PORT HAWKESBURY – A building that began its life as a dairy facility and served as everything from a performing arts centre to a chocolate factory is now preparing for a new era as a marine training facility.

The Town of Port Hawkesbury, the Cape Breton Partnership and the Nautical Institute of the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) joined forces this spring to refurbish a Port Hawkesbury waterfront property known for decades as the Creamery Building. The upgrades will see the property rebranded as the Strait Area Innovations Centre and focus on ocean-based training, with the NSCC having a significant presence in the building upon its completion.

The construction project will see the town contribute $5,000 towards an overall price tag of $65,000 dollars for the project, with other funds coming from the Cape Breton Partnership, NSCC, and federal and provincial governments via the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA).

Originally designed as a formal creamery when the facility opened a century ago, the waterfront building took on several purposes later in life, serving for years as a Co-op Building Supplies store prior to its redesign as a performing arts and community centre in 1994. Containing a seating capacity of 300, the Creamery Building hosted a wide variety of events – most notably, the then-new Tuesday Night Ceilidh series and a songwriter-oriented weekly show called “Songs On The Waterfront” – until 2006.

At that time, the federal, provincial and municipal governments awarded the building to Isle Madame Confectioners, a company based in nearby Arichat that required a new building to manufacture and package the popular chocolates that the company had previously developed and distributed from its original Richmond County home for the previous two years.

Following the bankruptcy and receivership of Isle Madame Confectioners in 2009, town officials set about restoring the Creamery Building to its previous status as an entertainment complex, using funds that had been previously awarded to the town by the province and Ottawa via ACOA to construct a similarly-themed community centre bearing the title Ship Harbour Place.

However, once the town exhausted those funds in 2010, then-Mayor Billy Joe MacLean and other town officials chose to hold off on applying for new funds to finish the project. Town council also simultaneously ended its association with the ad-hoc Strait Area Waterfront Commission, which had overseen the Creamery Building’s operations for the previous two decades.

While town officials investigated the possibility of turning the Creamery Building into a health-care facility that would also house Port Hawkesbury’s three family doctors, none of these discussions came to fruition. However, current Mayor Brenda Chisholm-Beaton is optimistic that the recasting of the facility as an ocean training centre will bear fruit in the short and long term, particularly with the globally-recognized reputation of the NSCC Nautical Institute as a world leader in marine instruction.