The oldest building still standing in Alberta is a small white log chapel on a hill in St. Albert. It was built in 1861 by Father Albert Lacombe of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and you can walk past it on a normal Tuesday afternoon. Most Albertans do. The Father Lacombe Chapel is the kind of heritage site that hides in plain sight because the building is modest and the country has built up around it. Both things make it more interesting, not less.
1861 on the hill above the river
Father Lacombe arrived in the area that became St. Albert in 1861 with instructions from Bishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché to establish a Roman Catholic mission for the Métis community already living along the Sturgeon River. Lacombe picked the south slope of Mission Hill for the chapel. The location had three things going for it. Good drainage, a view that let the small Métis settlement see the chapel from below, and proximity to the existing river crossing.
The chapel itself
The 1861 structure is small. It is a rectangular log building roughly seven and a half metres by five metres, with a simple steeply pitched roof. The original cedar shake exterior has been refinished. The interior walls show the original squared logs. Nothing about the design was elaborate. It was built fast, by hand, in a single construction season, with materials from the country immediately around it.
Why this building survived when most others did not
Three reasons, all worth saying out loud.
- The chapel was small enough to be moved when development around it threatened the site.
- The Oblates of Mary Immaculate kept ownership of the structure for over a century and treated maintenance as a religious obligation.
- The City of St. Albert and the Government of Alberta both classified the site as worth preserving when development pressure intensified in the twentieth century.
The Alberta Register of Historic Places lists the chapel under ID 5004. It was designated a Provincial Historic Resource on June 2, 1983.
Father Lacombe himself
Lacombe is one of the founding figures of Catholic Alberta. He spoke Cree fluently, worked with Cree and Métis communities across the western half of the province for almost five decades, and is remembered today through the chapel, through the town of Lacombe, through dozens of schools and parishes, and through a long shelf of mission-era correspondence held in the Provincial Archives of Alberta. The 1861 chapel is the physical anchor for that whole biography.
Reading a one hundred and sixty four year old building
Here is the buff take. Alberta does not have many buildings older than a hundred and fifty years. Most of what we had has been replaced, burned, demolished, or moved off its original ground beyond recognition. The Father Lacombe Chapel is the rare survivor. It still sits on the hill where it was built. The view from the hill has changed almost entirely. The chapel has not. If you want to understand what early Alberta architecture actually looked like, before sawmills, before plate glass, before standardised building codes, you stand inside this chapel and look at the corners. The country produced the materials, the priest produced the labour, and the building has held up for one hundred and sixty four winters. That is a heritage exhibit worth a small detour.
Listed on the registry. Father Lacombe Chapel appears on the Canadian Register of Historic Places as Site ID 5004 and was designated a Provincial Historic Resource on June 2, 1983. The chapel is interpreted today by the Musée Héritage Museum in St. Albert.
Related reading from the series. The Bishop’s Palace and the institutional chapter that followed. Rundle’s Mission and Alberta’s first Protestant inland outpost.
