Renovation of the Borden Hotel: The Model-T Bar & Grille

Tony and Helen Beaudry, owners of the Borden Hotel, c. 2010. Courtesy of the Beaudrys

 I co-wrote the following article with Merrill Edlund for the spring 2011 issue of Worth Magazine (Vol 23, Issue 1), published by the Architectural Heritage Society of Saskatchewan (AHSS). It is republished here with the permission of Merrill and the AHSS. For more information see http://www.ahsk.ca/worth_magazine.php

Saddle up to the bar at the Model-T Bar and Grille and experience the 1920s. Tony and Helen Beaudry bought the Borden hotel in 2007, and have been working steadily to renovate this heritage building ever since. “We have people who come in regularly,” Helen said. “They get to listen to my player piano and sit on the saddle at the bar.” 

The Pioneer Hotel in Borden, c. 1910. Courtesy of the Borden Museum

Built in 1905 by Joe Pellettier, the hotel was called the Pioneer Hotel until 1952. Many changes were made to the building by successive owners. The original 16 guest rooms were reduced to 15 to accommodate the bathroom when the hotel was equipped with running water.  Interior plaster walls and transom windows were covered with wallboard. Part of the upstairs was closed off and not opened again until 50 years later, when the Beaudrys started peeling back the layers, revealing the building’s heritage features.  For example, when they removed the wallboard in one of the second-storey guest rooms, they found the entrance to the balcony once located above the front door of the original hotel. 

Sam and Ada Wright owned the Borden Hotel in the 1940s. Courtesy of the Borden Museum

“When I walked in, I felt like I was home,” Helen said of her first look at the hotel in 2008. “I thought, ‘Wow! This has a lot of potential’.” The Beaudrys put in a successful bid of $25,000 with the Borden village council, which had taken over the property from the former owner. “We were bidding against four other people, but they gave it to us because we weren’t going to tear it down.’ said Helen.

The Borden Hotel in 2006, two years before Tony and Helen bought it. Joan Champ photo

The Beaudrys financed and did all the restoration work themselves. The first thing the couple did was gut the lobby, bar and kitchen. It was a dirty job as can be seen in the “before and after” photos on the hotel’s web site. The current restaurant space once served as the original hotel’s rotunda, an ice cream parlour, the owners’ residence, and finally a games room – complete with VLTs and pool table. The Beaudrys removed these gaming items and opened both sides of the hotel’s main floor as family dining areas. A five-foot lobby separates the two areas, and stairs lead up to the second floor.

The games room in 2006 before it was converted into the Grille. Joan Champ photo

Tony Beaudry looks over the Model-T Grille, 2010. Joan Champ photo

The second-floor guest rooms are laid out like an old boarding house. At the top of the stairs, there is a seating area where hotel guests can relax. Three regular rooms, each with a sink, share two bathrooms and a shower down the hall – just like in the old days.  Two larger suites feature a double bed, fireplace, toilet, sink and claw-foot tub with a shower attachment. The rooms are named after Borden-area school districts: Concordia, Thistledale, Saginaw, Diefenbaker, and Baltimore. “We opened up the side that had been closed since the 40’s,” Tony explained. This section will soon be the Halcyonia Suite, which will sleep six guests. Helen and Tony have carefully chosen authentic period furniture and fabrics for each room.

Upstairs hallway, 2010. Joan Champ photo

Old-fashioned comforts of a Borden hotel guest room, 2010. Joan Champ photo

The Model-T Inn, Bar and Grille received provincial heritage designation in 2009.  “If I had the money, I’d buy up all the small town hotels in Saskatchewan and renovate them to their original splendor”, said Helen. The Beaudry’s commitment to this big restoration project has turned the old hotel into something the town of Borden can once again be proud of. The couple’s passion will continue to carry them through as they renovate the hotel’s exterior this coming summer.

© Joan Champ and Merrill Edlund

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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