C.W. Gross is the 2021 Historian in Residence

In my introductory post as Historian in Residence for Heritage Calgary and the Calgary Public Library, I shared my journey in tracking down the quarry from which Calgary’s Historic City Hall came. Through a combination of literature in the Calgary’s Story collection at the Central Library, online research, and inquiring with knowledgeable people, I was able to pay a visit to the J.A. Lewis Quarry on Beddington Creek, alongside the Nose Creek Pathway behind the Country Hills Golf Club.

This was not, however, the only quarry to be found in Calgary. There were at least 15 documented quarries in the city and surrounding area, some of which are easy to find and many of which have been lost to time. I’ve created a Google Map below which identifies the quarry locations:

Some of the earliest were adjacent to Fort Calgary. The Orr Quarry was established in 1886 in Bridgeland, any remnant of which is now buried beneath housing and other buildings.  On the south side of the railway bridge across the Elbow River between Inglewood and Downtown was the Elbow River Quarry. Established by John McCallum in 1895, sandstone was quarried from the outcrops at the northern tip of Scotsman’s Hill. This quarry likely extended along the river from about 9th St. to Macdonald Ave.

In marked contrast is the Oliver Quarry that once ran across modern Crowchild Trail beneath Sunalta School from 1901 to 1915. It is very easy to find because it has since been enshrined as Oliver Quarry Park. Wedged between Crowchild and 22nd St. SW is a sliver of greenspace that has been landscaped beyond recognition as a quarry, but nonetheless has had its history preserved in its name and interpretive signage at the park’s entrance. It was twist of fate that had Sunalta School built out of the very sandstone being quarried just below it. It was completed in 1912.

At the height of the Oliver Quarry’s operations, they employed two steam shovels, two steam derricks, two horse derricks, three steam drills, an electric gang saw, and 40 men.  An average day ran 10 hours, and a stonemason worked six and a half days a week, with the half-day off for Sunday morning church services. Pay rates at the Oliver Quarry ran $0.65/hour for stone cutters, $0.45/hour for drillers, $0.40/hour for quarrymen, and $0.35/hour for labourers. Sandstone blocks of about 70 cubic feet sold for $0.01/foot and rubble sold for $7.00/cord. A cord is approximately 128 cubic feet. Adjusted for inflation, that $7.00 cord would cost $164.97 today. The stone cutter earned $15.32 an hour in 2021 dollars.

Further west lay Edworthy Park. The Canadian Pacific Railway established a quarry here in 1885, to be followed by several more placed by Thomas Edworthy in 1888/89. Most of these are recessed into the hillside, shrouded in foliage and otherwise not easily accessible. However, a quick look on Google Maps for the tell-tale geometry of human activity revealed a quarry at the top of the access road off Bow Trail. After Oliver Quarry Park, it was a relatively short jaunt to visit this site as well. And while there, my wife and I ended up having an interesting conversation with a photographer who had also tracked down the quarry!

Some quarries, however, were not as forthcoming.

One of my duties as Historian in Residence is consulting with members of the public who are doing research of their own. These are always interesting and, in waves of quarantine and lockdown, a very welcome opportunity to meet with new people, even if virtually. Several of these consultations have had to do with Calgary’s sandstone quarries.

Perhaps the most troubling was John McCallum’s second quarry at McHugh Bluff in Sunnyside… Troubling because there is very little evidence of this quarry having existed. It is known of, but there are virtually no maps of its exact location that either myself or my inquirer could find. There aren’t even clear photographs of the quarry, or of the Barwis Quarry that would have been further east along the slope that now supports the north end of the Centre St. Bridge. An informal map of Calgary in 1905 drafted in 2005 gives the approximate known location. Further confounding it are drill cores excavated for various building projects that place the sandstone bedrock tens of feet below surface level.

The best clue were maps breaking down the area into lots. A “lot 43” in historic maps of Sunnyside lines up with the approximate quarry location in the 2005 map. Is this truly the site? An in-person investigation revealed… Nothing. The area is now so heavily landscaped that the quarry location can only be inferred by the fact of landscaping and presence of storm drains. These storm drains may be part of a groundwater mitigation strategy, as Calgary’s sandstone is a well-known aquifer.

This lack of textual evidence is unfortunate because McCallum’s quarry, dubbed the Sunny Side Freestone Quarry, has one of the most amusing stories associated with a Calgary quarry. In 1896, the globe was captivated by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. On the shores of Lake Michigan rose a gleaming city of white plaster and electric light. It was a show of many firsts, including the world’s first Ferris Wheel, and it has left its mark on our culture to this day. For example, its row of rides and sideshow attractions has forever lent its name to fairs and exhibitions across the world: the Midway Plaisance. It was to the World’s Columbian Exposition that McCallum shipped a sandstone bassinette so large that it needed to be carried by railway flatcar. 

Another consultation had us tracking down the Butlin Quarry in Britannia. Joseph Butlin was born in 1855 in Kingston, Ontario but arrived in this area as a North West Mounted Police constable in 1875. He retired in 1880 to establish a ranch along the Elbow River, though he later joined Steele’s Scouts in 1885 and eventually moved on to the Hobema Reserve in 1912 where he acted as Indian Agent until 1921. He passed away in Morningside in 1924 and is buried at the Wetaskiwin Cemetery.

