One of our local museums is inside what was once the power house for our city. I pass the Soo Line Historical Museum on many of my walks, as it’s en route to one of my favourite trails.

The museum houses many interesting, quirky, and atypical displays, not the least of which is a silver collection that takes up an entire large room.

The Charles Wilson Collection of silver, brass, and crystal pieces, consists of more than 5,000 items (3,333 of which are silver pieces ranging from swords to presentation-ware to jewelry to grape scissors) dating from 1750 to 1972. It’s apparently the largest accumulation of silver pieces in the world collected by a single person.

The museum staff have a set rotation of silver polishing in order to keep every piece shining at all times. You won’t ever find a trace of tarnish here.

In order to get a photo of the entire building at a close range, I shot the original photo in ultra wide mode on my iPhone. As a result, the smoke stack appeared to be leaning quite severely (almost a fisheye effect). A few tweaks with the perspective crop tools in the native photos app, and the stack was standing as perfectly straight as it has been since the power house was built in 1909.

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

Walter Benjamin