Esplanade Archives
The Tweed residence shortly after construction.
Thomas and Helen Tweed arrived in Medicine Hat in May of 1883, with their two children, Jean, nine, and Harry, three. Lured by the opening of the West due to the expanding Canadian Pacific Railroad, the Tweed family came before the rail was laid. The Tweeds made the journey all the way from Cornwall, Ont. by horse and covered wagon, carrying goods to set up a store for the soon to be community. Thomas and a business partner set up a general store in a tent. Almost overnight, a temporary tent town of around 200 people sprang up. At that time, there was no running water, no electricity, no school for daughter Jean to attend and no real bank for Thomas’s business. The early pioneers adapted well and those who stayed prospered.
In 1887, Helen had another child, named Thomas. Thomas was most likely born at home, the Tweeds by this time living in a modest frame house. It would be another two years before our first hospital opened.
Thomas Tweed Sr. was an adventuresome man, having participated in the Red River Expedition, and an ambitious one as well. He and his partner John Ewart soon set up a second general store in Lethbridge and then established one of the first large scale ranching operations in the district. He served as Medicine Hat’s MLA for the District of Assiniboia, NWT, before Alberta became a province.
In 1898, Thomas hired contractor Harry Yuill to build a grand house on the Esplanade, in an area then known as the Herald Survey. At the west end of town, the Herald Survey was outside the western town limits, the boundary being the West Road Allowance, today Division Ave. S.W. Tweed’s Queen Anne Victorian house cost around $4,000, which was a tidy sum in 1898. Because it was outside the town limits, the Tweeds had a windmill on the property to provide water and irrigation. There was plenty of room for a windmill because the Tweed property at that time covered four lots, extending to the river.
Thomas Sr. died unexpectedly in 1906. Son Thomas Jr. was killed in action overseas in 1918. Jean became a top-notch student and attended college in Brantford, Ont. Harry served as an alderman in 1907-1908 and continued in his father’s business for a while before moving to Winnipeg. Helen, despite her personal losses, never returned East. For 40 years until her death in 1928, she remained in the Esplanade home, re-addressed in 1914 as 56 Division Ave. SW. She was known affectionately by the neighbourhood kids as “Granny Tweed.”
Three other First Street homes, the Ewart Duggan house, the Crawford Dietrich house and the Cousins residence are designated and protected under the Alberta Historic Resources Act. Despite years of restoration, the Tweed House is being considered for removal. If relocated, the Tweed home will lose its heritage value and the First Street South Municipal Historic Area will lose an important landmark.
This column was researched and composed by Sally Sehn, a member of the Heritage Resources Committee of the City of Medicine Hat.