His ranch along the Elbow River included some prime sandstone outcrop that the city’s 1885 Directory measured at “300 yards… about six feet in depth.” It added that “Mr. Butlin as owner of this valuable quarry is certainly to be congratulated as possessing a real ‘bonanza.’” Butlin would advertise his stone as “equal to any in North America.” 

Luckily, by this point my quarry-finding skills had much improved. A Google Map examination and an afternoon visit to Sandy Beach Park later, the likely location had been found. A too-well defined cliff edge gives it all away. The Butlin Quarry was in the treed area along the hillside above the Riverdale Dog Park. Across the Elbow River, above the Sandy Beach off-leash river access, is an equivalent outcrop of sandstone to that which Butlin quarried.

It is one thing to track down quarries, but why are they here to begin with? How did this region come to have these massive beds of sandstone?

As I discussed in my previous post on City Hall, Calgary’s bedrock is split between four geologic formations. At the base are the Scollard and Willow Creek Formations, over which lie the Paskapoo and Porcupine Hills Formations respectively. Calgary’s geology is fairly complex because it is at the meeting point between these four formations and they don’t parse out in an obvious way. Together they tell a story of regional ecology and climate changing over time, in the wake of one of the most devastating extinction events in Earth’s history.

On a very bad day 66 million years ago, an 81 km diameter asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. This impact capped off centuries of volcanism, continental drift, and ecological change that spelled doom for the dinosaurs, flying pterosaurs, marine reptiles like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, and nautilus-like ammonites that dominated the planet for the previous 185 million years. The Scollard and Willow Creek Formations straddle this event. Upstream of Drumheller along the Red Deer River is the telltale sign of this event: a thin dark layer layer of stone called the “K-Pg Boundary” that is rich in the celestial mineral iridium and minute quartz “shocked” by the impact. Above this layer are found the remains of smaller reptiles, turtles, crocodiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals that inherited a new world.

In the upper part of the Scollard Formation and into the Paskapoo we also find the fossils of plants more common to warmer climates today. Leaves of the dawn redwood – a relative of modern redwoods and giant sequoia – are found in these layers. It was thought to be extinct until a grove was discovered in China in the 1940’s. Living dawn redwoods grow to and average of 37 m (120 ft) and, similar to larch and bald cypress, will drop their needles in autumn.     

Other plant remains found in the Paskapoo Formation include various marsh ferns, katsura trees, sycamore and other maples, elm, birch, cypress, hackberry, buckeye, dogwood, aspen, and ginko. In addition to turtles and crocodiles, reptiles were survived by a group called “champsosaurs.” These reptiles were very similar to crocodiles, with crocodile-like bodies and elongated snouts, despite not being very closely related to them. Champsosaurs lived in a very similar ecological niche to crocodiles today, and thus evolved very similar adaptations. This process of unrelated animals evolving in similar ways is called “convergent evolution.” 

The diversity of mammals plummeted with the extinction event 66 million years ago, but the big winners were a group called “multituberculates.” In fact, multituberculates are the most successful group of mammals of all time. These rodent-like mammals first evolved in the Jurassic Period, over 160 million years ago, and dominated the mammal family for 100 million years. Though also hard hit by the meteorite impact, they rapidly diversified into the many empty ecological niches. It was only after multituberculates started to decline around 56 million years ago that small, insignificant placental mammals could really begin to diversify and take over. Nevertheless, evidence of early primates, lemurs, ungulates, and carnivorous placental mammals have also been found in the Paskapoo.  Among the largest mammals were a now-extinct group called the “pantodonts.”

It is a very lucky fossil collector who finds the remains or traces of these animals in the rocks underlying Calgary. More common are leaves, petrified wood, and the shells of clams and oysters that filled these prehistoric rivers. The sand supplying the sandstone came from the Rocky Mountains, filling river channels and spilling over the banks in flood events. Yes, flooding was as much a problem for Calgarians of 60 million years ago as of today. These rock formations also show a similar climate regime to modern times. The Scollard and Paskapoo Formations show evidence of a slightly cooler and wetter regime, with additional coal and mudstone. The Willow Creek and Porcupine Hills Formations, on the other hand, show a slightly warmer and drier environment, with calcite nodules, calcite cement, and rusty “red beds.” Though the average temperature today is much cooler than it was 60 million years ago, we still see this same system today. North of Calgary are cooler, wetter conditions more conducive to parkland and boreal forest while south of Calgary are the warmer, drier conditions of the bald prairie and rolling Porcupine Hills.   

Today there is only one active quarry for Porcupine Hills sandstone. It still finds use as a decorative stone and as cladding for buildings, but its utility as a building stone was quickly called into question. Paskapoo/Porcupine Hills sandstone is soft and easy to quarry, which made it an attractive target for entrepreneurs. It was also known to harden up with exposure to air, mitigating its softness. But it never got hard enough. We even see the erosional marks of the 2013 flood along the historic buildings of Mission and Downtown.

Calgary sandstone was ultimately found to be too soft, and the proliferation of other materials like Indiana limestone took attention away from our native rock. By 1915, there were no active quarries in the city. The sandstone era had come to an end.

C.W. (Cory) Gross is a professional educator with over 20 years of experience in museums and heritage. His primary field is the geology of Western Canada and its intersection with Indigenous, settler, and immigrant histories. In early 2020 he published his first book, The Ice Age in Western Canada.

The Historian in Residence is presented in partnership with Calgary Public Library.