Upon settling into his new home in Woodbridge, Virginia in 1995, Tom found an expected Colorado relic on top of the kitchen cupboard – a vintage plate, but not the kind people eat on.
“I was settling in and unpacking after moving to the Washington D.C. metro area for a new job at the Pentagon when I found the item,” he said.
The item – a 1927 Colorado license plate – found 1,700 miles away remains to be a mystery for Tom. Ironically enough, he lived in Colorado prior to moving to Virginia. Today, Tom and his wife, a Colorado native, call Colorado home once again. Tom has held onto the license plate 26 years later, still pondering how it got to Virginia in the first place.
“The home I purchased was built in 1972, so finding the plate there provided no clues,” he said. “Yet here it was, a black and white plate, stamped out in 1927 soon to become a century old with a story to tell. I am still hoping that with research and a little luck I can unearth that story. All I have found out so far is that about 308,000 plates were issued here in Colorado in 1927. That number represents almost 30% of the state’s population at that time. Whether that fact alone is unusual is another story, for another time.”
For now, the vintage license plate sits in his home office.
It’s likely the 1927 plate was made at the state’s oldest prison since Colorado inmates began making plates in 1926.
However, any information that could identify the original owner of the license plate is protected under the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994 which protects any information that can relate to an identifiable person.
Online auction website EBay has 1927 license plates ranging from $8, for a barely recognizable plate, up to $599 for a plate that is only 4 digits and claimed to be rare. At the time, state-issued license plates were a relatively new concept. Prior to the state issuing license plates in 1913, cities issued numbers to people who then were left to their own devices to create their own license plates. After that, license plates were made out of porcelain for the first few years.