Bronze plaques are history in age of metal theft
Traditional heritage plaques are being stolen from parks, civic buildings and even some homes
Traditional bronze heritage plaques are fast becoming history in Hamilton thanks to the city’s infamous metal thieves.
Over the last year and a half, brazen bronze burglars have absconded with nine decades-old plaques of varying sizes.
They’ve ripped them off of brick cairns in the east end — most recently at the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology. They’ve yanked them out of old rock fences on the Mountain, including at Matt Broman Park. They’ve even pried them off the walls of people’s homes in the lower city.
Such thefts have been happening for years, but “it does seem to be happening with more frequency now,” said Chris Redford, a heritage presentation co-ordinator with the city who is working on replacements for
several plaques pilfered this year.
“It’s quite sad, considering the fraction of pennies on the dollar (thieves) will get for it ... It is certainly changing how we go about recognizing these historic sites and buildings.”
Bronze plaques aren’t actually worth much as scrap — even pure copper is worth less than $3 a pound right now — and reputable dealers are not going to buy a hunk of cast-metal featuring the City of Hamilton logo. But replacement and repair costs for the city can be in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
That’s why the city is choosing “smarter” locations for new or replacement plaques, ideally close to busy roads or walkways, and manufacturing them with “less attractive” metals — or better still, no metal at all.
There are 3,200-plus municipal historic plaques and signs across amalgamated Hamilton, said Redford, including hundreds of small ovals on individual homes. The oldest are often cast-bronze.
The city won’t identify the locations of plaques stolen from actual homes, citing privacy. (There is also an ongoing effort to inventory the oldest locations.)
But if your old oval goes missing today, the city won’t replace it with bronze.
Instead, the city is using a cheaper aluminum alloy “crafted to look like the original.” But even that plan has its challenges, Redford admitted. “The problem we face is if we make them look just like the originals, will they just be stolen anyway?”
Last year, at the Museum of Steam and Technology, thieves managed to pry off a large bronze plaque from a brick cairn erected in 1999 by the Case Canada Corporation to honour nearly a century of manufacturing in Hamilton.
They also took off with about
three metres of copper downspout from the historic water treatment plant-turned-museum, said chagrined curatorial assistant Michael McAllister.
The city will pay a mason this spring to countersink a lookalike replacement into the cairn and secure it with industrial cement. That will add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to the overall cost of the replacement — but hopefully dissuade future thieves.
“You always hope people will respect the history and people we’re trying to commemorate, but obviously that doesn’t always happen,” McAllister said.
When possible, the city is trying to avoid metal altogether.
A stolen plaque recognizing Archie Hodge, captain of the research ship that rediscovered the 1812 wrecks Hamilton and Scourge, will be replaced later this year in Confederation Park with high-density polyvinyl.
“It doesn’t look like the old plaques, but it actually lets us tell more of the story,” said Redford, who noted the larger information boards allows for old photos and more description of the commemorated history.
“And ideally, no one is going to want to take it and sell it.”
Plaques aren’t the only historical victims of metal snatchers, of course. Copper roof tiles, downspouts and even lightning rod cables have been filched from civic buildings, including the steam and technology museum, Whitehern Historic House and an old pavilion in Sam Lawrence park.
Locally, copper thieves in recent years have infamously reeled in kilometres of electrical wires at a time from Eastport Drive street lights, disassembled parts of the pedestrian bridge over the QEW and even dug up cables used to monitor landfill pollution.