Prohibition: Hotel Bars Close Their Doors

From July 1, 1915 to 1924, Saskatchewan was dry. With the closure of 406 bars, 38 liquor dealers, and 12 clubs, it was estimated that liquor consumption in the province dropped by ninety percent. The number of convictions for drunkenness dropped from 2,970 cases in 1913 to 434 in 1918. When the bars closed down, however, so did many small-town hotels. “The hotelmen knew that without beverage revenue they could hardly hope to make ends meet,” writes H. G. Bowley in his 1957 history of the Hotels Association of Saskatchewan. “One of the cornerstones of the art of hospitality was to be removed, and they knew the whole structure of their industry would inevitably totter, and perhaps crash.” Indeed, hotels values in the province plummeted. Many hotel businesses never fully recovered from the blow of 1915. It may not be a coincidence that so many hotels burned down during the Prohibition years. 

The Lafrenieres. Footsteps in Time: Meota  (1980)

The last days of June 1915 before Prohibition came into effect were hectic ones for small-town Saskatchewan hotels. Prior to the closing of the bars on the July 1^st deadline, hotel owners were faced with the necessity of disposing of their stocks. There was a great rush to purchase liquor. At the Clarendon Hotel in Gull Lake, “more than one kerosene can, brought to town to be filled with coal oil, found its way home filled with liquid other than coal oil,” the town history (1989) reports. “Rye whiskey sold that afternoon of June 30^th at $1.00 per gallon and some sizeable stocks were laid in against the drought.”  That same day at the King Edward Hotel in Meota, Edward and Ferris Ann Lafreniere recalled that, prior to closing, “Anxious buyers filled the bar pushing and shoving. Money was thrown and bottles snatched in return. The doors finally closed and Ed and Ferris Ann literally swept the money from the floor with broom and dust pan. The following day the law moved in and destroyed the remaining stocks.” 

Closure and arson weren’t the only coping strategies used by Saskatchewan hotel owners when Prohibition hit. Charles Hitts sold the hotel at Griffin. “When the liquor licenses were rescinded it was hard to keep the commercial travelers over the weekends in the small places,” Griffin historian Mable Charlton writes (1967). “Although the menus were as good they went on to bigger places where there was more amusement.” The owner of the Imperial Hotel at Frobisher, John Klaholz, approached the town council in 1920 requesting that the sales of soft drinks, cigars and cigarettes be confined to the hotel to help make it pay – otherwise, he said, he would have to close it. Some hotel owners applied for government grants for the maintenance of public restrooms and reading rooms in their establishments. Unable to operate profitably, the Last Mountain Hotel at Strasbourg established a movie theatre on the second floor. Ice cream parlours often took the place of hotel bars. In 1916, F. A. Wright got a license to operate five pool tables in the Commercial Hotel in Herbert. Two years later, the Commercial Hotel was destroyed by fire.

Bootleg operations flourished in small-town Saskatchewan hotels during Prohibition. The thirsty traveler staying at the Arlington Hotel at Maryfield was usually able to satisfy his wants through the good graces of John Dodds, the proprietor. Dodds was caught on at least two occasions by a provincial liquor inspector, and paid the appropriate fines for his indiscretion. 

The Wilkie local history book provides the following account of a suspected bootlegging case at the Empire Hotel. On August 17, 1915, the Royal North West Mounted raided the hotel between 10 a.m. and noon. “In room No. 6, which was occupied by the hotel proprietor [W.H. Smith] and his wife, after a vigorous search was made, 28 bottles of liquor of various descriptions were found, the contents of two of which had been partially consumed. Upon being asked how this exceptionally large ‘private’ stock came to be on the premises, the defendant, during the hearing before Mr. T. A. Dinsley, J. P., stated that she had taken this liquor from the hotel cellars prior to the date upon which intoxicants had to be removed from the premises, July 1^st, and had secreted the bottles, unknown to her husband, in her trunk in which they were found. ... The room in which the liquor was found had been occupied exclusively as a private living room during the entire period that her husband had been proprietor of the house and that it had never been used as a guest chamber. … When the police commenced to search the trunk she told them that it only contained linen. When asked why she made this statement, she could give no reason. When asked why she had kept her husband in ignorance of the fact that she had a private stock she stated that had he known he would probably not have allowed her to retain it.” Verdict: Not guilty.

© Joan Champ, 2011

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