Dinsmore Hotel: A Floor-By-Floor Description

Dinsmore Hotel, n.d. From Dynamic Dinsmore, 1979

When the Canadian Northern Railway arrived at Dinsmore in 1913, it brought with it twelve railway cars of lumber for the construction of a hotel, built by T.W. McCrea & Delisle Bros. at a cost of about $25,000. John Amos Delisle, his wife Marguerite, and their six children (ages 2 to 15) were living in the Dinsmore hotel in 1916, according to the Canada Census of that year. The Saskatchewan town of Delisle was named after John, who served its first postmaster in 1905. Also residing at the hotel were three waitresses, two Chinese cooks, and several guests including a couple of salesmen.

Dinsmore, c. 1920 Source

Over the years – in 1916, 1931, 1935 and 1949 – many Dinsmore businesses were destroyed by fire. Amazingly, the Dinsmore Hotel survived these blazes, and it remains a community landmark to this day. The following, written by Bill Davidson for Dynamic Dinsmore (1979), is one of the most complete descriptions I have found on the structure and infrastructure of a small-town Saskatchewan hotel:

 

“The hotel was a well-built frame structure of 3 storeys on a full size basement, 41’ x 75’ and 35’ high, covered with cedar siding and a flat roof paper composition with a 1-3 slope. The original structure had a false front extending around 3 sides, open at the back (north side). It has always been painted cream with brown trim. Other buildings built at this time in connection with the hotel were a buggy shed, a stable with a loft, a chicken house which later became an ice house… ."

Tom and Hilda Davidson and family, c 1935

"The interior was lathed and plastered and calsimined most vivid colours [calsimine is a water-based paint containing zinc oxide, glue and colouring, used as a wash for walls and ceilings]. The trim and doors were fir and very darkly stained. The ground floor comprised of two small rooms for the proprietor’s dwelling, a pantry, large kitchen and large dining room, a very large rotunda with a horse shoe counter facing the stairway, and a huge sitting area. A portion of this was used as barber shop and a small room at the N.E. corner was a saloon, but used as a confectionery, lunch counter and store over the years. The first floor comprised of 14 bedrooms and the [third] floor 17 bedrooms. Total 31 rooms. The rooms weren’t all that large especially when two beds were put in some. Each floor has a very wide hallway 12 feet. The rooms were originally furnished with brass beds 48’ or 36’, a chair or two, a dresser or a combination dresser and wash stand, and one 60-watt light bulb in the center of each room, also a china pitcher, basin and thunder mug… . The original toilet system was built onto the N.W. corner of the hotel – a 12 x 12 addition comprising of two toilets on each guest floor and directly below sat the traditional known honey wagon – a 300 gallon tank on a horse-drawn wagon that had to be emptied regularly. There was a back stairway from top to bottom coming down into the kitchen. Also each room had a cotton rope coiled up beneath the window to be used in case of fire. … All the floors were fir, except the kitchen which was white hardwood and had to be scrubbed regularly. Eventually, some of the floors were covered with congoleum, linoleum, tile, etc."

Bill and Grace Davidson and family, c 1975

"The lighting system built into the hotel was an English Lister lighting plant 32-volt plus glass storage batteries. It was a gasoline engine in the basement with an outside exhaust, which had to be started each day at dawn and shut off at 11 p.m. when everyone was supposed to be in bed. If the plant wasn’t working properly the lights were very dim. When Dad took over [Tom Davidson in 1930], he doubled the number of storage batteries and installed a wind charger to keep them charged. This helped save the old plant. In 1948, Dad hooked up with Sask. Power, and after a lot of rewiring we could use an electric iron, bed lamps, hot water, heaters, refrigeration, air conditioning, etc. The heating system comprised of a sectional cast iron steam boiler, a one-pipe system piped throughout the building connecting to a cast iron steam radiator in each room, two in the larger rooms. It had to be hand-fired with coal and wood, so that was an annual job putting a car of wood and coal in the basement every fall. The boiler was in bad shape when Dad bought the hotel, so stoves were installed here and there to keep warm.”   

