Weyburn's Soo Line Historical Museum may be closed for winter, but maintenance of the Charles Wilson silver collection warrants two part-time staff whose job is to polish it all.

“We have 3,333 pieces of silver,” said Museum Attendant Tanya Musk. “From what we know it was the largest private silver collection in the world because it was all collected by one man, it was all collected by Charles Wilson and it was donated to us when he died in the early 90s.”

While Moose Jaw is busy fighting a war against Storevdahl, Norway over the size of their respective moose statues, Weyburn is proving some Canadians don't care as much about size, at least when it comes to having the world's largest silver collection.

“I found out recently actually that we didn't' keep all of the silver,” Musk revealed. “It was actually a much larger collection and we just did not and still do not have room for it.”

What they did have still involved a great deal of work to arrange.

“The museum board at the time put it all together, put it in display cases. They did a very good job considering how much they had to work with,” she said.

The museum attracts tourists from all over Canada.

“The silver is a huge part of the tourist attraction for here, mostly because it is the largest silver collection,” she said. “We have people who work with antiquities in Regina who come down to see it, we have people who've come from BC, we've had people who've come from Nova Scotia... so many different places.”

Musk said the lifelong bachelor, Shriner, and Freemason, Charles Wilson simply loved collecting silver.

“When his parents died, he inherited it and he didn't get married and he didn't have kids, so he just collected silver. He kept it in various rooms of his house. He had a couple of buildings built for it, they were in crates. It was well-organized but it was on every available surface,” she said.

Wilson grew his collection from all over the world, including Germany and his homeland of England.

“He traveled a bit to look for it,” said Musk. “He also had people in different countries who would keep an eye out for silver for him. They would contact him when they found something and he had people who went to silver sales and antiquing and different auctions.”

With a collection so substantial, the pieces get weird, some having practical uses, but others being simply ornamental.

Weyburn just might also be home of the world's weirdest silver collection.

“Some of them are very useful and some of them I'm standing there going, 'grape scissors are weird!’,” exclaimed Musk. “You would have a bushel of grapes in the centre and they are specifically used to cut smaller bushels off of the larger bushel and put them on your plate so that you can eat them.”

The silver ranges from plated, electro-plated, sterling silver and solid silver, depending on the piece.

Charles Wilson was also the original owner of the taxidermied eight-legged calf, which also resides permanently in the Soo Line Historical Museum.

A silver sword sits nonchalantly amid the more than 3000 pieces of silver in the Soo Line Historical Museum (photo by Marna McManus).

Silver time pieces are displayed in a case on the wall in the Charles Wilson silver collection room at the Soo Line Historical Museum (photo by Marna McManus).

Grape scissors are just one of the weirder items in the collection (photo by Marna McManus).

A view from the mezzanine stairs in the silver collection room at the Soo Line Historical Museum in Weyburn (photo by Marna McManus).