last one, with ideas running dry, a woman made a joke. Given that the area was overrun with Richardson’s ground squirrels — locally called gophers — she suggested they stuff a few and put them on display.
The room laughed. Then someone said: wait.
Meet the Residents
The Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, also billed as the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, opened in 1996 and now houses 82 taxidermized Richardson’s ground squirrels arranged across 48 intricately designed dioramas. Each one depicts a scene from Torrington’s history and community life, with the gophers dressed, posed, and propped as human townspeople.
There’s a rodent hair salon. An Old Tyme Music Jamboree. A gopher hard at work at the Torrington Fertilizer Plant. Others are shown hunting, fishing, preaching sermons, and keeping the peace as uniformed police officers. Every display is meant to capture something real about Torrington — its culture, its history, its humor. But the scenes are universal enough that anyone who grew up in small-town Alberta would recognize them: the legion dance, the local market, the old-time jamboree, the First Nations heritage woven into the land.
The collection also includes some biological curiosities — black ground squirrels, albino ground squirrels, and the thirteen-lined ground squirrel, a rarer species that makes its home in southern Alberta.
A Word About the Gopher
Richardson’s ground squirrels aren’t actually gophers — they’re more closely related to prairie dogs. They’re found across the northern United States (North Dakota, Montana) and throughout western Canada, where they’ve long been considered agricultural pests for their enthusiasm in eating crop species. In recent years they’ve also found a surprising second life in the exotic pet trade.
In Torrington, they were simply everywhere — which is precisely what gave the museum its raw material.
The Museum Itself
The facility is built across two small structures: a one-room rural schoolhouse and a former grain elevator office. Specimens were donated by local farmers, hunters, and veterinarians. Five residents taught themselves taxidermy. Volunteers sewed miniature clothing, sourced or hand-crafted tiny props, and designed the diorama sets. The entire operation — tours, maintenance, exhibit development — is run by volunteers to this day.
It’s a genuinely grassroots institution, built by a community for a community, funded initially by a single $9,000 grant and sustained ever since by ingenuity and local pride.
The Controversy Nobody Expected
Word got out fast. A small filler segment on a Calgary news station lit the fuse, and suddenly this tiny prairie museum was attracting international attention — not all of it welcome. Before the doors even opened, the museum had received a bomb threat and drawn organized protesters. PETA objected. Members of the Kennedy family weighed in. For a brief, surreal moment, Torrington, Alberta was a flashpoint in a national conversation about taxidermy, animal rights, and rural tourism.
The museum opened anyway. Over 10,000 people visited that first year.
Today, it draws between 7,000 and 10,000 visitors annually — a remarkable number for a volunteer-run attraction in a village of 239 people.
All In
Torrington didn’t stop at the museum. The village has leaned into its gopher identity completely. A 12-foot outdoor sculpture named Clem T. GoFur stands watch over the town. All 11 of Torrington’s fire hydrants have been painted to look like gophers.
It’s the kind of committed, self-aware small-town quirkiness that’s impossible not to love — a community that took a throwaway joke, a modest grant, and an overpopulation problem, and turned it into something genuinely one-of-a-kind.
That’s a wrap on Weird Museums Week. From the haunted to the hilarious, from the obsessive to the outright bizarre, these places remind us that the best museums aren’t always the biggest ones — sometimes they’re the ones that a town built with nine thousand dollars and a very good sense of humor.