Osgoode Township Museum (https://osgoodemuseum.ca/)

7814 Lawrence St. Vernon, ON, Free Admission

Tuesday – Saturday: 10:00 – 5:00 (Winter hours, closed on Tuesdays)

This was a nice, rural museum, the focus of which is rural life in Ontario from the days of the United Empire Loyalists to today-ish.  There are two parts to the museum, the indoor display of artefacts, which is a single room (displayed on the right) which has panels and descriptions of elements of bygone days in Osgoode Township.  The other section of the museum is an outdoor barn filled with the implements of daily life of the past.  I was the only person there, and I spent about a half hour looking at what was there for perusal. 

In the indoor part (nice on a cold November day when I visited), there were relics and artefacts of Osgoode Township, which demonstrate what life was like for farmers in a farming community, within a day’s drive of Ottawa as the market town.  The artefacts date back to 1827, when the first European settlers arrived, and extend until 2000, when Osgoode became a part of the amalgamated city of Ottawa.  What caught my interest were the pride in “local heroes”, who gained a fair bit of fame outside of Ontario, including singers and hockey players.  There was also a panel looking at the history of baseball in the community, pre-dating Major League Baseball and the professionalization of the sport. 

The outdoor part was a large barn filled with the kind of farming equipment that would be ubiquitous a century ago, but now you can only find in a museum.  I found this fun to look at for a couple of reasons.  The first is the complete lack of safety regulations on farm equipment in days past.  I looked at a harvesting machine called a reaper, and the Blue Oyster Cult song “Don’t Fear the Reaper” came to mind, and I thought, “No, fear THAT reaper!” 

There was a fair bit of equipment for trades, particularly blacksmithing and cobbling, but as an amateur chef, I enjoyed seeing just how much food preservation equipment there was.  Particularly for dairy, as the area was important for fruit and vegetables, but especially for dairy cattle.  As Monty Python once said while reinterpreting The Beatitudes, “Blessed are the cheesemakers”.  This was of course meant to be interpreted metaphorically, applying to all dairy product development. 

The museum is worth a stop if passing through Vernon, Ontario.