Written by: David Monteyne, Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Calgary
Between 1885 and 1930, the Dominion government built and operated about a dozen immigration halls in Alberta (and rented space for this purpose in a dozen more towns), from Lethbridge and Medicine Hat in the south to Grande Prairie and Peace River in the north. But what, exactly was an “immigration hall”?
An immigration hall was a place where the federal immigration branch provided free accommodations as well as advice to new arrivals from Europe, the United States and even eastern Canada. These prairie immigration halls were part of a nationwide building program, described in my recent book, for which the federal Department of Public Works designed and built: pier buildings in ports like Quebec City and Halifax (Pier 21, now the Canadian Museum of Immigration); immigrant detention hospitals; and quarantine stations on both coasts. Of all of these, the immigration halls were the most numerically significant, with more than 50 buildings erected across the three prairie provinces. The immigration hall was a newly invented building type, unique to Canada.
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