Bill and Grace Davidson took over the Dinsmore Hotel when Bill’s parents retired in 1953. They still owned the hotel when Bill wrote the above article in 1979.

Dinsmore Hotel, February 2006.  Joan Champ photo

© Joan Champ, 2011

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Luseland: Ryans Reign at the Royal George Hotel

Royal George Hotel in Luseland, 1946. Bertrand G. Brown photograph, Western Development Museum

Sixty-two years -- must be a record for hotel ownership!

After a difficult delivery, the Royal George Hotel in Luseland has had a long and successful life. When it was first built in 1911, it immediately burned down. The owners, Smith and Gardner, sold their holdings in the hotel to William Engelbrecht. According to the first issue [1911] of the Luseland Despatch, “the townspeople were much relieved when the final arrangements were made public as the need of a good hotel at this point is most urgent, the only public-sleeping quarters being bunkhouses. A full force of men will be put to work at lathing the building Monday. As soon as the first floor is completed the plasterers will follow and then the finishers and, should no unlooked-for delay occur, the hotel will open February 1^st [1912].” 

Dennis and Margaret Ryan, 1910

In 1915, Dennis Ryan and his wife Margaret began what would turn out to be a 62-year-long run of Ryan family management of the Royal George Hotel. Born in Ontario, Dennis worked for a time in the hotel at Scott, Saskatchewan, where he met and married Margaret in 1910. The couple homesteaded for a few years before they and their two little daughters moved to Luseland and bought the Royal George Hotel. “The hotel was a haven for many bachelors,” the Luseland history book recounts. “Maggie tried to cater to them as much as possible whether it be a stack of pancakes, a crisp dandelion salad or fresh doughnuts for the priests that stayed there because there was no Roman Catholic church or rectory in town. The first masses were held in a room upstairs.” Three Ryan children were born in the hotel – Laurence in 1917, Albert in 1918, and Leo in 1923. 

Operating the hotel in those days was a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year job. The ‘Dirty Thirties’ were especially difficult at the Royal George. “The dust blew so hard that it was necessary to spread wet cloths on the window sill to try to keep it out," Kay Ryan Heffner recalls. "It was also a chore to keep all the lamp globes clean and the wicks trimmed to provide light for all the rooms. In the winter it was a full time job to keep all the stoves going to keep all three floors even moderately warm. When the coal stoker was installed and the boiler provided steam heat to all the floors, conditions were much more comfortable.” Dennis Ryan passed away in 1936, and his widow Margaret continued to run the hotel. All the Ryan boys went off to war in the 1940s, leaving one of their sisters to help their mother look after the hotel operations. When Leo returned from his stint in the Navy, he worked for his mother until 1950 when he and his wife Kay took over the Luseland hotel. 

Leo and Kay Ryan, 1949. Luseland Hub and Spokes (1983)

The 1950s brought new prosperity to the Ryans and the Royal George Hotel. The Saskatchewan oil boom and pipeline operations were in full swing. Unfortunately, it was not until 1955 that flush toilets, sinks, showers and bathrooms were installed in the hotel. Before that, each room was provided with a basin, a pitcher, and “a slop jar.” In 1952, the Ryans purchased the first clothes dryer in Luseland which made drying the hotel sheets a lot easier. The average cost of a single room at the Royal George Hotel was $2. “ This was not very profitable when, say on July 1 a ‘cowboy’ would rent a room for $2, invite two dozen more friends to join him and make a big mess,” Leo Ryan’s wife recalls. “Needless to say the yearly stampede was not looked on with joy.”  Hunting season was also a busy time for the hotel – every room would be full. 

