Downtown Brandon’s painted memories

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/10/2021 (1486 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Aly Wowchuk takes people on tours of downtown Brandon, she gives them a simple piece of advice: look up.

That’s because the administrator of the Brandon General Museum & Archives knows that above many of the modern facades of the buildings that line the city’s core lie very tangible pieces of the Wheat City’s history.

In some cases, a cornerstone or engraving might indicate when a building was finished or commissioned or who commissioned a building in the first place.

Take the McDonald block at 841 Rosser Ave., for instance. A stone block on the upper storey of the building lists the name John A. McDonald and the year it opened.

Wowchuk says people frequently believe the building is named after Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, but the lack of an extra “a” indicates that it was actually named after a local clothier.

Those tidbits are interesting, and there are far more detailed remnants of Brandon’s past located on the sides of buildings scattered throughout downtown.

These days, billboards and digital signs with easily replaceable and vibrant details are commonplace in the realm of advertising, but those technologies haven’t always existed.

To grab potential customers’ attention, businesses used to paint advertisements in the form of murals on the sides of buildings.

The most notable example of this is likely the mural that takes up the entire southern side of a building on the 100 block of 10th Street. When the historic Strand theatre was demolished in 2018, after efforts to preserve it failed, the mural on the adjacent building was once again revealed to the world in better shape than most after being protected from the elements for decades.

The top portion of the mural advertises the Ione Cigar Factory, which operated in that building from 1907 to 1915.

During a tour of the remaining downtown advertising murals, Wowchuk told the Sun that the factory was actually more commonly known as Dillon’s Cigar Factory after the owner. The “Ione Cigar” was actually one of Dillon’s premium products.

The larger portion of the same mural is for Christie’s Biscuits, with a green background and white lettering that makes it stand out. Not to be confused with longtime Brandon business Christie’s Office Plus or the British auction house named Christie’s, the company was one of Canada’s largest cookie manufacturers and despite a takeover by a larger conglomerate, the name continues to appear on many varieties still sold in stores.

Another downtown building has some of the more well-preserved examples of vintage ads left in Brandon.

It’s now known as the Bass Building but originally called the Campbell Building after partners Archibald and Robert Campbell operated their combination furniture and undertaking business there for decades after construction in 1905.

“As far as I can find, there’s no relation there,” Wowchuk said of the original namesakes. “They also ended up with partners Fergus Wright and George Ferguson. Ferguson operated as an undertaker, so there were funeral, furniture and undertaking services, and that was actually incredibly common back in the day. Even Brockie Donovan Funeral Home had a furniture store at one point. Undertaking and furniture companies went hand in hand for a long time.”

Forty years later, George Bass bought the building, and his name is still used to refer to it. However, remnants of both businesses still linger.

On the south side of the building, there remain the faint traces of a Campbell & Campbell ad that has been partially painted over by an ad for the United Grill, which Bass owned.

Going around to the north side, a better preserved Campbell & Campbell sign is vertically aligned on the part of the building closest to both the roof and 10th Street. Below it is a horizontally aligned ad for B&B Agencies, an insurance and real estate company that opened in the 1950s named after Nick Bass and Oswald Bicknell.

Though B&B Agencies no longer exists, the advertisement’s reference to being an Autopac dealer still lends it a small degree of relevancy to modern life decades later.

Wowchuk pointed out another part of history for the building that isn’t reflected in the paintings that adorn it. Campbell & Campbell closed up shop in 1935, and before Bass took it over, it was used as a troop barracks during the Second World War.

Behind the Alexander Block on 10th Street, there is a lingering remnant of a former occupant that has lasted at the location for far longer than the business was a tenant.

Where the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba and Western Manitoba Public Library are currently located at the corner of Seventh Street and Rosser Avenue used to be what was once Brandon’s largest commercial block, known as the Syndicate Block.

Businessmen Doig, Rankin and Robertson had everything from groceries to furniture to clothes under one roof, but disaster struck in 1916 when a fire ravaged the building and claimed the lives of four employees.

