In the great, Northern land of Canada, purple glass was once a common sight across the landscape of the farms, hills, ravines, swamps, mountains, and lakes. Royal purple glass telegraph and telephone insulators, embossed with names such as G.N.W. TEL. CO., C.N.R., CANADIAN PACIFIC RY CO, and B.T.Co. of Can were mass-produced by the hundreds of thousands for use in all manner of applications.

However, much to the dismay of the modern Canadian collector, very nearly ALL of this vibrant purple glass was snapped up as early as the 1960s to be traded away for colourful and rare insulators from very different lands - far away lands with only a deficiency of royal purple glass to speak of. Thus, in modern day Canada, finding a royal purple insulator intact is a rarity. At least, it seems, for me.

However, on a hunt this past May with my good friend, Kyle, we were rather surprised to turn up something that I, personally, had not seen in the wild before. While poking around at the base of a relatively "normal" seeming modern telegraph pole along a stretch of the local Great Western Railway, we decided it was getting to be around the time we should head home, as we had been out for a good 4 hours already, and it was close to dinner time. Packing up my things, and taking one last gander around the pole site, something caught my eye on the top of a high plateau behind the pole. I darted my head left and right to try to make out whatever it was that had caught my eye. "Is that..." I trailed off. "Kyle! I've got something!" I yelped, and scampered on all fours, accordingly with my quite recently adopted canine tendencies, up the embankment to see if it was what I had in mind. Sure enough, at the top of the hill, I was greeted with a sight thus far unique in my collecting experience...

See the [id=222640920;next photo] for a more close-up view of what had startled me in it's originality.