| Architect: Thomas Fuller, Chief architect of
the Dominion Department of Public Works.
Contractor: John Gillies McCallum
Original
Cost: $40,000
Construction Materials:
locally quarried
sandstone (each stone was about 16 inches thick and
weighed up to 400 pounds), brick internal petitions
Historical Highlights:
- prior to 1888
temporary court facilities were set up in a frame
immigrant shed!
- construction began
November 1888 on Calgary's first permanent
courthouse, a two-storey mansard-roofed building.
- first and largest
courthouse built in the Northwest Territories by
the Canadian government
- turned over to the
Province on a rental basis in 1907 with the move
from territorial to provincial judicial systems.
- Province bought the
building and the site in 1910 from the federal
government for $40,090.80.
- lawyer R.B.
Bennett, Prime Minister of Canada 1930-35,
practiced in the old courthouse in his early
years in Calgary.
- construction on a
second courthouse was completed in 1915 and the
1888 building converted into Northwest Mounted
Police facilities and jail
- subsequent uses
included; offices for the Highway Department, a
basement museum, Canadian Institute for the Blind
and Calgary Family Court
- Alderman Mary Dover
whose grandfather Colonel James F. Macleod sat as
a judge in the first courthouse, led the movement
to save the building. In 1957 she submitted a
petition signed by more than 16,000 Calgarians to
the Alberta government asking that the courthouse
be preserved as an historical site.
- demolished March
1958 (sandstone was offered to Cathedral Church
of the Redeemer to build a proposed extension but
church officials turned it down and it was
delivered to the Jubilee Auditorium grounds for
use in rock gardens)
- the cornerstone of
the 1888 structure was mounted on the wall in the
front foyer of Calgary's third courthouse, the
Court of Queen's Bench, built on the site in
1962.
|
Calgary's First Courthouse