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Brandon history in postcards.

Article Excerpt
I have always had a great interest in the history of Brandon. So it was only natural that I would collect historical postcards, many showing buildings, events and people which no longer exist. Initially, I found the cards at local antique sales and flea markets. More recently, my membership in the Toronto Postcard Club has allowed me to obtain Brandon postcards from across Canada. My collection now numbers over 600 cards, and I suspect that many more hundreds exist for me to find. To remember whether I have a postcard when digging through boxes at sales, I developed a catalog of my cards. In the process, I noticed some common themes. These include scenes on Tenth Street and Rosser Avenue (historically, Brandon's main roads), the railway and its station along Pacific Avenue, and views of Brandon hotels, schools, and public buildings. A few of the cards from my collection are shown on the following pages.

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First Spike

Discussions by the Brandon city council took place for a number of years before the city began building the roadbed for a street car system. The biggest controversy was whether the system should be publicly owned or built and operated by private enterprise. This issue was hotly debated and voted on by the citizens of Brandon. It was eventually decided to be privately owned when, at the last minute, councillors changed their minds and made it municipally owned. Construction workers began building the roadbed and laying the street car tracks throughout the city about 1910. Although work on the street car tracks had been underway for some time, this postcard shows Mayor...

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