Glenora of the early 20th century was a magical place
Posted: November 03, 2009Peggy O’Connor Farnell’s Glenora of the early 20th century was a magical place. “Goodness, it was the edge of town! There were no roads, no services and it was bush from our place west to 142nd Street.”
When I interviewed Mrs. Farnell in 1999, she was 84, her vision clouded by a bout with glaucoma. But when she talked about growing up in Old Glenora, she saw it with clarity and precision.
She remembered riding her bike to school along a gravel path that her mother called Athabasca and which is today 102nd Avenue. “There used to be a little funny piece of pavement just wide enough for the streetcar tracks,” Peggy recalled. “The rest was dirt.”
When Mrs. Farnell sold her Glenora home in 1997, it marked the end of a grand 83-year chapter of Edmonton history. The Graenon, as her parents called their home, had been in her family since it was built on St. George’s Crescent in 1914.
The 3,152 square foot home was commissioned by Peggy’s father, former chief justice George Bligh O’Connor, and his wife Margaret – a journalist and one time theatre critic for the Edmonton Bulletin. “My mother saw the design in an American magazine and said, ‘That’s the house for us,’” Peggy recalled.
Designed by a Virginia architect, the $10,000 house was custom built over five months beginning in April 1914 by the firm of Morrison and Fairlie. W.A. Morrison was Mrs. O’Connor’s brother.
“It was the only thing Morrison and Fairlie ever built,” Peggy said. “The war started in August and, like a lot of young men, they joined the services and never came back.”
Peggy’s mother called the house The Graenon, after the Irish word meaning “sunny place.” It wasn’t long after the O’Connors moved into the house that a new ray of sunshine came into their lives when Peggy was born. Peggy remembered evenings laying in her bed in her room and hearing the far away music from the Glenora Skating and Tennis Club (later the Royal Glenora Club). And she laughed recalling adventures in the house’s richly panelled library. “Sometimes, before we put a screen over the opening, bats used to fly down the chimney and into the room. That generated a lot of excitement.”
Peggy left Edmonton during the Second World War, working for the British Intelligence Service in such far-flung locations as Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Haiti and New York. After the war, she married Gerald Farnell, a bomber pilot.
The couple moved to Edmonton in 1952. Five years later, her father died and, when her mother passed on in 1966, the family of five (including three boys) moved into The Graenon.
For years, Peggy worked as a librarian at the University of Alberta. Around the time she retired, the Old Glenora Historical Society decided to compile a history of the neighbourhood as a project to mark the 40th anniversary of Glenora School. Peggy was enlisted and it became a retirement project.
“After all those years of reading everybody else’s writing, I really wanted to write,” she told me. “I wanted to tell what it was like, and make it readable.”
Once she got into it, she just didn’t stop. The volume was written over the course of one summer and, when it published in 1984, it was an immediate hit. The 750 copies all sold within just a few months. “We never thought it would be such a popular little book,” Peggy conceded.
By the late 1990s, copies were as rare as hen’s teeth. Janice Prodor was one of dozens of people who tried in vain to source a copy of the book. “I put my name on a waiting list at Bjarne’s Books, I asked around, but there were no copies,” she said.
When it came time to discuss projects to mark the 50th anniversary of the Glenora
Community League in 1999, reprinting the book was at the head of the wish list. Janice served as chair of the book project committee and the second edition of the book, 1,000 copies, was released that summer.
The community history was again a hit, selling especially well to the neighbourhood’s many new residents, discovering Glenora’s history for the first time. For her part, Peggy was delighted that her book, with its invigorating chapters on early settlement, the houses, the churches, the schools and characters like local bush pilots, was finding its way into so many new hands.
“I think the interest is there,” she smiled, grateful that her work was being discovered anew. “And, with all the characters and interesting buildings, it is a great story.”
Peggy is gone now, her rich and full life complete. But her great little book lives on. Told by one of Glenora’s first ladies, Old Glenora is a treasure worth keeping.
Copies of Old Glenora are $25 and are only available now through your Glenora Community League. The book may also be ordered by emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Article Reprinted with permission"Real Estate Weekly" .written by Lawrence Herzog
Peggy O'Connor Farnell, outside her beloved Old Glenora home The Graenon. Photo courtesy her family.
