It's Never Just a Car

It started with an object—and a question

This digital exhibit extends For Us, It’s Never Just an Object, a Made By: Kawartha Lakes exhibition first presented at the Lindsay Exhibition in 2026.

At the fair, five objects opened five very different stories about the people who have made—and continue to make—Kawartha Lakes. Each painted panel offered only a few possible paths: names, places, skills, events and ideas connected by lines of curiosity. Visitors could stop with the object and its panel, or scan a QR code and follow the story further.

The Walter Redpath panel began with one remarkable object: a small gasoline automobile called the Redpath Messenger. The car itself was not at the fair; it is preserved by the Canadian Automotive Museum in Oshawa. The panel instead asked how an automobile connected to Berlin, Toronto and Oshawa also belongs within the history of Omemee and Kawartha Lakes.

Follow that question and the story expands quickly.

It takes us to a farm boy with mechanical ideas, an Omemee foundry, agricultural machinery and fire engines, patents and collaborators, carriage builders and investors—and into the uncertain beginnings of motoring in Ontario.

This digital exhibit follows those connections beyond what one panel, or one physical exhibition, could hold.

FOR US, IT’S NEVER JUST AN OBJECT.

An object is evidence. It carries the marks of the people who imagined it, made it, used it, valued it and chose to preserve it. When we ask the right questions, one object can open an entire world.

This is still a working history. Sources disagree, important details remain uncertain and new evidence may change what we understand. We point out those questions as we go and invite others to help us pursue them.

Begin with the car. See where it takes us.