Postcard Memories is a weekly series of historic postcard views and photos submitted by Marcel Rousseau.
Some were previously published by the Orillia Museum of Art and History and in the book Postcard Memories Orillia.
The Collegiate Institute was built in 1889 with 10 classrooms and an assembly hall. Dated 1931, this postcard view from the corner of West and Borland Streets shows the expanded Orillia Collegiate Institute building after the 1928 addition of new classrooms and a gymnasium.
With subsequent additions, the school would later become Orillia District Collegiate and Vocational Institute.
But the aged school was deemed too prohibitive to repair and its students merged with students from Park Street Collegiate Insititute at the site, while a new Orillia Secondary School was constructed on Park Street.
The school was demolished in 2019 after it was purchased by the County of Simcoe, which is developing a multi-million-dollar community hub on the site.
