The best view of Nellie McClung’s Calgary house is from the sidewalk. The City of Calgary’s heritage walk says the half-timbering, gables and tall chimneys show clearly from the north and east sides of 803 15 Avenue SW, and it describes the house as a private residence. That sidewalk is where the public record and the public experience of the place meet, and it’s a thinner meeting than a provincial historic resource deserves.
The record can’t agree on how old the house is. The Canadian Register of Historic Places says about 1900, and the City’s walk says 1907. McClung lived there from 1923, and Persons Day, October 18, marks the ruling that was won while she did.
Key facts
- The register lists the Nellie McClung House at 803 15 Avenue SW as built about 1900 in the Tudor Revival style and a Provincial Historic Resource since March 15, 1978, with McClung living there from 1923 to the mid-1930s.
- The City’s walk gives 1907 as the construction year and 1923 to 1935 as the years the McClung family lived in the house.
- The five women who brought the Persons Case filed their petition on August 27, 1927. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled on April 24, 1928 that women weren’t eligible for the Senate, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council reversed that on October 18, 1929, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia.
- Heritage Park runs the Famous 5 Centre of Canadian Women in a replica of McClung’s home.
She wrote upstairs while the Legislature sat in Edmonton
A Library and Archives Canada web archive describes a large second-floor bedroom that McClung used as her writing room. She held a seat in the Alberta legislature when she moved in, so her weeks ran on two clocks. Weekdays went to the capital, and weekends went to Calgary, her husband and two of their five children. She kept that commute up through her last three years as a member, which ended in 1926.
The register adds a small physical detail that’s easy to pass over. The spruce trees and ivy McClung planted herself sit on its list of elements worth protecting, right beside the oak and fir woodwork, the verandah with French doors and the fireplaces with wooden mantels.
The Persons Case ran entirely during her years in this house
Petition in 1927, defeat in 1928, reversal in 1929. By the dates in both the register and the City’s walk, McClung was living at 803 15 Avenue SW for all of it. Most plaques claim less. The petition, the loss and the win fit inside one address, and that address is a house a passer-by can’t enter.
A provincial house should not be taught through a copy
Heritage Park’s centre teaches the story well, as far as its page shows. The original, designated by the province in 1978, is where the teaching is hardest, because the building is lived in and the public can reach only the sidewalk.
The province should settle the date first. A heritage record with two construction dates can’t be cited with confidence, and the fix is a land titles search and a corrected entry. After that, a sidewalk panel on 15 Avenue giving the Persons Case dates and the address’s tie to them would teach a passer-by on the spot what the walking tour tells only to walkers. The record doesn’t say whether one already stands there. Calgary’s other records from McClung’s decades include Victoria School’s 1918 epidemic ward. The legal path the Famous Five opened ran as far as Catherine Fraser, the first woman appointed Chief Justice of any Canadian province.
Half-timbering, gables and tall chimneys show from the north and east sidewalks, and somewhere behind them is the upstairs room where she wrote.
