This man has thousands of licence plates, but he's still short one

Albert MacDonald of Savage Harbour, P.E.I., has been collecting licence plates for 25 years, and probably has close to 20,000.

He's looking for one more.

MacDonald specializes in P.E.I. plates, and has plates dating back to 1913, five years before there was a provincial registry of motor vehicles. There were only 26 numbers issued in 1913, and people made their own.

In fact, he has a sample of every plate made on P.E.I., but his collection is still not complete.

"In 1944, the province did not issue a plate. There was only a sticker issued," said MacDonald.

"Only one sticker has ever been found."

An Ottawa couple has that only-known existing sticker. The space on MacDonald's wall for 1944 is held by a replica.

A birthday present to himself

MacDonald's collecting started when he came across a 1953 plate, his birth year, and he thought it would be fun to have. It came in a collection of about 40 plates, and he put them up on his barn wall. Then a friend donated more for the wall.

He had 30 or 40 years worth, but had a few gaps to fill in. Once he decided to fill those gaps there was no looking back.

MacDonald estimates he has between 1,000 and 1,500 P.E.I. plates, another 4,000 to 5,000 from other places, and between 10,000 and 15,000 bulk-purchase plates.

Dealing in history

P.E.I. has a proud place in the history of licence plates. Along with Idaho, it was the first place in North America to put a slogan on its plates in 1928.

By a strange quirk of fate, both slogans shared a theme.

• P.E.I.: "Seed potatoes and foxes"
• Idaho: "Idaho potatoes"

You can track a lot of what Islanders were thinking about themselves through licence plates, MacDonald said.

"They reflect a lot of the history of P.E.I.," he said.

"For example, the 1926 plate says P E Island, and if you look at a lot of artifacts in Prince Edward Island in the 1920s P E Island was very common."

MacDonald has set up a stall at the cruise ship port to sell plates to tourists. He also deals with large mail orders. He once sold 3,500 to the Boy Scouts of America, who were launching a project to build birdhouses using licence plates for the roofs.

He likes to think about the plates he has sold, decorating garage walls and birdhouses across the continent.

"Licence plates are sort of like a personal tourism event," said MacDonald.

"People see those plates, they see them up on garage walls, they see them on these birdhouses and I'm sure they think, 'Well, where's that? Where is that from? And what kind of a place is that?' I think actually the sale of licence plates promotes Prince Edward Island on a very effective, personal level."

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