The idea for the Transcona cenotaph came into existence in 1921, when pressure was put on the town council, to create a public war memorial for the lives lost during the Great War. The cenotaph was made in the yards of the Memorial Marble and Tile Company of Winnipeg. It was composed of a roughly finished grey granite obelisk, fourteen feet in height, placed on a five-foot base of smoothly polished granite. It took an experienced and dedicated stonecutter one hour to engrave two letters of a name into the surface. When it was completed, sixty-one names of war victims were engraved.
It was finally erected in late 1931 on the corner of Day Street (formerly Oxford Street) and Regent Avenue and on November 11, 1931, it was dedicated to the war dead of the First World War. After the Second World War the names of the deceased were engraved on the cenotaph. A plaque was later added to honour soldiers in the Korean War and Canadian Peacekeepers. In mid-1954, the cenotaph was relocated to its present site in Memorial Circle Park. It was rededicated on June 3, 2001.
Over the years, joint research by the Transcona Museum and the Transcona Legion Branch No. 7 identified individuals from the First World War and Second World War who were missing from the cenotaph. On June 5, 2011, with contributions made by the Transcona Legion Branch No. 7, the cenotaph was rededicated with new plaques that included the names of the missing soldiers.