In 1960 the hotel industry in Saskatchewan underwent a big change. Women were allowed to enter hotel beverage rooms “making the atmosphere much more pleasant for both guests and workers,” in Kay’s opinion. At this time women started working in the beverage room and Kay was able to help there, too. Leo Ryan passed away in 1977, and the Luseland hotel was bought by Hopfner Holdings. Thus ended the Ryan family reign at the Royal George Hotel. In 1995, Luseland’s old hotel had to be shut down for five months to repair damage done by a fire. Today,the hotel still operates with eight semi-modern rooms available on a daily or monthly basis for $18 per night.

Royal George Hotel, Luseland, 2010.  Courtesy of Gregory Melle

Watch video showing the town of Luseland, misspelled "Luceland," August 2009, including the hotel (20 seconds in): YouTube link

© Joan Champ, 2011

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Preeceville's Golden West Hotel

Preeceville, c. 1912. Source

The hotel shortly after it was built in 1912. Source

One of the most unique old hotels I have visited is the one in Preeceville. The town is located in the rolling hills of east-central Saskatchewan, approximately 100 kilometres north of Yorkton at the junction of Highways 49, 47, and 9. 

The Preeceville hotel is unique because it is the only one I know of that had porches and verandahs added rather than removed during its lifetime. In addition, while there have been several serious fires on Preeceville’s Main Street over the years, this large wooden structure has managed to escape the flames, mainly because of the wide spaces between the hotel and neighbouring buildings.

The three-storey Golden West Hotel was built in 1912 by Scott Rattray. According to Preeceville’s history book, Lines of the Past (1982), the basement excavation had to be abandoned the previous fall, “due to frost that even defied an attempt to blast with stumping powder.” Before the hotel opened, Rattray sold it to Rudy Ramsland, followed by Jack Lynch. 

In 1911, Swan Carlson and his wife Emma moved to Preeceville and bought the Temperance Hotel where they set up a soda fountain and restaurant. After their business was destroyed by fire in December 1914, the Carlsons bought the Golden West Hotel which they operated until 1917. They then built a general store in town which they operated until 1938 when they moved to San Diego, California.

Swan and Emma Carlson, n.d.  Lines of the Past (1982)

In 1929, the Mattison family bought the Golden West Hotel for $5000. Oscar and Clara Mattison, born in Norway, had come to Preeceville from Minnesota in 1913. Family members recall in the town’s history book that only one room in the hotel had linoleum flooring. “The lobby had an oiled board floor. The kitchen and dining-room floors were not painted and had to be scrubbed weekly,” the Mattisons write. Water works were not installed until the 1940s, so water was drawn from a cistern in the hotel’s kitchen. “Every day pails of water were carried upstairs to fill the large pitchers. Each bedroom was equipped with a wash basin and water pitcher. … The toilet facilities consisted of a commode. It had to be emptied two or three times daily, thoroughly rinsed and sterilized. A septic tank was installed in the backyard.” The only bathtub in the hotel was in the upstairs linen closet for family use only. The water was heated on the kitchen stove and carried upstairs.

For about a year and half, the Mattisons managed to meet the payments on the hotel. Then the Depression of the 1930s took its toll, and for many years the owners were only able to pay the interest and taxes. To help make ends meet, Mrs. Mattison made all the bread for the hotel. She also kept a couple of cows for milk until about 1938. The Mattison family continued to operate the Golden West Hotel until 1968 after 39 years of ownership.   
 

Golden West Hotel c1940 source

Sign in the bar of the hotel. Joan Champ photo

Subsequent owners of the Golden West Hotel have been Joe and Lucy Kruk (1968-1971), Peter and Monty Sharber (1971-1973), Albert and Erika Hanke (1973-1976), Marvin and Norma Abrahamson (1976-1987), Darton Holdings Ltd. (1987-1996), Reid Junek (1996-1998), and Brock Junek (1998-2001). Roger and Shannon Prestie became the owners of the Preeceville hotel in 2001.

The Golden West Hotel continues to operate on the corner of Main Street and Highway 49 in Preeceville. The hotel features six guest rooms and two light housekeeping suites. There is full food service in 150-seat bar with daily specials. The hotel was listed for sale by Shannon Prestie in 2018.

