Today a modern, urban university with more than 7,250 full and part-time students, this site is where St. Mary's University began. The original building on the site was also a "Glebe House", built in 1802, in which the Reverend Edmund Burke, later Bishop Burke, taught young men.
The boys’ school grew first into a college and then into a university. In 1841 St. Mary's received degree-granting status. Twenty seven years later, in 1868, the Christian Brothers of Saint John the Baptiste de la Salle took over teaching duties and moved Saint Mary's to the Belle Aire Terrace off Agricola Street. In 1876 the Archdiocese took over from the Christian Brothers and moved the school to Barrington Street. In 1952 Saint Mary’s was granted university status and in 1970 the university became a public institution.
Probably out of the necessity for larger, more modern premises, possibly as the result of fire (of which Halifax experienced many in the nineteenth century), the present Second Empire style Glebe House was built here, adjacent to St. Mary's Basilica Cathedral.
St. Mary’s Glebe
Built:
Style:
Architect:
Owner:
Designation: |
1891
Second Empire
J.C. Dumaresq
Roman Catholic Episcopal Corp.
Municipal Heritage Property |
A substantial part of the block bounded by Barrington Street, Spring Garden Road, Grafton Street and Blowers Street has been the heart of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Halifax for over two hundred years. It was on the northern section of the block, just below Blowers, that the first Catholic church, a small wooden structure (St. Peter’s), was built in 1794.
St. Mary’s Basilica (originally known as St. Peter’s) was begun in 1820 under Bishop Edmund
Burke, lengthened in the 1860s, and finished with an ornate granite façade and a soaring steeple in 1874 under Archbishop Thomas Connolly.
The Glebe was built in 1891 on the site of an earlier dwelling owned by Lawrence O’Connor, the
first Roman Catholic lawyer to be admitted to the Nova Scotia Bar. The Glebe is believed to have been designed by J.C. Dumaresq, a noted late-nineteenth century architect, who designed many other buildings nearby on Barrington Street and throughout the downtown.
Constructed of brick, the building has numerous projecting bays, a mansard roof, and varied gabled and tower dormers of cream-painted wood. The facades are accented with sandstone string courses which define the stories and articulate the window heads and sills. Ornamental brickwork on the second storey and at the eaves further enlivens the façade. Corner buttresses, a broad pointed arch portico at the Barrington Street entrance, and pointed arch windows in the dormers reinforce the Gothic mood of the building.
The perimeter of the property at the street corner is defined by a granite knee wall capped by
ornamental ironwork. On the Barrington Street side, the perimeter wall flows into the Glebe’s main entrance steps in a graceful curve, drawing the eye into the centre of the main façade.
The Glebe contributes strongly to the historic ambience of the Old Burying Ground precinct, and
its ongoing use for its original purpose adds to the historical continuity of the area.
The Glebe also provides a strong historical and architectural link with several other late Victorian institutional buildings which still stand just to the north on Barrington Street - the St. Mary’s Young Men’s Total Abstinence and Benevolent Society building (the former NFB, now standing as a shell only), the former City Club (now Neptune Theatre School), both designed by Dumaresq, and the former Church of England Institute (now Khyber Arts Society), which are brick structures built in the 1888-1891 period.
From the Halifax Regional Municipality