Portage la Prairie City Councillor Wayne Wall's launched a fundraising campaign for Central Plains Cancer Services that gives you a chance to own part of the city's history.

He's using wood from a 30 foot 12x12 beam from the Island Park bridge to frame high definition pictures of the bridge, taken by Dennis Wiens.

Wall acknowledges obtaining the wood was a process.

"All the salvage from the bridge belonged to the contractor," he says. "And a lot of people tried to get a piece of the bridge, and were turned down, but with the help of the city manager, and the director of operations, they talked to contractor in a construction meeting, told them why I wanted the beam from the bridge, and they let me pick a beam."

Wall had to cut it into one foot sections, weighing about 40 pounds each to transport them, and enlisted the help of the Portage Collegiate.

"Larry Giesbrecht and the head instructor from the Portage Collegiate woodworking shop came over and loaded it onto a truck, hauled it over to the high school, where they began cutting it into sections to make these plaques," he says. "They broke the first two bandsaw blades. This stuff is so dense, and so hard, you have to go extremely slow, and be very careful when you're cutting it."

They were cut to size, to make 100 plaques.

"They then routed out a section for me to lay in a 5x7 high definition photo on aluminium," he says, "At the bottom we'll add a plate that'll give a little history of the bridge, and number these plaques from 1 to 100. I hope to be able to raise several thousand dollars by selling these limited edition pieces of the Island Park bridge."

Wall stresses the remaining 99 plaques still have to be cut, so they're not available yet.

This is how the plaques will look