He was only half joking. Apparently some of the people they take through the museum’s archives don’t even bat an eye as they cross the threshold. They go right on talking as if they have just strolled into a Walmart, and walk out barely noticing the significance of the collection.

Wondering how one could be anything less than floored I asked, “How’d we fare?”

“You guys looked pretty amazed.”

From the exterior, the 30,000-square-foot warehouse is nondescript. It used to serve as a factory for Outboard Marine, a motor manufacturer and part of Peterborough’s long boat building history. After the industry faltered in the ‘60s, the company eventually went under and the building and all the equipment inside were essentially left to collect dust.

“When we first moved in, all the boats were stored wrapped in plastic and sealed off to preserve them from exposure to the dust and decay of the rest of the building,” said John Summers, the museum’s General Manager. “It was quite a process to get it to where it is today.”

After the remaining forgotten factory equipment was removed, the local fire department came in and literally hosed the building’s interior down, floor to ceiling. A small army of volunteers made up mostly of university students on their summer holidays whitewashed the walls and resealed and painted the sprawling concrete floor.

Today, natural light washes in from the rooftop windows, bathing the hundreds of boats in soft sunlight. Ancient-looking dugouts line one outside wall on shelves rising up 20 feet. Racks loaded with some of the museum’s 500 curious paddles of all shapes, sizes, materials and ages sit near the warehouse’s entrance. Along another wall is a drop sheet, hung to create a makeshift photo studio for the cataloging of each piece in the collection. Twenty-foot wood-plank boats and fragile birchbark war canoes on dollies crowd aisles lined by rows of stands on wheels. Each stand holds nine canoes in various stages of repair and preservation, each canoe with its own manilla tag stating a name and item number.

Ward pointed out the Starkell’s Orellana of Paddle to the Amazon fame; then, a canoe carved by First Nations to commemorate the Hudson Bay Company’s 300th anniversary that required painstaking attention to detail in fabrication but had apparently never actually seen water.

Ward shared the history of the gold medal-winning K1 from the 2004 Olympics in Athens; a miniature decked Fijian outrigger outfitted with a crab claw sail; and the Père Lallement—a 22-foot cedar canvas Chestnut canoe that capsized almost 35 years ago on a school trip in Timiskaming, resulting in the death of 12 boys and their master.

Each of the dozen-or-so canoes I recognized had such incredible stories behind them. And there were hundreds more boats with stories I could only guess at.

“In each story is a lesson of cooperation between people,” explained the museum’s Executive Director, James Raffan. “They’re all about people’s relationship to place, and about remembering.”

Like an inquisitive child, I jumped around from boat to boat, asking about their origins, the most peculiar looking ones really catching my attention. There is a definite international flavor in the materials, shapes, designs and techniques used to build many of the boats.

“What I find very exciting as we look at canoes from California or from Samoa, from Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands or South America, is that only a certain portion of each canoe is functional,” explained Ward. “Of course it needs to perform, it needs to paddle, it needs to be maneuverable or strong-tracking, but so much of each boat is just the artistic, the cultural art form of the community it came from and it’s so distinct.”

“There are some strange looking watercraft in here,” he added, “but they all have a family resemblance. Each one has its own individual story but, as an aggregate, they all link together.”

He and his team use these links to create the imaginative exhibits in the museum’s main display area. “This is an idea factory,” Ward beamed.