Bowness. Our Village in the Valley

I just read a fascinating book called Bowness. Our Village in the Valley, which tells the story of Bowness, now part of Calgary, from its origins until the present time.

I have lived in Bowness since 1975 and have always been interested in its history. There's something special about Bowness and Bownesians, maybe because it was a separate town for so long. I met Peter FitzGerald-Moore once, I think the last mayor of Bowness, and this too encouraged me to find out more about the place I lived in.

Bowness Our Village in the Valley is a treasure-trove of information. It was published by the Bowness Historical Society in 2005 and has almost 600 pages of text and photos documenting the development of Bowness from its origins as a planned garden community (Bowness Estates) in 1911 to its becoming a village, then a town and finally being annexed by the City of Calgary in 1964. About half of the book consists of the family stories of people who settled in Bowness in the first half of the twentieth century.

I got the book from the Bowness Public Library, because it was unfortunately out of print. But it has been reprinted, along with a companion volume with more photos and information, called Bowness: Past and Present, 1911-2011.

My memory is not too good, so I started taking notes about things that interested me in the Bowness Our Village in the Valley book. But then I got the idea of putting the information onto a Google Map, so I could see exactly where things happened, where people lived, where the stores and theatres and parks and farms were. The book contains several historical maps, which made it easier.

Creating an On-line Map

So I made a user-created map on Google maps. I called it Historical Bowness and I made it public so anyone can see it. I started adding placemarks for businesses and homes and schools and churches, and the street names used before annexation. I shaded in areas of interest such as Bowness Park and the Bowness Flying Field which was the first airport in the Calgary area, and the Soldiers' Settlement where the government settled returning Veterans after the Second World War.

Soon I realized I could not only add all this information, but using the side panel on the left I could organize it historically, so you can access things either geographically on the map, or chronologically the side panel. Unfortunately, when you have a lot of placemarks and other annotations on a map, Google splits it into two or more pages, and moving stuff from one page to the other doesn't always work well. So in order to get the chronological order, which I think is useful, I had to make two different maps. Most of the information is in Historical Bowness, but street names from before the annexation to Calgary are included in Bowness Street Names in the 1950s. Click on the links to go to the maps in a separate tab in your browser.

I couldn't use just Bowness as the address for this blog because it was already taken by someone in Bowness-in-Windermere, in England, which is the village our Bowness was probably named after. But the part of Bowness I live in, near what was Main Street, east of the CPR tracks, used to be called Critchley, so this blog is called BownessandCritchley.blogspot.com

A Brief History of Bowness

Here are a few extra facts about Bowness which I wasn't able to fit into the maps:

Bowness was the brain child of an English Solicitor turned real estate developer, John Hextall, who had moved out to Calgary in 1908, just as the city was expanding rapidly. Calgary had begun life as a fort in 1875, had become a town in 1884, just after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway line, and a city in 1894.

By the second decade of the twentieth century it was expanding rapidly: in 1911 for example, more than 2600 building permits were issued, for a value of $13 million. This was the year Hextall bought the Bowness Ranche, a parcel of almost 2500 acres, situated a few miles west of Calgary.

Hextall moved remarkably quickly to develop his land. He had a bridge built across the Bow River, to provide access from Calgary, and subdivided 1724 acres into lots which he advertised as Bowness Estates. He then negotiated a deal with the city of Calgary to extend the streetcar service from the city centre into Bowness over his bridge, donating two islands on the Bow to the City for use as a park, soon to be known as Bowness Park.

In 1952, Bowness had a mainly working class population of 900.