I've been hanging around Edmonton over Christmas, and wouldn't you guess what kind of familiar blue enamel rectangle I stumbled across at the Rocky Mountain Antique Mall!!

As a quick refresher, this is a standard City of Regina house number plate issued before the Great Depression, a subject which you can read about at great length here and here.

Not so fast

Or IS it? While I have exhaustively documented historical number plates inside the historic core of Regina, and this object is a perfect match, I have not conclusively proven that this style was never used in other cities in Western Canada.

However, I do have proof that blue enamel plates are not found in the City of Edmonton (surprise: there's going to be another blog post coming about this). So it must have been imported from somewhere, and Regina is the most plausible source. For the rest of this post, we're just going to assume I'm right, but I'll feel really silly if I discover six months later that these plates were also used in Medicine Hat or Saskatoon.

Pricing and identification

Apparently enamel signs - a specialty of the Rocky Mountain Antique Mall, which is just a couple blocks downwind of the more popular Old Strathcona Antique Mall - are really expensive. I was shocked to see pretty much every recognizable original enamel advertisement in the mall marked up to at least $500, regardless of condition.

I picked this thing up for $34. That's still a little steep by my standards, but I admit that as THE person obsessed with this very specific subject, the game was rigged from the start. I am almost certain that the owner did NOT recognize it as a Regina house number plate and simply appraised it as a random enamel object. Please don't ask me how much I would have been willing to pay for it, I read a lot of Wikipedia articles about game theory and I'm not telling.

As the foremost expert in the field, I would call its quality very average. A bit of rust damage emanating out from the nail holes is almost universal on these items, and it hasn't suffered too much from any sloppy paint jobs over the years.

Here are a couple other random street signs that were available for sale, indicating that this mall is a bit of a clearinghouse for unidentified enamel signs with no recorded provenance.

For the record, I researched these two particular signs a little bit, and the only McEvoy Street in Canada seems to be in Fredericton... and not particularly near downtown, either. I suspect they might actually be Australian, as there ARE both a McEvoy Street and a South Avenue in the older part of Sydney. If we can even assume that these form a set. Not my problem! (But for $190, it could be your problem.)

In hand at last

Have I been very eager to just pick one of these things up and flip it over a few times to watch the light play off its surfaces? Yes, I really have. I used a bit of rubbing alcohol to remove the price tag.

Although this is an immensely satisfying find, I can't say that it's taught me very much new information about these plates. Their biggest structural weakness seem to be the nail holes, which punch straight through the protective enamel layer, leaving an unshielded iron surface for rust to develop on. Otherwise, the enamel has weathered very handsomely for being (most likely) more than a century old.

Where did it come from?

Unlike all my other number plate observations, this one is not in situ. But, uh, to state the obvious, it says "1855" on it, and that counts for a lot. The Regina address shapefile can be downloaded here, which makes it very easy to pull every 1855 address in our target area. There are only thirteen possibilities!

We're kind of grasping at straws here, but what the heck, let's do a quick investigation into what sits at all of these locations today:

There's no way to actually confirm where this plate came from, but there are three houses still standing (c. 2025) that are reasonable candidates!! I think this is super cool.

If you are one of these owners, and are interested in buying this original plate back: um, yes, I think a 1,000% markup would be very reasonable for all the effort put into this research project, please contact me asap...