Heritage plaques - good as new again

By Svenja Hansen

Dozens of people, places and events have been designated as nationally significant across northern Ontario. Parks Canada is responsible for looking after the bilingual burgundy and bronze plaques, from the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, used to mark these designations.

With more than three dozen heritage plaques scattered across thousands of kilometres, Parks Canada tries to refinish a handful each year. The factory finish on these plaques usually lasts 10 years or more. However, once the protective clear coat begins to wear, the paint fades and the bronze lettering starts to tarnish. That is when Parks Canada staff perform maintenance, travelling to the plaques and refurbishing them on site.

To wash, sand, paint and apply a fresh protective clear coat to a plaque requires a full day. Ideally, this work is done on a warm and dry day. However, we don’t always get lucky. For example, this summer we pressure washed the stand and plaque at Fort St. Joseph in the rain. We then set up a tent and dried the plaque, so we could paint it. Wet weather and the corresponding humidity result in slower drying times for paint and that the bronze begins to tarnish almost immediately.

Working with aerosol paints and lacquers requires we wear personal protective equipment, like filtered masks, eye protection, and gloves. Overall, the process is very low-tech. We wash and scrub the plaque to remove dirt and loose fragments, sand the lettering with fine grit paper, wash everything again, apply a thin layer of grease to the tops of the letters to keep paint from sticking to them, prime, paint, scrape and wipe the grease and paint off the tops of the letters, degrease everything, and finally apply several layers of clear lacquer to protect it from the elements.

It is always a pleasure to speak with visitors who stop to check out what we are doing, but most gratifying perhaps are the before and after images. Seeing a plaque look good as new, again – ready for more years of conveying their message to visitors.

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