Sandstone City
1885 to 1900
In Part One, we saw the development of Stephen Avenue and the construction of some of the most iconic buildings in Calgary.
Expansion
The Calgary region was also developing, with a railway to Edmonton constructed by August 1891. It was the first railway connection for Edmonton and along it were developed new towns, such as Red Deer and Wetaskiwin.
The line shortened the distance travelling on Edmonton Trail to Calgary Trail from a 5-day stagecoach journey to a trip of only a few hours. The line was built to move inhabitants to the Edmonton area and beyond, and was eventually acquired by CPR to move grain to worldwide destinations.
By 1892, the town of Calgary had grown as far south as today’s 17th Avenue and west to 8th St, while to the east was built the industrial core of the city, including brewery, stockyard and meat packing and processing plant. Though the town now had a census population of 3800 people, economic conditions took a downturn and several projects, including a street car, were paused.
On top of the bad economic news, Calgary experienced another smallpox outbreak in the summer of 1892.
A Chinese resident was first diagnosed with the disease. Several others were quarantined near the mouth of Nose Creek and the supposed source, a Chinese laundry, was burned down as a health precaution. This did not stop the disease, and there were several deaths.
When the Chinese persons were released from quarantine on 2 August 1892, frightened residents left a cricket match and rioted. Several laundries were ransacked and many Chinese were assaulted. Local police did not intervene and so the NWMP were called up to patrol the town and calm the panicked residents.
Calgary’s Chinese community traces its origins to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Thousands of people worked on the railway, many from Europe and local Indigenous communities. Around 17,000 were hired from China to do the most dangerous jobs, such as working with explosives to clear rock for tunnels.
Many Chinese settled in the new towns along the railway or were forced to do so when the government reneged on its promise of a paid return to China. On Stephen Ave, several laundries were established, and their concentration made for easy targets during the riot. Eventually, restaurants and grocery stores became a part of Calgary’s first Chinatown.
Immigrants from Europe settled in today’s Bridgeland-Riverside neighbourhood. Sporadic settlements were established there by the 1880s. The first bridge across the Bow was a wooden structure completed in 1888. This replaced a ferry crossing and facilitated travel and trade to Edmonton along the Old North Trail. It was named the Langevin Bridge after one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, Hector-Louis Langevin, who was Minister of Public Works at the time. The advent of streetcars required a new bridge to residential areas, and so in 1910 a steel truss bridge was completed.
Soon after, an influx of Russian-German immigrants arrived in Riverside in 1892, lending the area its first name, Germantown. Germans had settled in Russia along the Volga River at the invitation of Catherine the Great, herself a native of Prussia, in 1762-3. They were fleeing the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and were seeking prosperity and freedom of religion. By the 1870s, the Russian government’s protections were withdrawn and many sought refuge again, this time in North America. Following the Russian-Germans were Ukranians and Italians.
South of town, the Francophone Catholic mission at St. Mary’s was also growing. Sacred Heart Convent was established in 1885 by the Order of the Faithful Companion of Jesus Sisters, founded in France in 1820. They were invited to establish schools in NWT by Bishop Gradin of St. Albert, AB. Mary Greene from Tipperary, Ireland was one of the arriving nuns. She taught mostly Metis Catholic students at southern Alberta’s first separate school, St. Mary’s. She helped lobby the government for NWT’s first Roman Catholic School district and was also superior of Sacred Heart Convent.
The convent is a rare example in Calgary of the Second Empire style. It has an ordered symmetrical form with central tower, flanking wings and Roman arched windows. Its main floor was a classroom and it also held music rooms, as the nuns were known for their excellence in musical instruction (let us all take a pause to listen to the score of The Sound of Music). Thomas Underwood constructed the Convent.
In the late 1880s, Édouard and Charles Rouleau from Quebec arrived in Calgary. Édouard, a physician, became the first president of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, which supported Francophone interests. He purchased the Rouleau Residence in 1887. It was built in 1885 and in the Queen Anne Revival style and is one of Calgary’s oldest homes.
Dr. Rouleau went on to become head physician of Holy Cross Hospital. The Hospital was founded by Quebecois Sœurs Grise (“Grey Sisters”) in 1891. Before its time, the town’s hospital was located at Fort Calgary. But the rapidly growing town was outpacing the meagre facilities. Bishop Grandin sought assistance from other religious communities to establish a hospital. Only the Grey Sisters of Montreal accepted the call, with Sisters Agnes Carroll, Olivia Beauchemin, Elizabeth Valiquette, and Gertrude Beemer travelling west to minister to the sick.
Charles Rouleau was a judge and member of the NWT Council. He hosted the community at his luxurious home, Castel aux Prés. Along with Father Lacombe and Sister Greene, he argued for a separate school district for Catholics. The influence of the brothers lent their name unofficially to the community, Rouleauville, which was officially incorporated in 1899.
Several other significant developments occurred in the early 1890s. Hudson’s Bay Company built a department store in Calgary in 1891, bringing a new type of shopping to the growing town. Rather than trading post and outfitter, HBC was evolving into a general merchandiser and modern store.
In 1884, its trading post from 1876 on the Elbow River moved to near the new railway station. HBC’s new sandstone building became the city’s primary retail hub for the next twenty years. The building is a great example of Romanesque Revival architecture and is another anchor building on Stephen Ave National Historical Site.
South of Calgary’s new bustling commercial avenue was built a landmark of the town’s socialites, the home of Sir James A. Lougheed. Lougheed became a lawyer at Osgoode Hall, Toronto and arrived in Calgary in 1883 to establish a legal practice in real estate and transportation law. He was a partner with R.B. Bennett and was one of the founders of the Law Society of Alberta.
In 1889, he was appointed to the Senate by Sir John A. He went on to lead the Conservatives in the Senate and was the first Conservative from Alberta to serve in the federal cabinet. He was knighted by King George V in 1916 for his work with the Military Hospitals Commission, the only Albertan ever to be so honoured. The house hosted many social occasions, including the visits of the Prince and Princess of Prussia and the future, if short-lived, King of Canada, Edward VIII.
Built in 1891, Lougheed House National Historic Site is a pristine example of the Queen Anne Revival style and is built from sandstone quarried near the Elbow River. The House’s asymmetrical façade, square and polygonal corner towers, steeply pitched roofs, wrought iron material and monumental chimneys are hallmarks of the style. Also, the complex roofline and abundant detailing are characteristic of French Chateau style, and the rounded windows and natural landscaping are characteristic of the Italianate style.
It was constructed with running water and electricity, luxuries in those days. The Beaulieu Gardens that surround it are now operated as a municipal park by the City. After serving as the Lougheed’s home, it became a barracks for women training during WWII and afterwards was the location of the Red Cross until 1979.
As mentioned above, Fort Calgary’s medical facilities were insufficient for the rapidly growing town. A committee formed in 1886 had obtained 4.5 acres from the NWT Council for a hospital in today’s Bridgeland-Riverside, but the land was too far from the town.
A cottage hospital was opened in October 1890 in a town residence, a 2-storey wood frame house that accommodated eight patients. This was the first Calgary General Hospital, which was incorporated by the Territories government with a $300 grant on top of private money and patients’ fees.
The dining room doubled as the operating room and overflow patients were housed in tents on the front lawn. Funds were raised by the Women’s Hospital Aid Society, headed by Jean Pinkham, with Lady Lougheed serving as treasurer. Thus began over a century of service at Calgary’s General Hospitals.
Banff and Lake Louise
With the completion of the railway, the CPR sought to expand its operations in the region. One avenue to make money was tourism. To bring people onto the trains, passengers needed a destination worthy of the long trip from out east. It so happens that Alberta’s Rocky Mountains are picturesque and a prime tourist destination.
Banff was settled in 1883 near the proposed tunnel for the railway, which was heading its way after the railway was diverted from its more northerly route to one through Calgary and the Bow River Valley towards Kicking Horse Pass. It was known as Siding 29 before receiving its current name from Lord Strathcona, Sir Donald A. Smith, who named it after his Scottish hometown.
The sighting of hot springs by rail workers led the federal government to establish a land reserve around Cave and Basin hot springs, which expanded to become Rocky Mountains Park in 1887, Canada’s first national park and North America’s second, after Yellowstone.
Banff townsite developed near the railway station to serve the tourist trade. The oldest building in Banff today is the Tanglewood (ca.1887) on Beaver Street, which was built where Banff began at Siding 29 northeast of the current townsite. It’s a 1-and-a-half-storey wood cottage home with log siding that also served as Banff’s post office.
Another older building in the town is St. George-in-the-Pines Anglican Church, which began construction in 1889 after Lord Stanley laid the cornerstone. John Brewster arrived in 1886 and established a dairy to serve the hotel trade. His sons started backcountry tours in 1892 after learning how to explore and hunt in the mountains from Indigenous local William Twin. The brothers then established an outfitting company.
The keystone of the townsite was (and probably still is) the CPR’s hotel. The site was personally chosen by CPR President Van Horne. He famously said, “If we can’t export the scenery, we’ll import the tourists”.
Opened in 1888, Banff Springs Hotel was one of the earliest of the CPR’s grand hotels, originally a five-storey wooden building. It was destroyed by fire in 1926. CPR began adding additional buildings in 1914, with the hotel consisting of an eleven-storey tower made of Rundle limestone and constructed in the Scottish Baronial style. The main block was added over the next decade and was built in the style of the chateaus in the Loire Valley, France. It was designated a National Historic Site in 1988.
Another spectacular location for a hotel was Lake Louise. The Stoney referred to the lake as Ho-run-num-nay (“lake of the little fishes”) and it was a Stoney guide who took CPR workman Tom Wilson to it in 1882. He called it Emerald Lake for its amazing colour, but it was officially designated Lake Louise to honour Princess Louise Caroline Alberta. Across from today’s hotel is Victoria Glacier, named after the Queen in 1897, forever immortalizing mother and daughter in our grand geography. Lake Louise is also Canada’s highest community, at 1600 m (5200 ft) above sea level.
At the location of the hotel, a base camp was established in 1884 for 12,000 workers to build the railway through the mountains. In 1886, a log cabin served people on day trips into the area. This was destroyed by a fire and subsequently in 1894 Chalet Lake Louise was constructed.
To this wooden building was added several buildings over the next two decades in the Victorian and Tudor Revival styles. A concrete wing in the Italian Villa style was added in 1912. To this was added a wing in the Chateau style after a fire in 1925, giving it the name Chateau Lake Louise. During this time, teahouses and resting huts were added to cater to the influx of hikers to the area.
As more tourists and residents arrived, the Indigenous peoples of the Rockies were less and less welcome to the Park. Over a thirty year period starting in 1890, the Stoney were excluded from Banff National Park. Their exclusion was meant to facilitate other priorities, including game conservation, sport hunting, and tourism and also to create an uninhabited wilderness.
Residential Schools
Indigenous peoples also faced what are known today as Residential Schools. After the Numbered Treaty system was established, the federal government sought to provide educational instruction, with Indigenous leaders wanting their children to learn new skills.
Based on his work with Indigenous peoples, Father Lacombe was brought in by Bishop Grandin to establish vocational instruction under Catholic supervision. He consulted with federal authorities in 1884 and returned to establish St. Joseph’s Industrial School at Dunbow, AB (near High River). The first cohort were teenage boys who actively resisted the behavioural norms of such a school. It closed in 1922.
Meanwhile, Chief Red Crow, during his visit out east after the 1885 North West Resistance, visited the Mohawk Institute (today’s Woodland Indian Cultural Centre) near Brantford, ON. It was established in 1831 for Six Nations youth. He was impressed with the progress of the children there and returned to Alberta in favour of Anglican, Methodist/United and Roman Catholic missionaries providing instruction.
Residential schools in Alberta were the model for institutions across the country. But rather than provide education and skills development, these schools isolated students from their culture and families. In some cases, Indigenous languages were forbidden and traditional clothing and spiritual rituals were denied.
The result was a failure to teach necessary skills. Also, thousands of individuals became lost between two worlds, having been denied their cultural traditions yet left without belonging to the rest of society. And then there were the conditions, with nutritional deficiencies and overcrowding leading to regular outbreaks of many diseases common at the time.
The only school within Calgary was St. Dunstan’s, located near today’s intersection of Deerfoot Trail and Glenmore Trail. It began operations in 1896 and closed in 1907. Some of its students created the oak communion table and lectern at St. Paul’s Anglican Church.
When students at the residential schools took ill, they were usually sent home. In the case of Jack White Goose Flying, he died of tuberculosis at the school in 1899 and was buried nearby. He was all but forgotten until 1956 when an effort was made to identify the remains. Development nearby in 1971 saw the city transfer his grave to Queens Park Cemetery.
City
The Town of Calgary was short-lived due to the pace of growth and the weight of the problems being experienced by its residents. On 1 January 1894, the North West Territories Legislative Assembly granted a charter to the City of Calgary, which remained in force for 56 years.
Calgary became the first city of the North West Territories. Our first civic election as a city took place on January 15th, with Wesley Fletcher Orr becoming mayor. Orr was previously an alderman of the town and chaired the public works committee that oversaw the installation of electric lights and waterworks and established the General Hospital.
Cow Town remained so despite the influx of inhabitants and farmers. The established ranches tried to resist the new influx. They appealed to Ottawa to set aside access to water for their operations even though the government in 1892 had lifted restrictions on homesteading on the original ranch leases. Eventually, the water access restrictions were lifted too.
The era of large ranches ended shortly after beginning. Many of these ranches struggled and did not last past their original lease holders. Senator Cochrane’s ranch suffered from bad planning, with livestock unable to successfully travel the bull train from Montana and survive the long winters. His focus on the British market also suffered from an 1892 embargo on beef exports due to disease. This forced prices down, which benefited newly-establishing meat processors, such as Patrick Burns. Cochrane turned to sheep raising in the Bow Valley west of Calgary and his holdings were eventually sold off to Mormons.
An employee of Cochrane’s was Alfred Ernest Cross, who arrived in Alberta in 1884. He went on to found A7 Ranche near Nanton, AB. After an injury, he formed the Calgary Brewing and Malting Co. in 1892. In 1899 he married Helen, the daughter of Col. James Macleod, and bought Cross House in Inglewood. The House was built in 1891 and is one of Calgary’s first Queen Anne Revival style homes, which includes balustrades in the Greek Revival style. Today it’s the home of Rouge restaurant.
Farms and homesteads around Calgary were expanding at this time. At Midnapore, William Roper Hull became a successful rancher and businessman. He invented a new hay-stacking machine and developed a mixed method of farming and ranching that used ditches to water the fields.
Hull translated his success into building Hull Ranche House in 1896. Hull’s first log home burned down and in its place he built a two-storey Tudor Revival style home within today’s Fish Creek Provincial Park.
Hull House reflects the wealth the area had started to generate, and is an example of elegant country living during the late Victorian era. He also funded an 700-seat opera house (Albion House, built in 1893 and torn down in 1963), built the Grain Exchange building, and owned the Hull Block. Upon his death, he apportioned some of his estate for an orphanage.
Also at Fish Creek was the Shaw family homestead. They farmed, ranched, operated a general store, ran the post office, and established a woollen mill. In 1889, the mill produced three hundred pounds of wool per day. Samuel’s wife Helen opened Midnapore Woollen Mills shop on Stephen Ave to sell their goods, offering skirts, blankets, flannel, tweed and yarn. It was said that many people on their way to the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon found themselves in Helen’s store.
Sandstone City was a beacon on the prairie. It was connected to the world via the railway and offered many opportunities to those venturing to this remote part of the continent.
To quote the Prime Minister at the time, Sir Wilfred Laurier, “all the signs point this way, that the 20th century shall be the century of Canada and Canadian development.… For the next 100 years, Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.”
One of those places was definitely Calgary, which we’ll see much more of next month.
– Anthony Imbrogno is a volunteer with The Calgary Heritage Initiative Society/Heritage Inspires YYC
– All copyright images cannot be shared without prior permission
Where to See This Era
Heritage Park, 1900 Heritage Dr SW, Calgary, AB T2V 2X3
Remington Carriage Museum, 623 Main St, Cardston, AB T0K 0K0
Inglewood walking tour
Haultain Park, 225 13 Ave SW, Calgary, AB T2R 1N8
Old Fire Hall No. 1, 104 6 Ave SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0G2
Stephen Avenue National Historic Site, 140 8 Ave SW, Calgary, AB T2P 1B3
Knox United Church, 506 4 St SW, Calgary, AB T2P 1S7
Bridgeland-Riverside walking tour
Rouleauville walking tour
Mission / Cliff Bungalow walking tour
Lougheed House National Historic Site, 707 13 Ave SW, Calgary, AB T2R 0K8
Fairmont Banff Springs, 405 Spray Ave, Banff, AB T1L 1J4
Banff Park Museum National Historic Site, 91 Banff Ave, Banff, AB T1L 1K2
Chateau Lake Louise, 111 Lake Louise Dr, Lake Louise, AB T0L 1E0
Rouge Restaurant, 1240 8 Ave SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0M7
Fish Creek Provincial Park, 15979 Bow Bottom Trail SE, Calgary, AB T2J 5E8
Further Reading
See https://nctr.ca/ for more on Residential Schools
Marlene Michel, Usu Leut Our People: An historic look at the Germans from Russia living in Bridgeland/Riverside, 2015.
History of St. Paul’s Anglican Church
History of Calgary’s Bridges
Calgary’s Civic Fathers and Mothers
Agricultural Roots of the Calgary Stampede
“Calgary’s first town council meeting”, Calgary Herald
“Calgary’s Great Fire of 1886 sparks ‘Sandstone City'”, CBC
Stephen Avenue: endangered site success story, National Trust for Canada
History of Calgary’s Chinatown
Banff: Siding 29 and Tanglewood
William Roper Hull Ranche House Historic Site
History of Midnapore
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