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| The Alexandra Hotel in Oxbow, c. 1910. Source |
Oxbow's First Hotel - The Palace
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| The Palace Hotel. Source: Furrow to the Future (1984) |
Oxbow's local history book, Furrow to the Future (1984), tells us that the Palace Hotel was built on the corner of Railway and Main by a Winnipeg firm in 1892. Peter Powell came from Ontario to Oxbow in 1897 to operate the hotel until he sold it to Harry Gleiser, also from Ontario.
In 1904, Harry Gleiser and his family took over the Palace Hotel. Gleiser enlarged the hotel’s dining room and built an addition at the back, giving the hotel 34 guest rooms. Gleiser’s son Percy opened a jewelry store in the hotel.
On August 14, 1907 a fire started at the rear of the Palace Hotel, sweeping through the business section of Oxbow, destroying many buildings including the hotel. The cost to Harry Gleiser was $25,000.
In 1908, with financial assistance from Oxbow businessmen, Gleiser replaced the Palace Hotel with a three-storey, 40-room, brick hotel called the Alexandra. It had a good-sized bar. Percy Gleiser opened a jewelry and watch repair store in the hotel. Two years later, Percy died of blood poisoning, and his sister Ruby took over his business. Several years later, Ruby took over the operation of the Alexandra Hotel.
Ruby Gleiser
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| Ruby Gleiser. Source: The Indianapolis Star, Oct. 10, 1937 |
Ruby Gleiser was a force of nature. When her father Harry died in February of 1927, Ruby took over the operation of the Alexandra Hotel. By that time, she was living in Estevan. “Who shall say what made Ruby Elizabeth Gleiser great?” a Regina Leader-Post editorial asked shortly after her death in August 1953 at age 62. “She had courage and even high daring from the beginning.” As a girl in Oxbow, Ruby played hockey and baseball, rode horseback, and won medals for her shotgun marksmanship. She was an avid hunter and became known as one of the best shots in Saskatchewan, man or woman. Ruby was also an accomplished musician. "She played the clarinet and saxophone at a period, surely, when most young ladies were occupied with piano lessons," the Leader-Post noted. "As a member of the Oxbow town band, she toured to fairs in North Dakota, Regina and Brandon exhibitions. In 1913, when she moved to Estevan, she was saxophone soloist with a band that toured from Winnipeg to Vancouver."
Ruby developed a strong head for business. Not only did she take over her brother’s and father’s businesses in Oxbow, she also operated the Delight Theatre at Estevan; a taxi service; and the Estevan Dairy which she purchased in 1933. Gleiser was the first woman in Saskatchewan to hold a motion picture operator’s license and the first woman in the province to obtain a chauffer’s license. She owned her first car at age 16, and according to the Leader-Post, by 1936 she owned 17 cars.
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| Leader-Post, Sept.24, 1936 |
A member of the local Rebekah Lodge, Ruby Gleiser's most notable achievement was when she became president of the international Association of Rebekah Assemblies in 1936, the highest office possible in that benevolent society. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Gleiser was named Saskatchewan director in charge of welcoming and placing children evacuated from England – the “Guest Children” as they became known. “[A] church so filled with flowers and friends that not an inch remained, with people standing outside and along the streets, must indicate that the day of Ruby Gleiser’s funeral was a sad day for all of Estevan,” the Leader-Post’s editorial concluded.
The Indridasons
Brothers Sveinn and Thorstein (Stone Sr.) Indridason bought the Alexandra Hotel from Ruby Gleiser in 1936. Originally from Iceland, the brothers and their families first settled in Gimli, Manitoba, then moved to North Dakota. Two years after moving to Oxbow, Sveinn and his family moved to Wolseley where they leased a hotel for three years. Stone Sr. and Stone Jr. continued to operate the Alexandra Hotel until 1942 when they moved to Alameda to operate a hotel there.
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| Sveinn Indridason and family. Source: Furrow to the Future (1984) |
In 1942, Sveinn and his wife Oliva regurned to Oxbow with their four children and bought the Alexandra Hotel. Their son Lorne continued to operate the hotel after he had spent a few years at university, from 1949 until at least 1984.
The Oxbow local history book contains the reminiscences of Margaret (Indridason) Grisdale about
the years her family owned the Alexandra Hotel at Oxbow up to 1984, the year the book was published. “Since Oxbow did not have an old folks’ home it seemed a lot of bachelors came to the hotel to spend their last years,” Grisdale writes. One of them was Albert (Ab) Salter, who had come to Cannington Manor, Saskatchewan from England in the 1880s as a 17-year old stable boy. After a stint with American rum runners, Salter, “a likeable old guy,” moved into Oxbow’s Alexander Hotel where he did odd jobs.
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| Ab Salter, 1957. Source: Furrow to the Future |
According to Grisdale, the 1950s were good years for the Alexander Hotel. In addition to rooms filled with oil workers, the hotel had one of the first televisions in Oxbow which, thanks to the antenna on the roof, could pick up a TV station in Minot, North Dakota. Grisdale remembers that the hotel lobby would be jammed with kids who came to watch television after school.
When the oil companies left and the Bow Manor Hotel was built in Oxbow, business declined at the old Alexandra Hotel. “Today there isn’t much business for the rooms, but the bar is still a regular ‘watering hole’ for many people,” Grisdale concluded in 1984.
A vacant lot now holds the space where the Alexandra Hotel once stood.
©Joan Champ, 2019
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