Bishop Machine Shop Museum

Step inside a turn-of-the-20th-century, belt-driven machine shop and experience a remarkable piece of Summerside’s industrial past. Bishop Machine Shop tells the story of the Bishop family—Island entrepreneurs who evolved from blacksmiths into skilled machinists, providing essential services to PEI’s farming, fishing, and local industries.

This beautifully preserved, old-fashioned workshop is filled with an extraordinary collection of lathes, machining tools, and ingenious gadgets, offering endless fascination for machinists, makers, and curious visitors of all ages. The building and its contents stand as a rare, tangible reminder of early industrial Summerside and the service-based economy that helped shape the community.

Now located at 71 Spring Street, the shop is the last remaining trace of a once-bustling foundry complex that stretched between Autumn and King Streets. When Ralph Bishop, the fourth generation of Bishop metalworkers, closed the doors in the mid-1980s, the shop remained much as it had for decades—almost frozen in time.

Thanks to the careful stewardship of the City of Summerside, Bishop Machine Shop continues to offer visitors a genuine step back in time, celebrating the ingenuity, craftsmanship, and community connections of PEI’s early industrial pioneers.