“‘Muskoka’ came from an Indigenous chief's name,” explains Wendy Fairburn, general manager at the Muskoka Steamships & Discovery Centre, referring to Mesqua Ukee, a 19th-century Chippawa Tribe Chief. The museum’s exhibitions trace the evolution of Muskoka and its more than 1,600 lakes from its role as a destination for hunters and gatherers to its industrial days, when logging and shipbuilding dominated the region from the 1850s to the 1920s, to the present.