Nellie McClung House

We’re at the McClung House at 15th Ave and 7th St Southwest, a couple of blocks away from the Lougheed House. This house was built in 1907, in what was then a comfortable middle-class neighbourhood, filled with wood-frame houses, much like Nellie McClung's. Nellie moved here in 1923 when her husband was transferred from Edmonton. She was 50 years old, mother of five children, and an Opposition Liberal MLA. She was also an established and celebrated author.

McClung lived in this house for almost 10 years, from 1923 to 1932, and these were really productive writing years for her. In her second floor bedroom, she wrote five works of fiction, many articles, and essays. She was also an active member of the Calgary literary community, serving on the executive of national and local branches of the Canadian Authors Association. She often hosted executive meetings and literary gatherings in her home. She forged lasting friendships with local writers like novelist Laura Goodman Salverson, who lived in Calgary in the mid-1920s, and the poet Elaine Catley. McClung also belonged to the Calgary Women's Literary Club, and of course that's a famous organization founded in 1906 in Annie Davidson's living room a few blocks east of us on 13th Avenue, near where the Hotel Arts is now. McClung was a member of that group and that literary club still continues to this day in contemporary Calgary. Nellie's church was Wesley Methodist, a block or so away from her home on 7th Street. That building is now the Mamdani Opera Centre. At Wesley, she was a leading member of the Good Cheer Club. Fifteen years after Nellie died in 1951, club members honoured her role by donating sixteen of her books, many of them signed, to the Glenbow Library. If you're ever doing research at the Glenbow Library, now located at the University of Calgary, ask to see a few of Nellie McClung's books and you might find one that's signed by her. McClung left Calgary for Victoria in 1932, but she returned to this house, this Calgary house of hers, in her 1945 memoir The Stream Runs Fast.

I want to talk a little bit before we leave her house about McClung Avenue. Perhaps you've been wandering around this part of the Beltline and have seen the street signs. I'm going to tell you the story about how this came to be. In 1951, the year McClung died, the city rebuffed a proposal by local writers to name 15th Avenue in McClung's honour. The city cited its policy, to quote, "to name things only where they are not straight and cannot be numbered", and there was no budging off of that policy. In the 1970s, the house was saved from demolition by its owner, a reader named Bessie Smith. As a child, Smith read McClung's classic prairie novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny, and she was fiercely protective of McClung's house. Her efforts paid off. In 1979, the province dedicated the house a Provincial Historic Site. Fast forward to a couple of years ago, then poet laureate Derek Beaulieu campaigned to name a few city streets and alleys after deceased Calgary authors. He was successful on one account. In 2018, the city added Nellie McClung Avenue to street signs near the author's home. It's only one of a very small handful of literary markings in the city.

At least, literary markings to my knowledge. All of the ones I know of are in East Village, so next time you are walking around, head for Loft 112, there you will see the Rosemary Griebel Bookmark that was just unveiled a few months ago in the fall. It connects Calgary to Project Bookmark, Canada's national literary trail. At the back entrance to City Hall, look down into the sidewalk and you will see a bronze plaque featuring a passage from a poem by Micheline Maylor, who was poet laureate a few years ago. And, if you walk over towards the skipping bridge and look down again into the sidewalk, you'll see a very large circle in pavement, and that's called The Wheel of Women, featuring 30 women that made a significant contribution to Calgary society and culture. There are eight writers included in The Wheel of Women. Winnifred Eaton Reeve is one of them. We talk much more about her as we go along in this walk. Curiously, Nellie McClung is not featured in The Wheel of Women, but she does have a visible legacy in Calgary in her home on 15th Avenue, and now on the street sign on 15th Avenue. The replica of her home is at Heritage Park, the Famous Five Centre, and of course there is Nellie standing across from the performing arts centre with her colleagues in the sculpture Women are Persons. So, that's Nellie McClung.

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