To keep the businesses going during the rebuilding process, the men temporarily relocated to the Alexander Block for about a year.

From the alley between 10th and 11th streets, you can still see a large painted sign for Doig, Rankin and Robertson Ltd. on the south side of the building, spanning the entire length of the structure.

Windows installed in the intervening years have since removed the lower half of the ad that should read “dry goods and ladies wear,” but 105 years later the sign is perfectly legible, albeit a bit faded, and has endured far longer than the proprietors who briefly occupied the building.

They aren’t quite murals, but there are some painted remnants on the building that houses The Dock on Princess hinting at what used to occupy the space.

Looking at the front of the building on Princess Avenue, there are three signs reading “McCreary,” “Whippets” and “Trucks,” respectively.

McCreary Automotive was one of Brandon’s first big vehicle dealerships. Whippets are a breed of hound dog out of England known for their speed and hunting ability.

According to Wowchuk, the whippets advertised on the building were a brand of small cars and trucks named after the breed by Willys, the company that created the Jeep in the Second World War.

On the side of the building along 12th Street, faint paint marks spell out “Gillis and Warren,” who bought out McCreary and operated the business into the 1960s. Since then, it has been used as a meeting space for the Knights of Columbus, a beauty salon, a boxing gym, a church outreach centre and four separate restaurants.

At 640 Rosser Ave., currently the home of Reactive Massage Therapy, the building was originally known as the Crawford Block after Edward Crawford, who commissioned its construction. It was built in 1908, but burned down in 1916, then was rebuilt with an additional storey.

In the early 1940s, pharmacist Patrick Kennedy bought the building and opened a drug store and music store and it was renamed after that. The paint has faded horribly, but you can still make out some details relating to the music store like “sheet music” and at the bottom, “Kennedy Block.”

Between Ninth and 10th streets on the south side of Rosser Avenue remain some of downtown Brandon’s best-preserved historical business buildings.

The Laplont Block along that stretch of road not only has a weathered but excellent example of a surviving original storefront, but the stonework that makes up the front step and foundation is also original. It is clearly worn down from decades of use, showing the impact made by generations of Brandonites.

One of the buildings on that block features the faded marks of a sign for Bertrand’s, which was a candy and confectionery business that also sold tobacco in another part of the building.

“They actually made the candy and cigarettes on site,” Wowchuk said. “They served the greater Westman community and did deliveries.”

Nearby at 717 Rosser Ave., you can see the remains of a sign for Eve’s Gift, which operated from the 1940s to the 1970s.

On a side of the McKenzie Seeds building visible from the alley behind it, a sign reads “A.E. McKenzie Co. Limited, Garden, Field, Grass and Clover Seeds.”

While the discovery of the mural on the former cigar factory was a delight for history buffs, Wowchuk said it was unfortunate that it came at the cost of losing an irreplaceable heritage building.

“You never want to hope that anything else gets demolished downtown because we’ve had so many heritage buildings lost just over the past couple of years,” she said. “It was definitely a curious discovery.”

Trying to restore the paintings would also prove to be a dilemma.

“When you receive a piece and it’s in poor condition, then you ask the question: do you want to restore it to its natural state or preserve it as its current state?” Wowchuk said about museums finding and receiving artifacts. “Because that tells just as much history about the item. You have to assess and see what is better for this particular object. When it comes to these murals, I’d say it would have to be an opinion of the city. I would love to see a lot of them maybe just sealed, something to preserve it somehow.”

As the architectural landscape of downtown Brandon continues to evolve, who knows if more examples of vintage painted advertisements might be lurking just out of sight. Taking a walk downtown and looking carefully may reveal some of the paintings not covered in this article.

Special thanks to the Brandon General Museum & Archives and Aly Wowchuk for providing photographs and historical information for this piece.

Much of the information learned in the piece is brought up during the museum’s walking tours of downtown, which have covered various topics like the city’s early history, historical scandals and a cheery session titled “Death, Disasters and Disease.”

While the final tours of the season have been fully booked, Wowchuk said it seems that they will become a regular feature for the museum and will likely return next summer or fall.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark