Quill Lake: One Family - Two Hotels

In 1906, Robert and Annie Florence Bannatyne sold their hotel in Oak Lake, Manitoba, and with their one-year-old son Herman, headed for Saskatoon. They planned to buy the Flanagan Hotel, but on the train they met Charles Volkes, a real estate dealer who persuaded them that Quill Lake was the place with a future. They bought a boarding house and enlarged it into the three-storey Leland Hotel. This was the beginning of the Bannatyne hotel “dynasty” that lasted until the 1950s. 

Robert Bannatyne was the son of a prominent Winnipeg family.  His mother was Metis woman Anne “Annie” McDermot Bannatyne; his father was Andrew Graham Ballenden Bannatyne, a fur trader, politician and “possibly the wealthiest, probably the most influential, certainly the most highly esteemed man in the Red River community.” Born in 1867, Robert grew up in one of the best homes in Winnipeg – a “noble mansion” on the banks of the Assiniboine River called Ravenscourt. The two hotels Robert Bannatyne built in Quill Lake were much humbler structures. Source  

Leland Hotel (far left), c1920. Source

The Leland Hotel

The Leland Hotel on the corner of Main Street was built in 1906 by Robert Bannatyne. A number of Quill Lake residents initially opposed Bannatyne’s license for a hotel. The hotel license commissioners of the day, however, felt the community needed a place of public accommodation, and the thirty-room, three-storey Leland Hotel, complete with sample rooms and steam heat, opened in the fall of 1906. One of the first functions held at the hotel was a banquet given by the Board of Trade on December 10, 1906 to celebrate the incorporation of Quill Lake as a village. The hotel did a roaring business until 1916 when the bar was closed due to Prohibition.

Leland Hotel, no date. Source

Leland Hotel, c1915. Source

Mrs. Bannatyne is reported to have been a jolly woman who loved having company despite the busy life she led. She often had her sister Ellen helping her with the chores of running the hotel and looking after the Bannatyne’s ten children. Source and With Quill in Hand; Quill Lake and District, 1903 to 1983, Quill Lake Historical Society, 1984.

Robert and Annie Bannatyne with their ten children, c. 1925.  Source: With Quill in Hand (1984)

Bannatyne sold the Leland hotel in 1920, due, no doubt, to poor business during Prohibition. The

Source: With Quill in Hand (1984)

new owner was Edward A. Cunningham, an Irishman from Liverpool, England. Edward and his wife Jessie came to Saskatchewan in 1907 with their three children. In 1915, they sold their homestead and bought the Invermay Hotel which they operated for a short time. In 1922, the Cunninghams and their four children moved to Quill Lake where they bought the Leland Hotel. The the onslaught of the Depression spelled doom for many a country hotel, and in 1929 the Cunninghams retired to Saskatoon. 

Two Chinese men, including “Der Louie” took over the Leland Hotel in the late 1930s, but after Archie McLean was murdered in November of 1939, they left. The police may have given them a hard time. McLean, an elderly bachelor, had participated in a late-night poker game held in a room at the hotel. The following morning, he was found dead in his shack by the village watchman.  The old-age pensioner had been beaten to death with a piece of wood. Fred Zazula, a 31-year-old farm labourer, was charged with the murder, the motive being robbery. When McLean left the poker game at the Leland Hotel, he had money in his pockets, but when his body was found, his pockets had been turned inside-out, and only a few coins were found on his body. Source 

Leland Hotel in the 1920s.  Source: With Quill in Hand (1984)

Major changes were made to the Leland Hotel after Edward W. Walker bought the business in 1941. Walker, a barber originally from Winnipeg, removed the second and third floors of the building, which included 20 guest rooms. Walker then operated his barber shop and poolroom on the main floor. 

 Apparently, the hotel still had eight rooms and plenty of living space for Walker, his wife Irene, and their four children.  The balconies were also removed, the windows changed, and some partitions removed and a stucco job done on the front.  “Our old building, known as Ed’s Barber and Billiards, has quite a history,” Walker wrote in the Quill Lake history book. “It was the largest hotel in the district in the early days, an old-time bar, a liquor outlet, and later a restaurant before I took over in 1941. … Heating was always a problem. There was a leaky hot water system which I changed to steam to heat the front part of the building and I had a big barrel wood stove in the poolroom part in the back. Steam was later piped back there, too. A big threshing boiler – hand fed, supplied the steam for heat; later a stoker, then an oil-burning furnace, which was at last converted to natural gas. Gasoline lamps were used over my pool tables for the first two years. Water kept coming up in the basement and had to be pumped out twice a day at least. Finally sewer and water and inside plumbing was a wonderful change when it came to town. ….”  (Source: With Quill in Hand; Quill Lake and District, 1903 to 1983, Quill Lake Historical Society, 1984, p. 843) 

Photo by Ruth Bitner

Walker sold the Leland hotel to Mac Wilson and Thomas Scarfe in 1982. It was used as a game arcade, with pinball machines and a pool table. The building was torn down sometime after that, replaced by a park and the Quill Lake roadside attraction – a large Canada goose.

The Quill Lake Hotel 

After Robert Bannatyne sold the Leland Hotel in 1920, he turned to farming.  He kept his hand in with business in Quill Lake, however. He owned a store across Main Street from his old hotel. In 1929, the original O.C. King Hardware store was remodeled and opened as the Quill Lake Hotel by Bannatyne. He operated the hotel until he died in 1934 at age 70. The business was taken over by Bannatyne’s daughter, Mrs. Flo Piett, who ran it until 1940. Other members of the Bannatyne family operated the Quill Lake Hotel throughout the 1940s. Herman, also known as “Toots” because he played saxophone in the town orchestra for local dances, ran the hotel with his wife Jean until his brothers, Garnet and Jim, returned from overseas after the Second World War. Garnet brought with him a bride from Holland and their four-month-old daughter. (Source: With Quill in Hand; Quill Lake and District, 1903 to 1983, Quill Lake Historical Society, 1984)

Annie Bannatyne passed away on June 3, 1945. She was survived by all ten of her children. The Bannatyne’s Quill Lake Hotel was still standing in 2013.

Quill Lake Hotel across the street from the former Leland Hotel site, August 2013. Joan Champ photo

© Joan Champ 2011

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The Unlucky Landis Hotel

The Landis Hotel, c. 1915. Sign beside the door reads "Chautauqua."  Image source

Reading about all the people who once owned the now-demolished Landis Hotel really makes me want to learn more about them. There are stories in every hotel, but something tells me the stories in this one are truly compelling – and sometimes sad.

Gertrude and Noble Woodworth, n.d. Courtesy of their grandson, Michael Vasil.

The Woodworths

Noble and Gertrude Woodworth, originally from Nova Scotia, came to Saskatchewan (via Vancouver) in 1917 to try their luck a farming in the Landis area. As suitable land was not immediately available, they decided to run the Landis Hotel for a year. Built in 1909 by contractors Lee, Hope and Meldrome, the hotel had been in a slump since the start of Prohibition in 1915. To make matters worse, the Spanish Flu hit the village of Landis in the fall of 1918. An emergency influenza hospital was set up in the Landis Hotel. 

Hotel at the end of Main Street, n.d. Image source

Landis Hotel, 1913. From The Landis Record (1980)

The flu epidemic started in the trenches at the end of the First World War in May 1918.  It spread across the Atlantic as troops returned to Canadian ports in the late spring and early summer, and reached Saskatchewan on October 1, 1918. Infected soldiers bound for home disembarked from troop trains in Regina and from there, the flu spread rapidly throughout the province.  

Almost 4,000 Saskatchewan people died during the first three months of the epidemic, and the largest number of deaths occurred in villages (12.6 people out of 1,000). Landis was not spared. It was thought that the flu was brought to the community by troupe of Chautauqua performers. (A Chautauqua was a travelling summer fair featuring music, drama and educational lectures, popular across North America during the Teens and Twenties.) So severe was the epidemic that literally every household in the village and surrounding district was stricken. The Landis Record reports that schools and businesses were closed, “and it was difficult to find enough able-bodied people to tend the sick.” Several people from Landis and area died. The wife of the United Church minister, Mrs. Trevor Williams, died at age 30, leaving behind a daughter who was only a few months old. Four members of the Geary family succumbed to the flu, including Ted Geary, his wife and son.

The next year, the Woodworths moved to a quarter section of land on the outskirts of Landis. Their two room shack, with no conveniences and with straw and manure banked up around the foundation to keep the place warm in winter, was likely a welcome change to the sadness the couple witnessed in the Landis Hotel in the fall of 1918.

A page from the Landis Hotel guest register, c. 1917. "Guests without baggage will please pay in advance." Courtesy Michael Vasil.

Anna Haas (right) with her sister Clara.
From The Landis Record (1980)

Anna Haas

Anna Haas ran the Landis Hotel from 1919 to 1921. Anna, the eldest daughter of Adam and Mariana Haas, had immigrated to Canada from Galicia in 1900 when she was only a few months old. The family originally homesteaded in the area of Gimli, Manitoba, on Lake Winnipeg.  In 1918, when Anna was 18 years old and working in the garment industry in Winnipeg, her parents and siblings moved to Landis. Perhaps the family thought the operation of the village hotel would be a good opportunity for Anna, for she arrived by passenger train shortly afterwards.  Anna’s younger siblings lived at the hotel while they attended school in town. They helped her with some of the lighter chores like carrying wood and washing dishes. In 1921, Anna decided to return to Winnipeg, and then to Edmonton, where she worked for the G.W.G. Garment Company. Anna was “stricken with a mental disorder” in 1928. She was committed to the Weyburn Mental Hospital where she lived for 50 years, dying at the hospital in 1978 at 78 years old. She is buried in the Landis cemetery.

John and Mary Ann "Grannie" MacLeod in front of the hotel, c. 1940.
From The Landis Record (1980)

 

The MacLeods

John MacLeod his wife, Mary Ann, and their six children farmed near Lockwood, Saskatchewan for five years before taking over ownership of the Landis Hotel in 1923. The MacLeod family ran the hotel until 1961. John passed away in 1942, at which time his son Hector, who had been working in the hotel since 1930, bought the business. Mary Ann passed away in 1951. 

Woo Sing

The following year, Hector converted the dining room of the hotel into a café, and hired Woo Sing Kee from Rosetown to run it. Mr. Sing, as he was known, had a wife in China, but Canada’s restrictive immigration laws prevented him from bringing her to join him in Saskatchewan. Instead, he brought young Raymond Kwan from China to help him out. Raymond attended school in Landis when he wasn’t working at the hotel cafe. After Raymond left, Mr. Sing had Wing Woo and Wah Woo working with him in the café. The Chinese Immigration Act was finally repealed in 1947, but it wasn’t until 1958 that Mr. Sing’s wife joined him in Landis. Mr. Sing died two years later, in 1960. His wife continued to live in the Landis Hotel, with Wing Woo and Wah Woo looking after her until her death in 1968.

The empty Landis Hotel, March 2006.  Joan Champ photo

By 2006, the hotel was abandoned and empty – open to vandals and the elements – a real safety hazard. Its wooden exterior had been covered over with stucco at some point, painted in bright colours. At the back there were several small additions to the original structure – sheds, lean-tos and even a dog house, with doors everywhere. Looking around the place, one could not help but say, “If only these walls could talk....” The Landis Hotel was torn down a couple of years later.

Rear of the Landis Hotel, 2007. Image source

Rear of the Landis Hotel, 2007. Image source

© Joan Champ, 2011

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Chinese Hotel Owners: "Friends to All"

Chinese immigrants in Canada, c. 1900. Image source

“George Brennan built the first hotel and managed it until Prohibition came. When he could no longer get a license for the bar, he sold it to some Chinamen.” This line from Pennant’s history book describes a typical scenario. When Saskatchewan’s hotels hit hard times, the province’s small Chinese community stepped in to pick up the pieces, keeping those hotels in business. Many Saskatchewan hotels were owned and operated by Chinese throughout the Prohibition years of the teens and 1920s, and into the Depression of the 1930s. In his address to the annual convention of the Hotel Association of Saskatchewan in 1952, George G. Grant stated that, back in the early1930s, “the condition of hotels was desperate, and half the hotels were operated by Orientals.” (Saskatoon StarPhoenix, May 20, 1952, p. 3)

The “Chinamen” who bought the Pennant Hotel from George Brennan in 1916 were “Yock Yee, Yee On, Yee Kong, and Young Yenchew, better known to all as George, Doo Lu, Louie and Charlie.” Like many Chinese enterprises in small-town Saskatchewan, the Pennant Hotel was not, strictly speaking, a family business. Rather, it was run by several men – relatives or friends – who worked as partners. This was necessary because, from 1885 until well into the 20^th century, restrictive immigration laws prevented Chinese from bringing their wives and children to Canada. As a result, the Chinese Canadian community became a “bachelor society.” 

Chinese immigrants began arriving in what is now Saskatchewan in the late 1880s after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Fleeing from mob violence in British Columbia, they tended to disperse into the new railroad towns of the prairies. In his book, Sweet and Sour; Life in Chinese Family Restaurants (2010), John Jung explains that, upon arriving in a community, Chinese had to find or develop forms of self-employment as a means of economic survival. Other forms of work such as railway construction were denied to them. “Lacking English language skills, having little money, and little experience,” Jung writes, “one of the few opportunities was in domestic work, typically considered ‘women’s work’. Thus, they started their own small businesses such as laundries, grocery stores, and restaurants often in areas where there were few other Chinese.” Some became cooks in small-town hotels where they learned the business. 

