Behind the Bar - Barrels, Beer Kegs, and Bung Starters

How did small-town Saskatchewan hotels serve beer in the early 1900s? It started with the shipment of wooden beer barrels by train to the hotels, unloaded on the railway station platform. The Bulyea local history book, Between Long Lake and Last Mountain (1982), recounts a story about two local farmers who crawled under the train platform “armed with a brace and bit, a washtub, and several buckets.” When the hotel owner arrived to pick up his delivery, he was dismayed to find an empty barrel.

Barrel terminology. Source

Because they had to stand up to pressure and liquid (and the occasional tampering), beer barrels were lined with pitch and made of thicker, good quality wood. The barrel was filled by the brewery through a bung hole. Once filled, a plug was hammered into the hole, sealing the barrel. 

Source

 

Star-Phoenix, June 1, 1948

Opening the beer barrel presented a challenge to many a hotel barkeep. They used what was called a “bung starter” – a heavy wooden mallet – to drive the wooden plug, bit by bit, up and out of the bung hole. Bill Graham, head bartender at the Great West Hotel in Davidson during the pre-1915 days, told the Star-Phoenix on June 1, 1948 that he had driven many a faucet pump into a keg of beer with a bung starter. Unless you were quick, Graham recalled, beer sprayed all over the place. “I got pretty good with that old bung starter,’ he said. “People would stand around and watch me with their mouths open.” The heavy bung starter also served as an excellent weapon for a beleaguered bartender.

To keep beer cool, many small-town hotels used ice that had been cut from local lakes or rivers. For the hotel at Fairlight, for example, this meant replenishing the ice in the draft beer cabinet on a daily basis and checking the storage of beer kegs in the basement cooler two or three times a week. Other hotels kept ice in an icehouse, packed in layers of sawdust.

During Prohibition, it was not unusual for hotel owners to keep a barrel or two of booze hidden away in the basement of their establishments. In 1925, police raided the Cecil Hotel in Moose Jaw. As the officers entered the hotel, they saw the man behind the bar pull a string. “The officers darted to the basement and attacked a lock cabinet, where they found a small keg overflowing with water driven into it at high pressure,” the Regina Leader-Post reported on February 3rd. “There was, of course, a smell of beer about the place.” The hotel had installed a beer keg apparatus – alleged to have been invented to defeat liquor enforcement methods – consisting of a double spigot connected to the water main. The pulling of a string flooded the keg and removed the beer within seconds.

Regina Leader-Post, February 26, 1935

In 1935, when the Government of Saskatchewan permitted hotels to sell beer by the glass, Saskatchewan’s hotels scrambled to reopen their beer parlours. This required a major outlay of cash for the hotel owners to meet the government’s rigorous architectural and regulatory standards for licensing. In addition to building renovations and new furniture, hotels had to install new drawing systems for beer, refrigeration equipment, and draft beer cabinets. “A 25-table beer parlour will require the most modern beer pumps, a cooling system, and cabinets,” the Leader-Post wrote on December 4, 1934. “It will need 100 chairs, at least 400 glasses and an insulated storage cellar.” This equipment cost thousands of dollars per hotel. Saskatchewan suppliers did well. The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix reported on April 8, 1935 that Sterling Millwork Company and Cushing’s Limited had many orders for tabletops and refrigerators, and the John East Foundry was manufacturing $8,000 worth of table bases.

Ad in the Star-Phoenix, April 30, 1935

1935 was also a boom year for beer keg manufacturers. The Leader-Post reported on May 4 that one Regina brewery acquired 2,900 kegs for its new draft beer business. Of these, 800 were steel, “the newest wrinkle in the keg business.” The remainder were wooden kegs which cost the breweries about $8 apiece; the steel kegs, which had an insulated aluminum lining, cost around $12. “Handling of the empties by the breweries entails a lot of work, the newspaper wrote. “They must be sterilized and repitched each time they go back to the brewery.”

With the outbreak of the Second World War, metal beer kegs were prohibited due to the war effort, but metal hoops and fittings were still allowed on wooden kegs.

Eventually, bottled beer became popular and draft beer sales declined. Today, draft beer is enjoying a comeback thanks to craft breweries.

A 1980s bar set-up, with bartender serving draft beer. Leader-Post, July 2, 1987.

©Joan Champ, 2019

Catastrophe at the Macoun Hotel

 This is an expanded version of an earlier post on this blog. Click here for Hotel Fires.

