Staff at St. Albert’s museum will go for a stroll next week to help residents dial in to the history of the telephone.
The Musée Héritage Museum’s public walking tour series resumes July 3. The tours see museum staff and volunteers take about a dozen guests out on walks through St. Albert as they discuss topics not typically covered at the museum.
Expect a leisurely one-or-two-hour walk in and around the Sturgeon River, the Father Lacombe Chapel, or downtown St. Albert, museum curator Martin Bierens said. Topics include historic buildings, Indigenous landscapes, public art, and the Sturgeon.
Food and phones
Bierens said he was personally interested in the July 10 talk on telephones, which corresponds with the 140th anniversary of the first long-distance phone call in Alberta.
The call happened in 1885 between the office of Edmonton telegraph operator Alex Taylor and the home/store of St. Albert businessman Henry McKenney, Black Robe’s Vision reports. Taylor wanted to improve communications between St. Albert and Edmonton and convinced the federal government to build a 14-kilometre phone line between the two communities. He also ordered two phones from Britain, placing one in his office and the other in McKenney’s store.
After a few test calls in December 1884, Alberta’s first official phone call happened on Jan. 3, 1885. On one end of the line was Taylor, who wished St. Albert “a very happy New Year.” On the other was a rather verbose Narcisse St. Jean, who replied, “The people of St. Albert congratulate the people of Edmonton on telephone communications being established between the two places and wish the clergy and people a happy New Year.”
St. Albert’s phone caused mass panic in the Edmonton region a few months later during the North-West Resistance, where battles between federal and Indigenous forces had put Albertans on edge.
On May 11, 1885, someone used McKenney’s phone to report 1,500 First Nations people had killed everyone in Fort Saskatchewan and burned it to the ground. This set off a stampede of people looking to shelter behind the walls of Fort Edmonton — one that only ended when a very-much-alive man from Fort Saskatchewan arrived and asked what all the fuss was about.
“It was the first viral news story that happened here in St. Albert,” Bierens said, and may have contributed to McKenney’s decision to remove the phone a week later.
July 31 and Aug. 21 will see museum staff host tours on food history in St. Albert. Bierens said these tours will include discussions of First Nations and Métis food gathering, agricultural efforts by the Oblates, and St. Albert’s many community cookbooks. Those cookbooks offer valuable insights into day-to-day life in St. Albert, he noted.
The tours run Thursdays at various times until late September, and cost $3 each. Visit www.artsandheritage.ca/pages/events-tours for details.
