The Prohibition Years: Hotels Struggle to Survive

This is my second blog post about the effects of Prohibition on Saskatchewan hotels. For the first post, click here.

Regina Leader-Post, October 28, 1918

Is it a hotel or a bar? This question being asked today about small-town Saskatchewan hotels, is not a new one. It was being asked back in 1915 at the time Prohibition effectively shut down all the bars in the province.

There was a great deal of anxiety on the part of Saskatchewan’s hotel owners when Prohibition came into effect in the province on July 1, 1915. With closure of the bars, their chief source of revenue was taken away.

June 7, 1915

Dramas large and small ensued. A month before Prohibition came into force, the Saskatchewan Licensed Victuallers’ Association, whose members included 80 percent of hotels in the province, issued a proclamation that all hotels would close as of July 1^st. “It isn’t a case of closing just to be spiteful,” stated Arthur Mason, vice-president of the Association, “but simply because we can’t afford to keep open.” The Regina Morning Leader took the hotel association’s proclamation to task on June 4, 1915, calling it both “a confession and a threat.” “The pretense of these men in the past has been that they existed primarily for the purpose of supplying hotel accommodation to the travelling public and that the sale of liquor was an adjunct to that business,” the newspaper’s editorial claimed. “The hotel men now confess that the hotel was merely a plausible excuse for the bar. They tell us, in effect, that the provision of hotel accommodation for the travelling public was to them a matter of indifference, except inasmuch as it served as a blind to the real motive for which they were in business, which was to reap the maximum of profits from the sale of booze.”

Regina Leader-Post, July 24, 1915

Smaller dramas played out in Saskatchewan’s towns and villages. Prior to the enactment of Prohibition, there were 427 hotels in the province. By April 1917, the government reported that there were 237 places licensed as public hotels. Forty-six hotels had closed in the first three weeks following the banishment of the bars. Others threatened to close.

The Alameda Case

The Alameda Hotel, 1909. Source

In Alameda, for example, hotel owner H. MacHouse closed the town’s only hotel immediately after Prohibition came into effect. It appears that he was attempting to pressure the community in order to gain both patronage and government subsidies. His efforts were successful, at least in the short term. In a letter to the editor of the Alameda Dispatch on July 9, 1915, MacHouse stated that, while he would experience heavy losses as a result of the new law, and that, while, “in my opinion the hotel business without liquor would be a much pleasanter business,” the success of the barless hotel would require the support of the people of Alameda and district. “Where are the people who attended the temperance meeting held in the Farmer’s Hall, Alameda, shortly after the Premier’s announcement?” MacHouse asked. “I wish to say to the public that without their support and cooperation I find it is impossible to keep this hotel open.” On August 6, 1915, the newspaper reported that the newly formed Alameda Accommodation Board agreed to all the terms and conditions submitted by MacHouse, including that only one hotel license be granted in Alameda, and that the town council turn over the licensee (MacHouse) the maximum grants and other concessions provided for hotels by the provincial government. The Alameda Hotel reopened on August 13, 1915.

Ad in Alameda Dispatch, August 13, 1915.

Rest Rooms and Reading Rooms

A major feature of the Hotel Act, passed on June 24, 1915 in conjunction with prohibition legislation, was a provision empowering municipalities to establish rest rooms and reading rooms in hotels. The idea was to give a concession to the hotel owners who had lost their liquor licenses, and to transform the hotels into social centres. In the words of the Saskatchewan Methodist Conference, quoted in the Regina Leader-Post on June 14th,  “Instead of the bar we may have the rest room, the place of clean amusement, the reading room and the respectable homelike hotel.”

Under the Hotel Act, provincial grants were provided to towns and villages with populations under 1000 to help hotel owners maintain these rest and reading rooms “for the convenience and comfort of the general public.” The Public Service Monthly reported that, during the first six months after the bars closed, grant applications were received from 153 municipalities. By the end of 1916, according to the same source, provincial grants had been given for rest and reading rooms in 225 small-town Saskatchewan hotels, totalling $100,416.47.

An article entitled “The New Saskatchewan Hotel” in Public Service Monthly, August 1915, illustrates the provincial government’s hope that the hotels could be converted from saloons to community centres. A strawberry social had recently been held in the Queen’s Hotel in Qu’Appelle, sponsored by the local Red Cross Society. “This occurrence may be regarded as one of the first evidences of the great reform which has been brought about in our province by the abolition of the bars,” the article effused. “The mere fact that such meetings are now possible on premises formerly licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors must be a cause for rejoicing by all thoughtful people.”

The sale of "temperance" beer was permitted during Prohibition. Kindersley Clarion, September 23, 1915

An Uphill Battle

The transition from bar to social space after Prohibition proved to be an uphill battle for small-town Saskatchewan’s hotels, however. On January 31, 1918, for example, The Landis Record reported that the village hotel was not being patronized to the extent required to pay the bills. “To heat a house of the dimensions of the Landis Hotel, to pay hired help in order to give good service, and to furnish good accommodation, requires considerable outlay,” the newspaper stated. “If the proposition is not a paying one, the community is bound to suffer.” The editorial concluded that, “the hotel being a necessity, it should be patronized by the farming community whenever possible.” On February 4, 1918, the Landis Village Council passed a motion levying one and a half mills on the village assessment for hotel support. 

Government subsidies allowed the hotels to limp along during the Prohibition years from 1915 to 1924, but they were no longer the paying propositions they had been before the bars were abolished.

© Joan Champ, 2019