Description of Historic Place

The Alberta Provincial Police Building is a small, rectangular one-storey wood frame residential bungalow style building situated on one urban lot on 18th Avenue in Coleman.

Heritage Value

The heritage value of the Alberta Provincial Police Building lies in the role that it played in the maintenance of law and order in the mining communities of the Crowsnest Pass from 1918 until the 1930s.

The International Coal and Coke Company established the town of Coleman in 1903 following the destruction of the town of Frank by a rockslide. Built the next year, this building was occupied by a series of law enforcement agencies: the North West Mounted Police, briefly, in 1904 (as there was already a detachment in Blairmore); a police officer hired for Coleman in 1910; and two constables of the Alberta Provincial Police Force (APP), who arrived in 1918. They shared the facility with town police until 1932, when the APP was disbanded and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police again assumed police duties in the Crowsnest Pass. It is one of the few APP buildings to survive and provides structural evidence of Alberta's attempt to undertaking its own policing.

The building was also the site of one of the most noteworthy crimes committed in Alberta. The APP was primarily concerned with labour unrest and the trade in illicit liquor that became widespread after prohibition in 1917. After APP Corporal Stephen Lawson was shot and killed in front of this building on September 21, 1922, a bootlegger named Emilio Picariello and his accomplice Florence Lassandro were convicted of the murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Lassandro thus became the first woman to be executed in Canada since 1899 and the only woman to be hanged in Alberta.

The building consists of two folk cottage style residences, joined together. It is typical of miners' houses built by the International Coal and Coke Company. Surrounded by other period residences its architecture represents life in an early mining town.

Source: Alberta Culture and Community Spirit, Historic Resources Management Branch (File: Des. 1974)

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the Alberta Provincial Police Building include:

Exterior
- form, scale and massing;
- wood frame construction;
- medium hip roof;
- two brick chimneys decorated with corbelled brickwork;
- horizontal drop wood siding with corner board trim;
- double hung window fenestration pattern.

Interior
- floor plan layout;
- fir tongue and groove flooring;
- tongue and groove wainscoting in front office area;
- baseboards, door and window trim;
- metal flue tie ins, evidence of cast iron stoves;
- tongue and groove walls and original ceiling material;
- plaster and fiber board wall and ceiling finishes.