What? They're in Moose Jaw too??!

Here are the M.J. basics: this small city is just 45 minutes from Regina, the provincial capital. The two communities used to have a fearsome rivalry, but the matter is essentially settled today, as Regina is 7 times larger and enjoys the international airport, the Costco, the symphony orchestra, and so on. This means that the city was heavily built up in the booming 1920s (we're not going to let losing the Provincial Legislature stop us!!) and has seen very little downtown redevelopment since then, creating a lovely historical main street nearly unparalleled in Canada.

So yes, there are old house number plates in Moose Jaw. As of this writing, I've documented 55 of them.

With most of the city's core being built out before the Depression, Moose Jaw has been one of the most fruitful places for house number hunting yet, beaten only by (don't tell them!!) the Heritage area of Regina.

Notice some cities on this list that haven't gotten a blog post yet? Consider sending me a nice email to encourage me to keep writing up the results of my field expeditions...

Physical manufacture

Let's get a closer look at one of these Moose Jaw plates. As with Regina, we are looking at a typical turn-of-the-last-century enamel sign, with a blue porcelain shell deposited around a steel substrate.

I promise I won't read a rivalry with Regina into every aspect of this blog post, but when we look at a typical Regina house number plate, the similarities are unmistakable:

...as are the minor differences. After some additional fieldwork (realizing I forgot to pack a ruler and taking multiple idiotic photos of my hand holding my pocketknife up to a random person's house), here are the typical attributes of the signs in both cities.

Moose Jaw plates are smaller, more square, and the numerals are a little more aesthetically pleasing, with a scalloped serif cut out of every "1". Moose Jaw also makes use of a technical innovation not found anywhere in Regina: the grommet.

The porcelain surface of these enamel signs is impressively weather-resistant, but they're extremely vulnerable to punctures, which expose the metal substrate underneath. Nail holes are a major vulnerability of Regina's house number signs, almost all of which can be seen with significant corrosion damage after a century of being exposed to the elements (although I didn't see any whose structural integrity seems to be yet at risk).

Conversely, in forward-thinking Moose Jaw, every sign typically comes with four protective metal rings. Smart move! The average house number plate in Moose Jaw is in much better condition than in Regina. This might be another reason why they survive in such large numbers here.

A mystery object

Although Moose Jaw's house number plates are very self-consistent in their size, style, and typography, I managed to find one truly weird object in situ on Stadacona Street.

This is the spitting image of an old Edmonton house number plate, but it's so badly degraded that whatever it once contained is completely illegible. I think I see an upper line of hand-lettered text, but none of the letterforms match the name of the street.

We know that Edmonton foil-and-glass signs were available on the private market, and that they were used for more than just house numbers (I've previously photographed one that said "NO AGENTS"). I speculate that this thing might have once displayed a family name, but it's also possible that the four sort-of-visible A's and R's here are just the remnant of some decorative pattern.

Conclusion

Given the ubiquity of these blue plates in the historical core of Moose Jaw, and the relative absence of other types of old house number signs, I am comfortable concluding that Moose Jaw is yet another Canadian city where the municipal government was originally involved in the distribution of a standard house number plate. Without further information, these plates were most likely handed out in the prosperous 1920s.

Sadly, I haven't been able to find any Moose Jaw tax roll information online, so without another research trip to the city, it's difficult to do any further analytical work. With the relatively good physical condition of these number plates, it's hard to guess when they might have stopped being issued by the city.

The close proximity of Regina and Moose Jaw makes a useful case study: not a single Regina-style enamel sign can be spotted in Moose Jaw, and not a single Moose Jaw-style enamel sign can be spotted in Regina. If these nearby rivals issued two similar-but-different styles of house number sign, it is very likely that both cities had their own local sign shops. This indicates that enamel sign manufacturing was not extremely specialized technology, and a large number of specialty sign shops are likely to have existed in pre-Depression Canada - each, no doubt, with their own aesthetic preferences and typographical quirks.