Stirling 2026
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
My son and I made the trip into Hastings County this weekend for the Stirling car show and flea market. It wasn't a very long journey; just to Belleville Friday evening and then home by mid-afternoon. Every time I make these trips, I dump the images into a folder with the year, but I've been doing Stirling since before I owned a digital camera. I think I have pictures of the first year I attended, which I think was 2001. So this year is —more or less— a silver anniversary.
The car show is always fun to walk through. As time goes on, there are more memories from the 1970s and 80s, like Chevy square body pickups, or this AMC Gremlin X, a '73 model. The matching plates were originally issued out of Mount Dennis (northwest Toronto near Jane & Eglinton).
This '49 Ford pickup is something I may or may not have seen at a show before. In my YOM days, I provided YOM plates to more than one owner of a '49 Ford pickup, but these plates didn't come from me. This truck, and the Gremlin above, were the only two YOM-plated vehicles I saw in Stirling.
I'm pretty sure I've photographed this Model T before somewhere before. I took a new picture because the sign on the window says it's a 1926, which makes this car a century old. That's pretty amazing when you think about it. Almost as amazing as the just-realized fact that I've been attending Stirling for a quarter of that time.
This tree features only two authentic signs, both of which are fairly obvious due to their rust spots. There was never a King's Highway 13, so that's a gag sign. It's priced at 80, as is the repro number 2 shield. But then why is the repro number 4 shield priced at 250? It's not real. Microsoft's Arial typeface didn't exist when signs of this format were made. The triangular number 2 sign seems to avoid the pitfall of Microsoft fonts, but it has reflective sheeting that didn't exist in the 1920s. A chunk of that sheeting has ripped off to the left of the 2.
More fakes, although this is pretty obvious to even a novice collector. You'd think that if someone is building Macdonald tin replica from scratch, with silkscreening, wire frame and all, maybe they'd spend the extra hour spraying it with primer and letting it dry? No one wants their fake plates to lose their appeal, but the contemporary sheet metal is laid bare for all to see. My son asked me how I could tell it was fake (I forgive him; he's not so much into old stuff). Four words, in this neck of the woods: Antique Plates Ain't Shiny.
It's puzzling when someone decides to repaint a plate without knowing what colours to use. I can understand if someone uses the wrong shade of red, but this? It's baffling. Both of these are repaints for sale from the same vendor.
Okay, enough complaining about fakes. There really were some interesting things to see in Stirling. Here's a pair of secondary highway signs. Both are from Parry Sound District, and as such, both highways still exist, since districts never had their secondaries downloaded into county roads. Each has been made using different methods. 510 has aging reflective sheeting, silkscreened legends and logos, and stencilled numbers (look closely at the top and bottom of the zero; you can see where the gap in the stencil was painted by hand after spraying). 518 was painted with reflective paint, before having its silkscreening applied. Then the 518 was hand-painted, with the all the brush strokes still visible.
General on-field view of Stirling. It was mostly cloudy, but it didn't rain while we were there. The air was pretty chilly, except for a brief period when the sun punched it way through the clouds. My fingers went numb from flipping through so many cold plates.
There were pockets of the field that had lots of plates, and other pockets with zilch. At this stage in my collecting life, I've got most of the common stuff in my collection, and I'm no longer prospecting for the YOM market. Even more than that, I just liquidated my trade stock in Acton, so I wasn't looking for "good deals" to trade later. I didn't buy much. These are pretty good examples, but I left them be.
I ran into John Hayes in the arena, where a vendor had several crates of plates, but he had vanished and there was no one to pay. This pair of dual-purpose plates was $40. Not a bad price, but a bit too much to pay for flipsies. Both John and I considered buying these, but I'd be downgrading the near-mint one in my collection to gain a cool number, and I didn't have the appetite for that. John also decided not to buy them, but the vendor's MIA status made those easy decisions for us.
My one keeper from Acton: A 1959 public vehicle plate. I keep my pocket want list handy for moments like these. This vendor was one of the last that I would see, so it was nice to come away with something apart from exercise and fresh air.
That was it for Stirling this year. Maybe I'll find some old pictures and do a silver anniversary retrospective of my very first trips Stirling. It wasn't until 2005 that I first wrote about it here (which you can see in the 2Cents Vault).