Harry Piers, (1870–1940) was a long-serving and influential historian and curator at the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Piers was born on February 12, 1870 in Halifax.
In 1893 he edited Mary Jane Katzmann's Akins Prize-winning History of the Townships of Dartmouth, Preston and Lawrencetown, Halifax County, N.S. posthumously for publication.[1]
He became the second curator of the Nova Scotia Museum in 1899 when he succeeded David Honeyman. Piers also served as librarian of the Provincial Science Library from 1900 and as Deputy Keeper of Public Records of Nova Scotia from 1899 until 1931, when the Public Archives of Nova Scotia opened. He died on January 24, 1940 and is buried in Halifax at Camp Hill Cemetery. He was succeeded as curator of Nova Scotia Museum by Donald Crowdis.
Piers worked with precision and diligence for many years as virtually a one-man-museum for Nova Scotia. His obituary in the Halifax Chronicle Herald noted, “Many called him a 'human book of knowledge'. His tall stately figure was familiar in the community life of Halifax and he played a prominent role in numerous activities in the City and Province.".[2] Piers' museum work was multi-disciplinary, collecting artifacts and specimens for human and natural history. His collection documentation set high standards of research and description that were ahead of their time and stand out today as instructive examples of museum work. A Parks Canada historian in recent times lauded him as a “renaissance man of this province's cultural history. It matters not where the modern researcher penetrates-- history, archaeology, material culture, geology, botany-- it is almost certain that you will find his footprint of decades ago. At a time when nobody else cared, he and his museum did, and between them they preserved and recorded much that would otherwise have vanished utterly."[3]
A portrait of Piers hangs at the Nova Scotia Museum where a meeting room is also named in his honour.