Calgary & Southern Alberta

George King's post office and store, 1890.
The building was decorated in honour of the beginning of construction on the Calgary and Edmonton railway. Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection.

While Calgary owed its existence to the NWMP, its growth and development were due principally to the CPR. Even before the line was completed in August 1883, speculators and merchants pitched tents on the Elbow River in anticipation of its arrival. The railroad meant business. By linking Calgary to the metropolitan East, it enabled the cattle business and related manufacturing and processing operations to flourish. When civic leaders persuaded the CPR to locate its stockyards in Calgary in 1898, the boon to the local economy was immediate. It was estimated that by 1907 the yards were worth over one million dollars annually.

The CPR was significant to Calgary's economic development both as a generator of revenues in the local economy, and as the city's largest employer. On average, the freight yards switched 700 cars daily, and employed 300 men to handle and maintain equipment. Construction of the Horse Shoe Falls power project in 1910 by the Calgary Power Company provided the city with cheap power, and induced the CPR to establish its major repair facilities at Ogden. The Ogden Shops, employing over 1,200 men in 1913, were one of the most important elements in Calgary's economic development before the 1945 oil boom. The CPR contributed further to the local economy by locating the headquarters of its large irrigation projects in Calgary.

In addition to being the city's largest employer, the railway greatly affected Calgary's physical development through its placement of spurs and rail facilities. Evidence of the CPR's importance was visible everywhere, from the railway station and freight yards to the imposing CPR Hotel, named the Palliser, which dominated Calgary's skyline for over half a century. Calgary's exclusive residential districts, like Mount Royal and Sunalta, owed their existence and prestige to the railway. Even the townsite of Calgary, originally on the Elbow River, was relocated to the railway's section, three-quarters of a mile west of the initial site.

The railway also encouraged land development and speculation in Calgary. When local citizens speculated on the construction of additional railways to compete with the CPR, their visions of limitless prosperity and expansion aroused the same excitement that major oil strikes produced decades later. Land prices in 1914, for example, soared to $1,000 per frontage foot at proposed terminal sites near the police barracks and St. Mary's Cathedral.