Chow Chow on right, with Robin Chow, n.d.

                       From A Link to Our Heritage: Lacadena and District (1989)

Chow Chow came to Lacadena in 1925 and built a hotel with eight guest rooms upstairs, and a very good café on the main floor.  According to Lacadena’s local history book, Chow was a generous, good-hearted businessman. “At Christmas time he always had a gift of chocolates or Christmas cake for every family,” the book recounts. “He provided service twenty-four hours a day if food was needed.”  Other members of the hotel staff were Wing Chow and a nephew, Ernie Chow, who attended school in Lacadena for a year or two. In 1947, Chow Chow's life changed when the Canadian government repealed the Chinese Immigration Act. His wife, son and two daughters were finally able to come from China to join him. He left Lacadena and moved to Vancouver where his wife helped him in a confectionery-café until he passed away from leukemia in 1972. 

The Wong Gin family of Herbert, 1940. Image Source

Wong Gin was a lucky man.  He came to Canada from China in 1908, and by 1913, he was the owner of the Tuxedo Café in Herbert, Saskatchewan. Thirteen years later, in 1926, he was the owner of the Tuxedo Hotel and Café, advertised as “The Best Hotel in Town – Ice Cream and Confectionary – Meals at All Hours – Clean Rooms and Best of Service.”  Wong Gin was also fortunate because his wife and family were not thousands of miles away in China. In 1927, he married Mae Yea of Riverhurst, Saskatchewan, and they had six children. Wong Gin was in competition with the Herbert Hotel owned by Mrs. E.M. Stephenson – “A Home Away From Home – Home Cooking – We Employ White Help Only.”  He must have been a naturalized Canadian, because in 1935, the year the province allowed the sale of beer by the glass, he bought the Herbert Hotel from Mrs. Stephenson and he was able to obtain a license to open a beer parlour – something many Chinese hotel owners were not permitted to do. Chinese were excluded because the law required that the applicant for a liquor license had to be a person who was entitled to vote. The Chinese in Saskatchewan did not receive the provincial franchise until 1947. In 1939, N.B. Williams, chairman of the Saskatchewan Liquor Board, stated that some liquor licenses had been granted to naturalized Chinese "who had long operated hotels in communities and were respected there." It was not, however, the board's policy to grant a license to naturalized Chinese "who had bought hotels after the former white owners had failed," Mr. Williams said. (Regina Leader-Post, Aug. 22, 1939, p. 9)

The Herbert Hotel in 1908.Image source

In 1945, Wong Gin sold the Herbert Hotel. He died in January 1960. The Herbert history (1987) records the following tribute:  “Wong had more than fulfilled the requirements of any citizen. As a pioneer he took an active part in building Herbert, for the well-being of his children and his neighbour’s children. He had helped to build on every project that needed volunteer labour – the school, hospital, skating rinks, curling rinks, exhibition grounds and Bible School. … One winter he even won a trophy in a farmers’ bonspiel.” The Gin family has continued to be active and involved in the Herbert community ever since.  

Edam Cafe and Hotel, n.d Image source

Charlie Chan arrived from China in 1910.  In 1915, Chan and a partner built a hotel on Main Street in Edam that, according to the Canada’s Historic Places web site, “was considered to be one of the most elegant establishments of its kind in the region.”  Chan’s business consisted of hotel, café and ice cream parlour. He eventually bought out his partner’s share in the Edam Café, and his family operated it until 1986. The two-storey, wood frame building, designated as a Municipal Heritage Property, was moved in 2003 from Main Street to the site of the Edam museum. 

Back in Pennant, Young Yenchew (aka Charlie) and Yok Yee (aka George), owners of the Pennant Hotel for many years, were considered “friends to all,” especially the children. The hotel café was a great place to meet for a 25-cent banana split, or an orange drink called “belly wash” for five cents. Charlie loved the sport of curling, and attended many bonspiels throughout the region. “When they left Pennant,” the history book reports, “a large crowd gathered at the Memorial Hall to say thank you for all the years of service to the community.” 

Once economic conditions improved during the war years of the 1940s, the number of Chinese hotel owners in the province dropped substantially.

© Joan Champ, 2011