Golden West Hotel, 2013. Joan Champ photo

Preeceville hotel, 2006.  Courtesy of Ruth Bitner

© Joan Champ, 2011

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Prohibition: Hotel Bars Close Their Doors

From July 1, 1915 to 1924, Saskatchewan was dry. With the closure of 406 bars, 38 liquor dealers, and 12 clubs, it was estimated that liquor consumption in the province dropped by ninety percent. The number of convictions for drunkenness dropped from 2,970 cases in 1913 to 434 in 1918. When the bars closed down, however, so did many small-town hotels. “The hotelmen knew that without beverage revenue they could hardly hope to make ends meet,” writes H. G. Bowley in his 1957 history of the Hotels Association of Saskatchewan. “One of the cornerstones of the art of hospitality was to be removed, and they knew the whole structure of their industry would inevitably totter, and perhaps crash.” Indeed, hotels values in the province plummeted. Many hotel businesses never fully recovered from the blow of 1915. It may not be a coincidence that so many hotels burned down during the Prohibition years. 

The Lafrenieres. Footsteps in Time: Meota  (1980)

The last days of June 1915 before Prohibition came into effect were hectic ones for small-town Saskatchewan hotels. Prior to the closing of the bars on the July 1^st deadline, hotel owners were faced with the necessity of disposing of their stocks. There was a great rush to purchase liquor. At the Clarendon Hotel in Gull Lake, “more than one kerosene can, brought to town to be filled with coal oil, found its way home filled with liquid other than coal oil,” the town history (1989) reports. “Rye whiskey sold that afternoon of June 30^th at $1.00 per gallon and some sizeable stocks were laid in against the drought.”  That same day at the King Edward Hotel in Meota, Edward and Ferris Ann Lafreniere recalled that, prior to closing, “Anxious buyers filled the bar pushing and shoving. Money was thrown and bottles snatched in return. The doors finally closed and Ed and Ferris Ann literally swept the money from the floor with broom and dust pan. The following day the law moved in and destroyed the remaining stocks.” 

Closure and arson weren’t the only coping strategies used by Saskatchewan hotel owners when Prohibition hit. Charles Hitts sold the hotel at Griffin. “When the liquor licenses were rescinded it was hard to keep the commercial travelers over the weekends in the small places,” Griffin historian Mable Charlton writes (1967). “Although the menus were as good they went on to bigger places where there was more amusement.” The owner of the Imperial Hotel at Frobisher, John Klaholz, approached the town council in 1920 requesting that the sales of soft drinks, cigars and cigarettes be confined to the hotel to help make it pay – otherwise, he said, he would have to close it. Some hotel owners applied for government grants for the maintenance of public restrooms and reading rooms in their establishments. Unable to operate profitably, the Last Mountain Hotel at Strasbourg established a movie theatre on the second floor. Ice cream parlours often took the place of hotel bars. In 1916, F. A. Wright got a license to operate five pool tables in the Commercial Hotel in Herbert. Two years later, the Commercial Hotel was destroyed by fire.

Bootleg operations flourished in small-town Saskatchewan hotels during Prohibition. The thirsty traveler staying at the Arlington Hotel at Maryfield was usually able to satisfy his wants through the good graces of John Dodds, the proprietor. Dodds was caught on at least two occasions by a provincial liquor inspector, and paid the appropriate fines for his indiscretion. 

The Wilkie local history book provides the following account of a suspected bootlegging case at the Empire Hotel. On August 17, 1915, the Royal North West Mounted raided the hotel between 10 a.m. and noon. “In room No. 6, which was occupied by the hotel proprietor [W.H. Smith] and his wife, after a vigorous search was made, 28 bottles of liquor of various descriptions were found, the contents of two of which had been partially consumed. Upon being asked how this exceptionally large ‘private’ stock came to be on the premises, the defendant, during the hearing before Mr. T. A. Dinsley, J. P., stated that she had taken this liquor from the hotel cellars prior to the date upon which intoxicants had to be removed from the premises, July 1^st, and had secreted the bottles, unknown to her husband, in her trunk in which they were found. ... The room in which the liquor was found had been occupied exclusively as a private living room during the entire period that her husband had been proprietor of the house and that it had never been used as a guest chamber. … When the police commenced to search the trunk she told them that it only contained linen. When asked why she made this statement, she could give no reason. When asked why she had kept her husband in ignorance of the fact that she had a private stock she stated that had he known he would probably not have allowed her to retain it.” Verdict: Not guilty.

