Rutherford House

Rutherford House was the home of the first Premier of Alberta, Alexander Cameron Rutherford, and his family. Today, it is designated as an Alberta historic site that offers visitors a glimpse of life in the early 20th century with costumed interpreters, guided tours and special events.

We visited Rutherford House last October during Alberta Culture Days.

It was very quiet and we didn’t see anyone there. We knocked on the door and a woman wearing an early 20th century style dress opened the door and greeted us. She explained a bit about the house and left us to explore by ourselves.

The house was quite big, but felt warm and cozy. It didn’t feel like a museum since there were no barriers and signs. It just felt like a family home.

We explored everything… the bedrooms, the hall, the library, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the pantries…. We also had a look inside the maid’s quarters at the top of a secret staircase next to the pantries.

In one of the bedrooms, there were a stack of colouring pages and a lot of colouring pencils on the table. Carla and Renan decided to do some colouring.

There were dresses and shoes in the closet, hair brushes and perfume bottles on the dresser, letters on the desk….

The pantries were full of pots and pans, kitchen tools, linens and food in jars…. It felt like people were still living in the house.

There was a big stove in the kitchen. Nonna has the same old fashioned stove in her kitchen in Brazil. Carla was excited since she knew how to make the stove work.

The library looked really warm and inviting… Should have been really nice to read a book by the fireplace there…

I had a lot of fun exploring the house, since I love history and I’m always interested in how people lived in the past. Carla and Renan also showed some interests… They asked me a lot of questions about old fashioned objects in the house. They were especially interested in the penny farthing bicycle. By the way, I think old fashioned sewing machines, like this one below, are still used in Indonesia…. I learned to sew when I was in high school using one of those!

We stayed in the house for around one hour.

Rutherford House is located on the University of Alberta campus, so we decided to explore the campus too. Carla and Renan had fun playing with the fallen leaves….

We then walked through the forest to go to Kinsmen Park. It was a nice walk, we really enjoyed the beautiful fall colours around us….

We ended up playing in the playground for more than one hour. The playground in Kinsmen Park is really nice, maybe next time I’ll write a post about it.

That’s all for now!