Walk along 9 Avenue SE in Calgary past the back side of the Deane House, and you go right past a one room squared-log cabin most people assume is a garden shed. It is not. The Hunt House is the oldest standing building in downtown Calgary, built by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1876, twelve months after F Troop of the Mounted Police arrived at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow.
What the building actually is
Squared log construction, rectangular footprint, single room, simple gable roof. The original chinking has been replaced more than once, the cedar shake roof has been redone, but the structural logs are the 1876 originals. The cabin sits roughly two hundred metres from where Fort Calgary was built the year before.
The HBC put the structure up to serve the trade traffic that converged on the new NWMP post. William Hunt, the family the building is named after, occupied it in the 1880s as a residence. By the 1890s the cabin had become a working class home in what was then the eastern edge of the new city.
Why it survived when nothing else from 1876 did
Calgary in the late nineteenth century was a city that demolished its history aggressively. Sandstone replaced wood. Brick replaced sandstone. Concrete replaced everything. The Hunt House survived for a very specific reason. It was too small to be worth knocking down for redevelopment, and it kept changing owners who used it for storage or as a back-lot building.
The building got formal heritage protection on January 18, 1978, listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places as Site ID 5140. The City of Calgary moved the building a short distance from its original location in the 1980s to consolidate the heritage cluster around Fort Calgary and the Deane House. That is a heritage choice that traded original location for active preservation. Worth knowing if you visit. The cabin you see is the original fabric on a slightly relocated footprint.
The cluster of survivors
The Hunt House is one of three pre-1900 buildings still standing in immediate downtown Calgary:
- The Hunt House from 1876.
- The Deane House from 1906 (the second-oldest in the area despite the gap).
- A handful of sandstone commercial buildings on Stephen Avenue from the 1880s and 1890s.
That is a thin survival record for a city of 1.4 million people. The Hunt House is the deepest root of that survival.
What an 1876 log cabin still tells you
The heritage buff opinion. The city’s downtown story usually starts with the railway in 1883 and the sandstone era after the 1886 fire on Stephen Avenue. The Hunt House predates all of that by seven years. It was here when the Mounted Police were still figuring out where to put the parade ground. It was here when the population of the entire settlement was less than a hundred people. It is still here, on the same general piece of ground, when Calgary is one of the largest cities in the country.
You can stand beside it and put your hand on a log that was cut and squared the same year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. That is the longest continuous physical link Calgary has to its founding moment. Worth a five minute detour if you happen to be near the Stampede grounds.
Related reading from the series. Fort Calgary and how a Mounted Police post became the city of Calgary. Stephen Avenue and how Calgary built its sandstone spine.
