A Peep into the Past pg 18 Vol. 2 Gordon and Belle Hall
A ‘Stately Old Lady’, the Rebekah Hall on main street in the town of Cochrane was built around the year 1900, the exact date is not known. There are few buildings of this age left in Cochrane. Whether it was the first hall in Cochrane is not clear, as the Howard Block was built about the same time and had a dance hall upstairs.
The Rebekah Hall was built and owned by an Orange Lodge, called Mount View Loyal Orange Lodge #1813 of Cochrane, and was of course known as the Orange Hall. The Oddfellows formed a lodge here in February 1912 and had their meetings in the Orange Hall. The rent was around $15 per month when things got too tough they would rent a room in the Howard Block and move. During the First World War, times were tough. Electric lights were just appearing so when you vacated a room or whatever, you rolled up the wire and took your lights too, and had them hooked up at the new place.
When my family arrived here in 1923, the Orange Hall was the hub of social life – dances, minstrel shows, Christmas parties for the kids, and concerts were held there. Then motion pictures were coming into vogue, so the Orangemen built the front of the hall out to the sidewalk, making about an extra 10 feet long, and adding two extra rooms to the side with a big room up stairs The reason for all this was to get space to put a room that was completely lined in case of fire. The local electric current was not strong enough for the projector, so Mr. Sharpe of Sharpe’s Theatre Supplies Calgary had a Delco plant in the back of his old Dodge car. It sat out front of the hall with a cable going up and through one of the windows and into the tin room. They were the old silent films, and we saw the Dempsey-Tunney fights. Charlie Chaplin in the Gold Rush, etcetera.
In 1934, when I joined the Oddfellows, we met in the Masonic Hall, in 1936 the Orange Hall came up at a tax sale, and we bought the Old Girl and lot for $200. The hall at this time was heated by wood and coal stoves, and remember the first supper the lodge members had in their new hall-it was in February 1937. We had cooked the food and turkey ourselves. The temperature outside was about 20 below zero. We ate supper with our overshoes and overcoats on and the steam from the cooking filled the hall.
In 1937, J. D. Curran, a local artist and oldtimer of the area and a relative Andisons, painted two huge pictures for the hall, one was at the back of the a stage and was later ruined by water. The other was painted on a canvas and was the stage curtain as it rolled up and down on a pole across the sage When the stage was taken out, the canvas was framed on the north wall of the hall, where it hangs today. It is a painting of the Three Sisters mountains at Canmore – Curran was 86 years old at this time.
At the start of the Second World War, a platoon of soldiers or militia was formed in Cochrane, named the Second Battalion Calgary Highlanders. The hall was offered to them by the Oddfellows to store rifles and equipment in and drill in the winter months – this went on for about four years.
The old hall has seen much of Cochrane’s past history, her back is bent, her floors are warped, the roof leaks, the doors don’t fit too well, but after about 90 years, who cares.
