Ferries at the Invermay Hotel

Invermay Hotel, c. 1915. From Parkland Trails (1986)

 

Invermay, c 1910 Source

The Invermay Hotel was built by Anthony Turner in 1905 to accommodate the influx of settlers brought in when the railway came through. Despite the fact that the bar was closed due to Prohibition, Robert and Nellie Coleville bought the hotel in 1917. The couple, with their six children, operated the Invermay Hotel until 1929.

Gladstone M. Ferrie, c. 1950. From Parkland Trails (1986)

Gladstone (Glad) M. Ferrie and his wife Mabel (Mabs) took over the operation of the Invermay Hotel in 1929 and ran it for 28 years. Glad was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1892. He came to Canada in 1906, and farmed in the Rama district. He served as a corporal in the 2^nd Engineers of the Canadian Armed Forces during the First World War. After the war, he resumed farming with Mabs and started a family of three boys and one girl. Mabs was a nurse, and since the closest doctor was in Canora, there were many times when she was called on to serve as a midwife. The couple decided to move to Invermay and buy the hotel so their children could attend school in town.

The hotel business suited the gregarious Glad very well. He loved people and his greatest pleasure was serving the public. This he did in a variety of capacities, first as hotelkeeper, then as reeve of the Rural Municipality of Invermay, and eventually as a Liberal Member of Parliament for the MacKenzie constituency from 1945 until 1954.

The dining room of the Invermay Hotel was the Ferrie family’s headquarters. The freight train stopped in town every day at noon and for many years meals were served to the crew. Meetings of the Rural Municipal Council were held in the hotel, and the members usually had their meals in the on council day. The RM Council’s annual Christmas dinner was served at the hotel for several years. After the Second World War, the hotel dining room was converted into a lunch counter. 

The Ferrie children were expected to help out with the hotel operation. The boys hauled water from the town well. “A familiar sight around town was our Scotch collie, Don, pulling the sleigh loaded with cans of water,” Ben Ferrie recalls in the Invermay local history book. (Parkland Trails: Histories of the R.M. of Invermay and Villages of Invermay and Rama, 1986) In 1950, the Ferries had a well dug on the north side of the hotel which supplied good drinking water for themselves as well as for others in the community. Glad also worked as a cattle buyer during the years he owned the hotel. He travelled to Winnipeg on the cattle train every Saturday, returning by passenger train the following Tuesday.

Glad and Mabs Ferrie, c. 1950. From Parkland Trails (1986)

Glad passed away in 1955 after a lengthy illness. His wife Mabs nursed him at home until the end. His youngest son Russ managed the hotel along with his wife Leona until 1957 when they sold it to Steve Kohan.

Invermay Hotel, June 2006.  Joan Champ photo

© Joan Champ 2011

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Hotel Fire Escapes

Many hotels once had covered balconies on upper floors and front verandas. As they were made of wood, however, they eventually became fire hazards and had to be removed. In their places, fire escapes were constructed. Some, like the Hafford Hotel, just had a hefty, knotted rope anchored by a metal ring near a window, long enough to reach the ground. Others had variations on stairways and ladders such as these, shown in my photos.

Commercial Hotel, Blaine Lake

Invermay Hotel

Royal Hotel, Weyburn

Royal Hotel, Strasbourg

Pennant Hotel

King George Hotel, Melville, 2006

King George Hotel, Melville, Feb. 17, 2010. Photo: Melville Advance

 “On the road, hotel fire exit locations were always implanted in my mind in the 50s after check-in.  I sometimes even checked to see if those doors really opened. ... There were guests, after lifting a couple too many in the beer parlour, who verified these escape routes." - Dave Anderson, To Get the Lights; A Memoir about Rural Electrification in Saskatchewan (2006)

© Joan Champ 2011

Day-to-Day Hotel Operations

Ben and Sarah Cook on right, with Bradwell hotel staff, c. 1910.

Western Development Museum Library, 6-E-4

Running a small-town Saskatchewan hotel back in the early 1900s was hard work. The hotel staff usually consisted of at least two chambermaids and a cook who worked from morning ‘til night, cleaning the guest rooms, doing the laundry, and washing dishes. The maid's work day at the Herbert Hotel started at 6:00 a.m. and ended at 9:00 p.m. for which she was paid $10 per month, plus room and board. Charles Pratt, the porter at the Griffin Hotel, not only assisted hotel guests with their luggage; he also washed dishes, milked the two cows that supplied the milk for the hotel and did all the odd jobs. The Griffin Hotel’s upstairs maid also polished the silver and glassware and kept everything shining. 

Staff in the kitchen of the Frances Hotel at Midale, c. 1910. 

From Plowshares to Pumpjacks: R.M. of Cymri: Macoun, Midale, Halbrite (1984)

All members of the hotel owner’s family had to share in the work of running the hotel. Leo Buhler, whose parents owned the hotel in Fairlight, recalls, “One of the duties of the kids was to help with the housekeeping and at noon you had to take your turn at washing the dishes before going back to school. My sister, Irma, served as a waitress in the dining room when she was barely taller than the table tops.”  Henry, son of the owner of the Herbert Hotel, had jobs, too, “such as carrying wood and water to the hotel when needed, and carrying out ashes.  On Mondays he always had to skip school to turn the handle on the washing machine. … Henry also earned an extra dollar by teaching the Chinese cook how to speak English. ” 

The Ferrie family ran the hotel at Invermay for 28 years.  The four Ferrie boys worked shifts hauling great loads of wood to keep the hotel’s furnace running 24 hours a day during the winter months. As Ben Ferrie recalls in the Invermay local history book:  “The years in the Hotel were busy ones for all of the family. It was the boys’ job to fire the wood-burning furnace. This meant rising about three a.m. and again at six to stoke the furnace. … We were responsible for bringing in blocks of ice and snow to melt for the daily wash. … We hauled our drinking water from the town well… A familiar sight around town was our Scotch collie, Don, pulling the sleigh loaded with cans of water.”

Cutting ice on a river.  From Wikimedia Commons

Packing ice in the winter was quite an experience.  It was necessary to put up about 30 tons of ice to provide year-round cold storage for the hotel kitchen.  Hotel owners would often hire a farmer to cut the ice and haul it in with teams and a sleigh, which would take several days.   

Mrs. Rehaume, owner of the Pleasantdale Hotel,

did all the washing for the hotel using a washtub and scrub board. 

From Memories of the Past: History of Pleasantdale (1981)

Wash days – usually Mondays – were an ordeal, especially in winter. Washing bedding and clothes was often a two-day proposition. Water had to be hauled and then heated in tubs the night before. Start-up time was set for five or six a.m. and the laundry process quite often ran into the afternoon. The next day, one of the maids would run the clothes and sheets through a mangle, a machine used to wring water out of wet laundry.  Most hotels did not get running water until the 1940s or 1950s, so water had to be hauled from a well in the summer.  In the winter, hotels used melted ice and snow, or water that had been collected in rain barrels during the previous summer.

© Joan Champ, 2011