A graduate-history assignment in 1999 somehow turned into more than 5,000 license-plate images and about 250 pages of British Columbia transportation history.
Christopher Garrish tells the origin story himself.
While taking a Canadian-history course at the University of Saskatchewan in 1999, students were assigned to build a web page related to their thesis work. Garrish liked the exercise, but quickly realized his growing license-plate collection would make a more interesting website.
On November 20, 1999, he started building the pages that eventually became BCpl8s.ca.
For its first two years the project lived on Angelfire. In late 2001 his brother registered the BCpl8s.ca domain as a Christmas gift, and the site moved to a Netfirms account so it could escape the advertising that came with free hosting.
The domain went live in January 2002.
The basic design has barely changed since.
A collector site became a historical archive
BCpl8s.ca covers passenger plates, motorcycles, commercial trucks, dealers, farms, government vehicles, veterans, ham radio operators, national parks, temporary permits, prototypes, Expo 86, Olympic plates, consular plates, chauffeur badges, driver’s licences and plenty of categories normal people did not know existed.
The site says it now contains more than 5,000 images and roughly 250 pages.
More important than the count is where the information came from.
Garrish describes spending years pulling material from microfilm, newspapers, the BC Archives and Motor Vehicle Branch files. Collectors contributed photographs, stories and access to private collections. Former Motor Vehicle Branch staff provided institutional knowledge that was never going to appear on the back of a plate.
The site’s history page is also a small lesson in old-Web production problems.
Early license plates were scanned on flatbed scanners too short to capture a full 12-inch North American plate. Sometimes that meant making two scans and stitching them together. Another method was shooting plates on 35mm film, developing the photos, and then scanning the photographs.
Storage was another problem. A Netfirms account offered only 50 MB, so Garrish converted JPEGs to smaller GIF files to make the collection fit.
By 2019, he estimated the site occupied about 9.24 GB.
That growth curve is almost a history of consumer web hosting by itself.
The archive now documents British Columbia plates from 1904 to the present, and the homepage celebrated 25 years online in 2024.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list repeatedly turns up sites where a collecting hobby quietly became a serious reference work. BCpl8s.ca is a textbook example.
A plate collector needed somewhere to put his pictures.
Twenty-five years later, researchers got a transportation archive.