The History of
Eau Claire

Eau Claire takes its name from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where lumber interests chartered the Eau Claire & Bow River Lumber Company in 1883. Three years later, they set up a mill along Calgary’s Bow River between 3rd and 4th Street West, with logging camps on the Kananaskis River and near Banff at Silver City. Within a few years it was the largest supplier of lumber in the North West Territories, cutting the timber that built early Calgary.

Log drives down the Bow continued until 1944. The mill closed in 1945, ending nearly six decades of operations. The neighbourhood that grew up around it took the company’s name, and the original mill building still stood until recently — carefully moved in 2021 to make way for the Eau Claire Plaza redesign, becoming one of Calgary’s few surviving industrial heritage structures.