Railway & Main: Small-Town Saskatchewan Hotels: rural commerce

Garment salesman in the sample room of a rural Alberta hotel, 1910. Source

In the early 1900s, hotels were an essential feature in Saskatchewan's commercial landscape. The settlers who homesteaded on the prairies had to travel to the nearest village or town to buy provisions such as flour, sugar, salt, tea, and cloth. Storekeepers relied on “commercial travellers” or travelling salesmen to keep their shelves stocked with dry goods. The commercial travellers, in turn, relied on the hotels they stayed in to provide them with “sample rooms” – temporary showrooms where local merchants could view the salesmen’s wares and order goods. The salesmen found the sample room set-up preferable to showing their products in stores where their clients could be distracted by their own customers.

Illustration from "All Things to All Men" by Timothy Spears, American Quarterly, December 1993.

In smaller hotels, sample rooms were often just a spare room furnished with a few tables and chairs. Some hotels had purpose-built sample rooms combining overnight accommodation and display space. Regardless, the commercial travellers came to see this amenity as an indispensable service. Sample rooms remained a fixture in Saskatchewan’s small-town and city hotels well into the 20^th century.

Trunks Full of Wares

Commercial travellers went by train prior to the 1950s. When they arrived in a town or village, they hauled their trunks and sample cases to the hotel where they rented both a room and the sample room – if it wasn’t already rented by another salesman. In the evenings, local shopkeepers came to the hotel to see the sample goods and place their orders. The next morning, the travellers boarded the train to the next town, or to return to the city from whence they came.

An article in the February 15, 1949 issue of MacLean’s, McKenzie Porter profiled Bert Thorne, one of Canada’s 40,000 commercial travellers. “For Warwick Brothers and Rutter Ltd., wholesale and manufacturing stationers of Toronto, [Thorne] covers 25,000 miles a year, mostly by train but some by car,” Porter writes. “He books orders for writing pads, cashbooks, paper napkins, gift wrappings, pencils, rulers, erasers, bridge scorers, artists’ water colors, thumbtacks, rubber bands, fountain pens and a few thousand other items from small-town druggists, booksellers and general stores. The biggest order he ever booked was $4,000 worth of Christmas cards, his smallest 25 cents worth of sealing wax.” Thorne travelled with two big trunks containing some 4,000 articles. It took him an hour to unpack the trunks and lay the items out on tables around the sample room before inviting the local storekeeper to view his wares.

Ad in The Simpson Lance, October 31, 1918.

Hotels placed advertisements promising travelling men comfortable accommodations and “good sample rooms.” Sometimes, the accommodation was less than comfortable, with a bare floor and a jug of frozen water by the bed. “One of the mysteries of the commercial traveller,” Frank Phillips wrote in the June 1, 1926 issue of MacLean’s magazine, “is the way he manages to keep spruce and well groomed after a long course of small-town hotels, rising before daybreak to catch a mixed train, bolting a breakfast that will haunt him for the rest of the day, making his toilet minus hot water in a cold, bare room with a distorting mirror and yet emerging from the process neat, clean, smoothly shaven.”

Illustration from "Couriers of Commerce" by Frank Phillips, MacLean's, June 1, 1926.

The Carnduff local history book recounts that commercial travellers often arrived at the Clarendon Hotel with ten to fifteen trunks full of merchandise. “They carried a sample of each item they sold; fifty different kinds of shirts available meant they carried fifty samples around with them.”

In a story about the Pense hotel in the Regina Leader-Post on March 27, 1943, Arthur Tims recalled the days when he worked as a porter shortly after the hotel was built in 1904. One salesman would tip him a dollar for taking his sixteen trunks from the train to the hotel’s large sample room. “Travellers used to leave shirts in their rooms,” Tims told the paper. “They never came back for them. We kept them for a while, then I’d get the ones that fitted.”

In 1940, the Government of Saskatchewan passed legislation which, among other things, empowered city, town and village councils to provide sample rooms for the convenience of travellers, and to fix the fees for the use of such rooms.

Changing Times

The economic boom times of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression, then the 1940s' war-time economy gave way to more boom times in the 1950s. Travelling salesmen were vulnerable in terms of the market’s increasing scale. As Timothy B. Spears writes in the December 1993 issue of American Quarterly, "The rise of mail order houses, the increased importance of branded products, the emergence of corporate selling organizations … and other related factors reshaped the commercial traveller’s professional identity and his role in the marketplace.” Specialization was one strategy adopted by salesmen. Instead of carrying several products and product lines, they would carry just one line which enabled them to make better time between sales calls.

In addition, improvements to Saskatchewan’s roads in the1950s meant that commercial travellers could switch from trains to cars to get from place to place. Unfortunately for hoteliers, automobiles enabled salesmen to move more easily between towns and get home more quickly, cutting into the hotel business. Then, in 1960 when mixed drinking was allowed in Saskatchewan, many hotels turned their sample rooms into beverage rooms. Commercial travellers were not longer hotel-dependent.