© Joan Champ, 2011

Hotel Hygiene

Room with a sink still conveniently located beside the bed, Borden Hotel, 2010.  Joan Champ photo

Sink in the room, toilet and bath down the hall.  Still, some small-town Saskatchewan hotels have come a long way from the “thunder mug” under the bed.  In the days before indoor plumbing, hotel rooms were equipped with chamber pots, wide-mouthed vessels used by the room’s occupants as a toilet during the middle of the night. The container was then covered with a lid or cloth and slid under the bed until the chambermaid retrieved it in the morning. People used to joke that these were traditional baseball hotels - "pitcher" on the dresser, "catcher" under the bed.

Tony Thibaudeau explained how the sanitation system worked at the Macklin Hotel in Prairie views from Eye Hill (1992):  “In those days the hotels provided a large wash bowl and a jug of water in each room and a matching chamber pot under the bed, and on each floor there was a sanitary toilet.  The chamber maid would change the beds, clean up the rooms, empty her scrub water and the contents of the aforementioned containers into a metal chute that was attached to the fire escape at the back of the hotel with an opening on each floor and had a barrel at the bottom to catch the flow, the contents of the barrel were bailed out with a pail and disposed of in a covered pool down the lane. I was fortunate enough to have this job for 35 cents a week.”  

The Golden West Hotel in Preeceville, operated in the 1930s by the Oscar Mattison family, did not get water works installed until the 1940s. “We had a pump in the kitchen to draw water from a cistern. A pail sat under the sink to catch the waste water. Every day pails of water were carried upstairs to fill the large pitchers.  Each bedroom was equipped with a wash basin and water pitcher. … The toilet facilities consisted of a commode.  It had to be emptied two or three times daily, thoroughly rinsed and sterilized. A septic tank was installed in the back yard. There was a bathtub in the upstairs linen closet for family use only. The water was heated on the kitchen wood stove and carried upstairs.”   

During the 1930s at Nipawin, the Avenue Hotel was owned by the Puterbaughs.  It had 16 guest rooms, a dining room, kitchen, laundry room, electricity, a wood furnace – and no running water. Instead, there was a cistern pump in the kitchen. Guests were given a pitcher of hot water with their wake-up call (a loud knock on the door) which they then used to fill a porcelain wash bowl sitting on a wash stand.  Guests were also supplied with soap, towels and a pitcher filled with cold water.   

A circa 1950s guest room at the Imperial Hotel, Sturgis, 2008.

These primitive conditions continued well into the 1940s and into the 1950s at some small-town Saskatchewan hotels. “It is not so many years ago (1940s),” the Wilkie local history book (1988) states, “that you might catch the hotel housekeeper emptying ‘pots’ over the fire escape on the second floor.”  In 1948, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Roitman completely renovated the interior of the Wilkie Hotel. The most modern touches of all were newly installed bathrooms, hot and cold running water, and a septic tank.  In his book, To Get the Lights; A Memoir about Rural Electrification in Saskatchewan (2006), Dave Anderson recalls that life on the road in the early 1950s without running water in hotel rooms was more than inconvenient.  “It was a hardship,” he writes. “Most municipal roads I travelled on were gravel …so choking dust in our vehicles was routine. … At day’s end it was impossible to get refreshed with a washcloth in the wash basin with a quart of two of cold water from a pitcher in which often floated a dead fly, moth or wayward ant. So the communal tub at the end of the hall, if there was one, shared with 20 or so other guests, was reluctantly used.”

© Joan Champ, 2011