Remembering the man behind Prince's Island Park, 100 years after his death
'Calgary wouldn't be what it is without him,' says local historian
One large urban park just north of downtown Calgary gets its name from a historical figure who left a lasting impact on the city.
Often mistakenly called Princess Island Park, its actual name is Prince's Island Park, named after Quebec-born Peter Anthony Prince. Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of Prince's death.
Calgary-based historian Harry Sanders chatted with CBC Radio host Angela Knight of the Calgary Eyeopener on Friday about the effect Prince had on the city.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
CBC: So Peter Prince wasn't born here — how did he end up here?
Harry Sanders: He came here on vacation in 1885 and liked it, and came back the following year and stayed. But it was a business that really brought him.
He was born in 1836 in Quebec in Trois-Rivières, and his journey from there to here was by way of the United States.
He worked as a millwright in Ontario, also was a hotel man, a lumber man. And then he moved down to Chicago and then to Eau Claire, Wis. … where he worked for a lumber company. And then he was among a group of businessmen who wanted to set up in Calgary. He'd been here. He liked the place.
In 1886, he formed a partnership with Isaac Kendall Kerr, another Canadian working in the lumber industry in Eau Claire, Wis., and they set up the Eau Claire and Bow River Lumber Company in Calgary.
They set up the industrial plant, but they also brought a whole bunch of Scandinavians, most of them Norwegians, from Eau Claire, Wis. to build their own homes and create a neighbourhood for themselves within walking distance of their place of work.
That's the origin of our Eau Claire neighbourhood in Calgary.
CBC: So that's how he became the lumber baron of Calgary. Was that his only claim to fortune, or was he involved in other things?
HS: He was walking in downtown Calgary at night in 1887, the year after he got here, and slipped off the wooden boardwalk and fell down in the mud, and resolved right then to provide electric power to Calgary so that we would have street lighting.
Well, it's probably an apocryphal story, and by then we already had the Calgary Electric Lighting company … [but] he created the Calgary Water Power Company. And eventually, within a few years, he got the contract to supply all of the power for Calgary.
He had other investments in a newspaper, in a flour mill, iron foundry. So all in all, an industrialist. You can think of him as the Citizen Kane of Calgary.
CBC: Do we know what he was like as a human being?
HS: There are a few clues.
The historian of Heritage Park, the late Vera Burns, wrote an unpublished memoir about her time at Heritage Park. She's got a passage about the Prince House, and in the course of that project in 1967, she got to know Peter Prince's granddaughter, Mrs. Wise.
Here's an extract from Vera Burns about Peter Prince:
"Peter Prince was Papa Prince to Calgarians, but seemed to be fairly stern at home. Mrs. Wise (the granddaughter) said that the family would visit him after church on Sunday morning, and he received them in the entrance hall with the parlour door closed and allowed them to stay only 10 minutes. He was a short man and quite portly, and his supper always consisted of bread and milk."
We also know from the record that he was a generous philanthropist here in Calgary. Peter Prince was Roman Catholic, and he donated to the Lacombe Home, which is now the campus of St. Mary's University. He also donated generously to the Holy Cross Hospital, which was the Catholic hospital here for many years until it closed a few decades ago.
CBC: Quite a legacy. You mentioned Prince's Island Park — now, we think of it as Prince's Island, but there's actually a channel cut in there.
HS: Part of Prince's lumber operation was the physical plant in the Eau Claire neighbourhood by the river, but the other part of it was a massive concession that his company got from the government to cut trees in the mountains. So he and his men would go up to the mountains, cut all these trees and then float them down the Bow River.
Up until the age of 69, he would supervise these log drives. And the log drives continued up until the mid-1940s down the Bow River.
They cut a channel so that they could capture those logs and haul them into the mill, and that created Prince's Island. It was known as a park, possibly as early as 1908. People would go there, there was the Prince's Island Tennis Club.
Prince died in 1925. His industries lasted until after the Second World War. Then after the Second World War, the land was sold to the city.
I think the family donated what is now Prince's Island and the whole thing was changed. The island became a park and the industrial site became the civic garage.
Calgary wouldn't be what it is without him.
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