Suburban Calgary, Riverside ca. 1913

Postcards from the Past, PC 933

At a well attended ceremony in Council Chambers on Monday January 24, three new heritage sites were ‘plaqued’ by the Calgary Heritage Authority. Plaques are given every two years to sites that are of historical significance to Calgary’s development based on criteria of architecture, history and context. Some of the sites that have been awarded plaques in the past are the Cathedral Church of the Redeemer, St. Mary’s Parish Hall, Sunalta School, Alyth Lodge (Ogden Hotel) and the North West Travellers Building (to see pictures of any of these sites, you can visit our Community Heritage and Family History Digital Library from the link on the left side of the page)

The three new sites named Monday are the Bridgeland-Riverside Vacant Lot Garden which is between 6 and 7A Streets NE; the Old North Trail (Spiller Road SE) and the Mission Bridge. Each site holds historical significance and each represents a different aspect of how we define heritage.

The Bridgeland-Riverside Vacant Lot Garden is the last of a number of similar gardens that were created by members of the Vacant Lot Garden Club as a way to beautify the city and put unused land to productive use. It was originally suggested by the aptly named Town Planning commissioner, James H. Garden and was started in 1914. Membership was $1.00 annually which entitled the holder to use one lot. Land owners such as Colonel Walker and J.C. Cockburn donated lots for use by the club. Calgarians were able to grow their own produce and reduce their reliance on “imported” food. Just as an aside, and a library tie-in, Alexander Calhoun, the first head librarian of the Calgary Public Library, was active in forming the club, as part of his role on the Town Planning Commission.

Spiller Road was a part of the Old North Trail that ran from the Yukon to New Mexico and was used by First Nations for thousands of years. According to Blackfoot Chief Brings-Down-the-Sun, the trail forked where Calgary now stands. “The right fork ran north into the Barren Lands as far as people live. The main trail ran south along the eastern side of the Rockies, at a uniform distance from the mountains, keeping clear of the forest and outside of the foothills. It ran close to where the city of Helena now stands and extended south into the country inhabited by a people with dark skins and long hair falling over their faces." (The Old North Trail by Walter McClintock, p434) When the NWMP built Fort Calgary, part of the trail became Macleod Trail, the main route to forts in the south such as Fort Macleod and Fort Benton in Montana.

The Mission Bridge was built at the place where travellers forded the Elbow River. Father Lacombe suggested that farmers coming into town from areas to the south would benefit from the building of a bridge to allow them easier access to markets. The first bridge was built in 1886 but soon became rotted and worn. In 1897 a new steel bridge was erected (see photo). In 1915 a concrete bridge (the first in Alberta) was erected. During construction, however, one of the worst floods to hit Calgary nearly destroyed the unfinished bridge and took the life of Quinton Campbell, a city worker. (This was the same flood that destroyed the original Centre Street Bridge, with the above mentioned Commissioner Garden, and the City Engineer, who planned and oversaw the construction of the Mission Bridge, G.W. Craig, aboard. They both survived the disaster.) Though this bridge has been renovated and rebuilt many times, elements of the 1915 bridge still remain.

Mission Bridge during flood, ca. 1923?

Postcards from the Past, PC 1377

The face of library service is undergoing a great change. Once we were seen as a repository of books. That was pretty much the sum of it. I’m not saying that was an accurate perception, since for as long as I have worked in libraries (and that is a long, long time) we have also been the intermediaries between customers and the information contained in those books. But books themselves are changing. They are no longer confined to their old fashioned paper format – they have broken free of the walls of the library and are finding a new home on the internet. One of the projects that is enabling this is the Google Books project. Google is working with some major libraries and also some partners to provide previews, and in some cases, complete text, of many books.

How it works is quite simple. You search, either through the regular Google search or through the more specific Google Books search for a name or a phrase. If that search term shows up in any of the scanned books, you will see a preview of the part of the book that contains the term. If the book is in the public domain, the whole text will appear as a pdf for reading or download. I have found this to be a real boon to my research.

What this has allowed me to do is to find stuff I wouldn’t have even known enough to look for. For example, I knew that my great-grandfather had worked on the Kettle Valley Railway but I didn’t know that he was the Chairman of the Locomotive Engineers Union for that railway until I found his name in a 1927 listing of labour organizations in Canada. I also didn’t know that my great uncle Claude, who eventually moved to Montana, ran a movie theatre in the billiard hall in Phoenix, BC in 1911. I found that juicy little bit of information in the preview of Ghost towns and mining camps of the Boundary Country by Garnet Basque. Using that, I was able to find Uncle Claude, his last name badly mis-transcribed and therefore not showing up in online searches, in the 1911 Canadian census, just where he was supposed to be, in Phoenix BC, living with his partner in the theatre business.

While it is great if the whole book is available, it is also just fine if it is not. Google Books gives great citations so that it is easy to find the book and request it, or a copy of the pertinent information, through interlibrary loans with your local library. In fact, there are links on the right side of the page to help you find it either through a book seller or at a library. (Turns out the U of C has the list of labour unions in which my great-grandfather appears, and Calgary Public Library – yay, has the ghost town book!)

So while digitization is not without its drawbacks and its need for adaptation, it is a great thing for researchers, especially those of us who are enamoured of the miniscule and unremarked details of the lives of our ancestors. These details could have gone unnoticed forever, unless we stumbled on them by chance. Now, the only drawback is that we can end up with WAY too much stuff for our family histories – we’re going to have to publish multivolume sets!

At the Summit of the Rockies

Postcards from the Past, PC 424

Entrance to Reader Rock Garden, ca 1960s

Alison Jackson Photograph Collection, AJ 1256

That we are very keen on the preservation of Calgary’s heritage sites goes without saying (this is the Community Heritage blog, after all). We have a deep admiration for people who work on behalf of these goals, groups like Calgary Heritage Initiative, the Heritage Planning Department at the City, the historical societies, and the legions of volunteers who work tirelessly inventorying, advocating, lobbying, writing, touring, to get heritage resources recognized and protected.

What we often overlook is what happens to heritage sites once they are legally protected. The conservation and restoration of heritage buildings requires different skills than building a new building or even renovating an older building. Work on heritage sites and artifacts require that the craftsman have an understanding of traditional materials and methods of construction.

We have the opportunity to hear from some of the trades people who work on heritage buildings, landscapes and artifacts at the next Heritage Roundtable on Thursday January 27 at 7:00 PM at Beaulieu, the historic Lougheed House. Speakers from various heritage trades will be there to give us insight into their work. Ken Armstrong, a mason and stone carver, will talk about tradition versus modern stone carving techniques; Janet Jones, a horticulturalist, will give us insight into the rehabilitation of the Reader Rock Garden; Steve Ramsey, the Manager of Facilities and Maintenance for heritage Park will give us a general overview of the park’s processes of heritage preservation and maintenance, while discussing the restoration of the 1885 Morrisey, Fernie & Michel passenger cars. There will also be time for questions and discussion and, of course, the all important networking with others interested in Calgary’s Heritage. You can register for this event online at http://www.calgarycommunities.com/events.php or by telephone at 403-244-4111. These roundtable events are always interesting and you get to meet some of the neatest people. I hope to see you there.

Crest on the wall of Beaulieu

Alison Jackson Photograph Collection, AJ 44-09

I was cruising through the genealogical society newsletters and came across this interesting bit of information: Library and Archives Canada has launched several new databases and tools for genealogists. They have also outlined their plans for the next few years.

In December LAC announced their intention to double the volume of online genealogical content with the mounting of millions of digital images on its website. This is as a result of their partnership with Ancestry.ca. Perhaps as recognition of the effect this partnership will have on Canadian researchers, Ancestry.ca was nominated for a 2010 Pierre Berton award for excellence in contributing to the study of Canadian History. They didn’t win, that honour went to Desmond Morton (yay!) but Ancestry.ca did receive an honourable mention for their work.

Library and Archives Canada has also announced their intention to phase out the sending of photocopies in response to the 750,000 requests they receive every year. Instead, by April 2011, the will be sending only digital copies. This has a double benefit. Paper use is reduced and, as digital copies are requested, LAC is looking for ways to reuse these images to provide access to the copied documents. Many archives enhance their digitization projects in this way. As images are requested they are mounted on the website. This doubles the value of work done.

New at the Canadian Genealogy Centre is the 1916 Census. It is not searchable by name but it can be searched by place and the pages can be browsed. In time, LAC will have all censuses available on their website. Also in December, LAC launched the Medals and Awards database. This resource contains more than 100,000 listings of medal citations and awards. Other databases and tools newly launched include the Canadian Families database, which is a small but growing index to church records, the Upper Canada Land Boards records which include 16,000 references to land board documents from 1765-1804, a guide to help researchers find documents relating to Internment Camps for both World Wars and new tools for researchers looking at immigration documents including transcriptions of the various forms used to record information.

It is always worthwhile, with any provider of information or database, to have a look at what’s new. At LAC, there is a link in the red bar on the left side of the page. Things are really hopping at LAC and I’m always impressed by what I find there.

Souvenir Handkerchief showing Calgary Public Library and South African War Memorial

Many of us have things that were left to us by family members. In my family, we inherited, on the passing of our great aunt, a musical fruit plate that my brother adored as a child, and an antler cribbage board made by my great grandfather. These are not valuable monetarily but they do have great value within our family. Other people’s heirlooms can be fascinating as well. Just look at the success of “Antiques Roadshow” and the popularity of Calgary Public Library’s Antiques Appraisal day. Sometimes other people’s heirlooms cross over from family interest to local history interest – we really like those kinds of things here. Some of the more obvious examples are postcards, of which we have a major collection here that you can view in the Community Heritage and Family History Digital Library (see the link on the left of the page).

A very interesting artifact was brought to my attention recently by a colleague who collects vintage stuff. She was shopping and found this hankie, with an image of the Memorial Park Library on it. It is a very interesting piece. We haven’t been able to find much information about it but it looks like it might be souvenir hankies, which were popular articles for servicemen to send home to their loved ones. I found this serviceman’s letter on a website called Canadian Letters and Images Project: “When up in town this a.m. I got a few souvenir handkerchiefs, one of which I am enclosing for Jean. Hoping she likes it.” The letter was from Louis Duff to his Aunt Lily, sent from Belgium in 1915. Calgary was a training centre for several units of the C.E.F. so it is a possibility that this handkerchief, like the one sent to Jean, was purchased by a serviceman.

Memorial Park

Postcards from the Past, PC 1895

We have an image similar to the one on the hankie on a postcard that has a 1940 postmark. It may be that the company that produced the souvenir postcards also produced the handkerchief (or that the photographer marketed his image to a number of printing houses or….). If you have any information about this kind of heirloom, please add a comment to this entry. I’m always interested to hear what you all have to say. It’s the best way to learn!

Heirlooms, such as the hankie and even the postcards, require special handling so they survive to be passed on to the next generation. We have several books in our collection that can help you, if you are lucky enough to have been passed some of these delightful objets. One is Saving stuff by Don Williams, another is Caring for your family treasures by Jane Long.

Mount Royal College, 1962

Alison Jackson Photography Collection, AJ 0196

The early part of the 20^th century was heady times for the city of Calgary. As you will notice over the next few years, a lot of our important institutions will be celebrating important anniversaries. The library will be 100 years old in 2012 as will the Calgary Stampede, Calgary Transit celebrated 100 years in 2009, Old City Hall, itself, will celebrate its centenary this year and Mount Royal College (now University) just turned 100.

The Methodist Church received a charter in 1910 to run a co-ed boarding school. It chose as the first president of the college, Dr. George W. Kerby, the very popular minister of Central Methodist church. His goal was to provide a good education to both boys and girls. In 1911 a two storey brick building was built at 11 Street and 6^th Avenue SW.

Dr. G.W. Kerby's Residence, 1125 7th Avenue SW

Alison Jackson Photography Collection, AJ 0436

A list of the Board of Governors from the 1915 calendar is a veritable who’s who of Calgary business and society. It included W.H. Cushing, A. Judson Sayre, A. Melville Scott, Pat Burns, E.H. Crandell, Dr. T.H. Blow, and O. Devenish, many of whom had children in attendance at the college. The school was described as a “high class and residential college for boys and young men, for girls and young women” in the Merchants and manufacturers record of 1911. The college had “122 registered, and more coming daily.” Courses were offered in academic subjects, commercial and shorthand, expression and physical culture and the conservatory of music.

By 1929 the college had outgrown its building and was seeking 20 acres of land near the Technical School grounds. This never came to pass and in 1931 ground was broken on an addition to the college. In the 1930s, the college gained affiliation with the University of Alberta and university courses were offered. In the 1940s the college experienced an influx of servicemen seeking to further their education and was forced, by a shortage of space, to offer classes in army huts on the grounds of Mewata Park. The article mentions that this will be only until “the proposed new college building is constructed.” (Calgary Herald June 28, 1946) In 1948, a start was made on building a gym, named after Dr. Stanley, who had sat on the board since 1910, and a memorial building in honour of Dr. Kerby. The memorial building was opened in June of 1949, the gym in November 1949. The Kerby building was enlarged in 1961 to keep up with the continuing success of the college, but by 1964 enrollment was once again at capacity and the school was bursting at the seams.

This pushed the drive for the new campus and in the 1966 land in Lincoln Park was acquired as a new site for the college. The Lincoln Park campus opened for classes in the fall of 1972. By 1981 the school had established satellite campuses. Growth continued and by 2000, 10,000 students were enrolled. In 2009 the Mount Royal College officially became Mount Royal University.

Corridor at Mount Royal College, ca. 1920s?

Postcards from the Past, PC 1782a

Eaton Store in the 1950s (not at Christmas, though)

Postcards from the Past, PC 1282

Calgary is my home town. My parents came here in the 50s because my dad had landed a job with Pacific Petroleums. Having grown up and gone to school here, I find myself in an interesting position, working with the history of the city because, apparently, the time of my childhood is now a historical era! In that spirit, I often find myself combing our Local History collection to verify my memories. Now seemed like a good time to go on a hunt since the Christmas season is upon us and is much on my mind.

We had a few family rituals at Christmas. One was the Pacific Petroleums’ children’s Christmas party. In those days, the company was fairly small and two annual events were planned for the kids of employees: in the summer, the company picnic, often at Bowness Park, and, in the winter, the Christmas party. There was a Christmas party for the adults, too, and I remember my mother’s collection of blue Christmas plates from Birks that were the annual gifts to the wives.

I also remember the trip to Eaton’s to see Santa. I never sat on Santa’s knee, I was far too timid to do that, but I did look at him. My brother was braver and was easily convinced to climb on the strange man’s lap. We would also visit Toyland to see what kinds of things we would like for Christmas (everything) and we took a look at the beautiful window displays. We had one of the moving vignettes here at the Central Library for a while. A group of dancing bears done up in Victorian nightwear spun and twirled here for a few years after Eaton’s closed its doors.

I had two favourite things that I just had to do when I was at Eaton’s. Since my Nan worked there, I used to “do lunch” with her in the cafeteria and I always finished with a bowl of square jello. That was de rigueur for a visit to Eaton’s. And my most favourite thing? It had to be the tunnel that led from the parkade to the store. We got to take the elevator, with its funny round buttons and then roar down the underground passage, so cool, making echoes all along the way (but only if we were alone, my mom said.) That was the very best part of the whole trip. We would start before we got our coats on asking, “can we go through the tunnel, can we?” Probably drove everyone nuts, but at least I wasn’t begging for toys.

Do you have Christmas memories you’d like to share? Post a comment to this blog to tell me about your favourite Christmas things and places. And to you all, Happy Holidays from all of us here on the 4^th Floor of the Central Library.

Dispatch from Calgary

Postcards from the Past, PC 928

Traditionally, the time around Christmas is the time when we at the library undertake some of our longer term projects. This year we are looking at our clippings files and sorting through some of the biographical information we have found there. We found a very interesting clipping in the ”J” file about a man who claimed to be the inspiration for the Owen Wister novel The Virginian.

Now, I may be dating myself, but I remember the television show that was loosely based on this novel. It starred Doug McClure (remember him?) and James Drury and ran from 1962 to 1971. I was too young to actually remember the novel in its heyday, but according to Alex Calhoun as he is quoted in the article from 1932, in the first twenty years of Calgary Public Library’s existence, it was the most consistently popular work of fiction in the library.

The journalist uncovered the interesting detail that the man on whom Wister based his novel was none other than Everett “Dad” Johnson, a resident of the Cochrane district. Mister Johnson had lived in southern Alberta for more than 40 years when the article was written. Born in Virginia, he followed the cowboy life through Texas and the American west until he ended up in Alberta as manager of the Bar U Ranch, a role which he had taken over from George Lane.. Sure enough, a quick check of the 1891 census shows him as foreman of a cattle company, listed alongside Fred Stimson and his wife Mary.

Johnson, known as Ebb, had been a foreman in the Powder River Cattle Co. in Wyoming, It was here that he acted as guide and hunting companion to Owen Wister. It was his job as foreman that led him up to Alberta, seeking grazing land for the 76 Ranch. Johnson was recommended to Stimson for the Bar U as the “best all round cowman in the country.” While on the Bar U he met Mary Bigland, who is shown in the 1891 census as a domestic at the ranch but was in fact a nurse, there to help Mary Stimson overcome a bout of scarlet fever. Mary and Ebb left the Bar U shortly after 1891 and moved on.

Johnson, in the 1932 interview, admitted he sometimes felt a bit contemptuous of the changes made to his story by Wister, but conceded that it did make a “right good story.”

The photo below is of Johnson in 1882. I found it on the Glenbow Archives website, after seeing it in the book The Bar U by Simon M. Evans. There are more pictures at the Glenbow of Mr. Johnson. You can check their photo archives at http://ww2.glenbow.org/search/archivesPhotosSearch.aspx and search for "everett johnson. If you would like to read more about Johnson, we have the clipping in a file in the local history room and the book mentioned. If you’re interested in looking at census records for Alberta, we have them on microfilm in the genealogy collection here at the Central Library and they can be viewed on Ancestry LE, which is available at every Calgary Public Library branch through our E-Library.

Everett Cyril Johnson in 1882

Glenbow Archives, NA 2924-12

Whenever I give a presentation to beginning genealogists, I tell them that the first step in any genealogy project is to talk to the oldest member of your extended family and really pump them for information. I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard researchers say “I wish I had listened when my grandma talked about her life”. People have information that you cannot get from documents. Yes, you can usually find out when someone was born, but it is very unlikely, unless the dad got completely out of hand with joy and ended up being arrested, that you will know how people felt about that birth or what that birth meant to the family. The same is true of marriages. You can imply that the bride’s parents didn’t approve of the groom if you find a marriage record in a “Gretna Green” kind of locale, or if the parents didn’t attend the wedding, but you won’t necessarily know why they felt that way. This is where your human resources come in.

Now, if you have a particularly chatty aunt or grandmother, or uncle or grandfather for that matter, you can just set up your recording device and let them go but it does help to have a few pointers in mind so you get not just gossip and random bits of information, although for me those were always the best, but also facts that may be pertinent to your research. There are ways of going about this. I found a very good article by Juliana Smith on the Ancestry Learning Centre about how to get the interesting details but also to get information that may be helpful in your search.

She suggests questions like: “Who were your neighbours when you were growing up?” or “What landmarks do you remember from your childhood neighbourhood?” Not only will questions like this open up the door to childhood memories, but when researching families, it is sometimes useful to know who was living around them (for example, if you can’t find your family in a census index, maybe you can find the neighbours, or use the names of the neighbours to verify that you have the right family in a census record or directory). The article contains other very interesting ways of asking questions to get dual purpose answers. There are also some very good books in our genealogy collection about interviewing family members. Some titles are Oral History Workshop by Cynthia Hart. It contains information on how to do interviews with family as well as lists of questions. There are also a number of very good resources available on the internet. There is a list of suggested questions at Louisiana State University.

It was the table chat about my relations (some might have called it gossip) that got me hooked on family history. The stories I gathered from my grandmother and my aunts and uncles could not have been found in any archive or library. For me, this is family history.

Elveden House under construction, 1960

Alison Jackson Photography Collection, AJ 43-06

We were at the Heritage Roundtable last week where the subject was Calgary’s architectural history. I learned a lot from the presenters, about historic building styles, the amazing resources available at the Canadian Architectural Archives at the U of C and about historic building research. But the talk that really opened my eyes was David Down’s presentation about Calgary’s Modernist architecture. In the course of my research I often see that magnificent old buildings were torn down, especially in the urban renewal schemes of the 1960s and I wonder what could have possessed the planners of the day to allow the destruction of such historic properties. However, I sometimes look at buildings like the Calgary Board of Education across the street from us or the Centennial Planetarium and wonder “how could the planners of the day have allowed those concrete bunkers to be built?” I should really be ashamed of myself, I guess. We often don’t appreciate the things of our day. It is only when we look back, with the advantage of hindsight, that we can see the elegance and beauty of contemporary architecture.

I was exercising my newfound eyes as I rode to work through the West LRT construction. I have watched as the overpass for the train was built, using that very cool mobile crane and the process certainly fascinated me. But looking at the structure itself, I see a kind of elegance and lightness in the fluted pillars and the sculpted concrete of the overpass itself. The pillars, with their delicate reeding, remind me a little of some columns seen in Egypt (like these at Edfu - or maybe I’m just dreaming?)

The question was raised about what we will consider “heritage” in the next century. Will we look at the new City Water Services building or the Bow building and see a historic site worth saving or will we ask ourselves: “What on earth were they thinking?” In any case, I am going to find out more about Calgary’s modern architecture by having a look at some of the books we have here on the subject. I think I’ll start with Calgary Modern, 1947-1967 by Geoffrey Simmins and Calgary Architecture: the Boom Years, 1972-1982 by Pierre Guimond. Both are available in the CHFH collection on the 4^th floor at the Central Library as well as in the regular collection.