George Lang (builder)

George Lang (Laing) (1821 – July 2, 1881) was a stone sculptor, stonemason and builder. He was born in Roxburghshire (now part of Borders), Scotland and died at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia. In 1858 Lang moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he successfully tendered on principal government and commercial contracts. These works made him one of the leading Halifax builders of the Victorian era.

Trained in Scotland as a mason, George Lang is said to have worked on the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, erected between 1841 and 1846, and then to have emigrated to St John’s, Newfoundland, to work on the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist (St. John's) constructed between 1847 and 1850. In 1851 Lang and Stirling began operating the Albert Freestone Quarries in Albert County, New Brunswick, where Lang had been a manager until 1858.

His first building was the Halifax County Court House (present-day Halifax Provincial Court (Spring Garden Road)), designed by William Thomas (architect) of Toronto and erected between 1858 and 1860. The building’s architectural exterior is classic with palladian style that represents stability and strength. Decorative features of the building include use of vermiculation and replete with carvings of the faces of snarling lions and stern, bearded men in each key stone of the original building’s central arches.

Lang’s second commission, a triumphal arch in St Paul’s Cemetery, commemorated British victory in the Crimean War and Halifax’s fallen sons, especially Augustus Frederick Welsford and William B. C. A. Parker. A larger than life twelve ton lion stands atop the Roman triumphal arch. Lang sculpted the lion from Albert County, New Brunswick sandstone. Lang repeated the monument’s lion motif on several later buildings.

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