Lougheed House

Our tour starts at the Lougheed House. Built in 1891 by James and Isabella Lougheed, two prominent citizens of early Calgary, this grand sandstone mansion became a home for the couple and their four children*.

The Lougheeds were a family of readers. As a girl, Isabella Hardisty read literary works at Wesleyan Ladies' College in Hamilton, Ontario. James became an avid reader as an adolescent growing up in Toronto's Cabbagetown. In 1892, a year after they built their Calgary home, James Lougheed was made honorary president of Calgary Literary and Debating Society. The Senator was known to quote Shakespeare, and the Lougheeds often gave the works of the Bard as a wedding gift instead of the more customary china and crystal. Their library contained ten thousand volumes. There were bookshelves on every floor of the house, and in 1907, the Lougheeds expanded the house to include a formal library on the lower level. Before the first public library opened in Calgary in 1912 a couple of blocks east of Lougheed House at Central Memorial Park, the Lougheeds' library was used as the city's reference library.

After Lady Lougheed died in 1936 their library was dispersed and sold at auction. We know of at least one of Lady Lougheed's books, an inscribed novel by Winnifred Eaton Reeve, otherwise known as Onoto Watanna. This book found its way into the Special Collections at the University of Calgary. That book, that signed book, was the inspiration for the exhibit Storied City.

The Lougheeds and their house were also represented on the literary page. The house is mentioned in Isabel Paterson's 1916 Calgary novel The Shadow Riders. She calls it "that quaint old baronial castle uptown." In the 1930s an unpublished story by Winnifred Eaton Reeve mentions a family modelled after the Lougheeds. Here is a bit from that story called "Tough Girl":

"The Catherwells were highly respected and important people in the city of Graytown. Mrs. Catherwell, whose personality dominated so many social and welfare clubs of the city, was credited with having 'made' her husband. Besides being an esteemed ornament of the legal profession, Norman Catherwell was a member of numerous lodges, fraternal societies, and organizations."

That's an excerpt from the story "Tough Girl" by Winnifred Reeve.

A woman much like Lady Lougheed shows up as the protagonist in Flos Jewell Williams' 1950 novel Fold Home. In that story, the narrator is the septuagenarian widow of a senator, has Indigenous ancestry, lives in a grand home, and like Lady Lougheed, is facing economic and hard times. Flos Jewell Williams was a novelist who started writing in 1920s Calgary, and she had a special interest in exploring women's lives on the page. Fold Home is a very interesting novel about this elderly Calgary woman modelled on, I believe, Lady Lougheed.

[audio transcript]

*The Lougheeds actually had six children: Clarence, Norman, Edgar, Douglas, Dorothy, and Marjorie.

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