Macoun's hotel was built in 1905 by Len Youngberg. Source

Macoun Hotel, c. 1910. Source

Six weeks after purchasing the hotel at Macoun and getting his family settled within, Carl Hochhaus left town to see to matters on his Alberta homestead. He could never have imagined that when he returned home, he would find his hotel a smouldering mass of ashes with many dead inside, including his wife Gertrude and 23-year-old daughter Emma.

On April 20, 1914, one of the most tragic hotel fires in Saskatchewan’s history occurred at Macoun, located 28 kilometres northwest of Estevan. Eleven people (some accounts say thirteen) lost their lives as a result of the disaster and many more were injured, including three Hochhaus children, Gertrude, Carl Jr., and Bernard.

The Explosion

At lunchtime on that fateful April day, thirty people were inside the Macoun Hotel. Some were Hockhaus family members, some were staff members, others were hotel guests. Many were sitting down for lunch, and the hotel dining room was full.

James Towey, a ten-year-old witness of the explosion, provides his account in Plowshares to Pumpjacks: R.M. of Cymri: Macoun, Midale, Halbrite, (1984). Shortly after noon, Carl Hochhaus, Jr. smelled gas and decided to go down to the basement to investigate. “He had a lighted cigar in his mouth as he descended the stairs and opened the door to the basement,” Towey recounts. “Immediately there was an explosion which lifted the entire structure approximately thirty feet in the air, then the building dropped back down into the basement.”

The bank and drug store (seen from rear) were still standing after the fire, but the hotel, meat market, telephone office and a private house were destroyed. Source

Carl was blown several feet through a doorway on to the street and survived with only a few bruises, singed hair and eyebrows. Everyone caught in the conflagration was injured, perished in the fire, or died later as a result of their injuries. 

The hotel’s dining room was located directly above an acetylene light plant in the basement. The explosion caused the entire dining room to collapse into the cellar below. Wreckage from the walls and floors above fell on top of the diners and then caught fire. All of the people who were in the dining room at the time of the explosion were killed. 

The Victims 

 

Headline in the Saskatoon Daily Star, April 21, 1914.

In addition to the two Hochhaus family members, those killed in the Macoun hotel explosion were: four telephone workers, Daniel Egan from Moose Jaw, Harold George Clark from Estevan, Thomas Drake from Pipestone, Manitoba, and Peter Joyner from Estevan; Joseph E. Grant, carpenter from Macoun; James Dunger, buyer for International Elevator Company of Manitoba; and three members of the hotel staff, Clifford VanDer, hotel clerk from Vancouver, Ferdinand Schmidt, hotel bartender from Alberta, and Stella Peterson, hotel cook from Macoun.

Stella Peterson, the hotel’s young Icelandic cook, was terribly injured in the explosion. The building collapse caused her to be pinned in the kitchen for some time before she was rescued. Miss Peterson, the sole wage earner for her widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters, died in Winnipeg General Hospital on June 16^th after weeks of suffering.

Bernard Hochhaus and his dog, Bismarck. From Plowshares to Pumpjacks

The most talked about incident in connection with the hotel explosion was, according to the Regina Leader-Post, the “miraculous escape” of Hochhaus’ youngest son, Bernard. The eight-year-old was playing with his dog, a large collie named Bismarck, in the lobby of the hotel when the explosion catapulted the two right out the door. Covered by debris, the collie dug its way into the open air but would not leave without little Bernard. “That the boy did not perish also,” the paper wrote on April 23, “is attributed by everyone to the dog.”

The day after the explosion, trains brought throngs of curious people to Macoun. The Leader-Post reported that visitors "formed a moving circle around the charred ruins of the wrecked building, watching silently the men of the Mounted Police, their red coats blackened and torn, delve into the debris, seeking those who were lost in the holocaust." Most remains were charred beyond recognition.

Crowds viewing the aftermath of the Macoun explosion, April 1914. Source

Acetylene Gas Regulations Needed

Small acetylene gas plants were one of the best lighting options in Saskatchewan in places where electric light was not yet attainable. But, after the Macoun disaster, there were calls for change. Saskatchewan’s fire commissioner, R. J. McLean, immediately appealed for safety measures in the installation of acetylene gas works in any home or public building. Acetylene gas can “do more harm than dynamite,” he stated, cautioning that no generators should be permitted in basements.

One type of acetylene gas plant, storage tank in centre, generator on right. Source

The Saskatoon Daily Star felt that more than warnings from the fire commissioner was needed. “One acetylene gas plant to one frame hotel equals one death trap,” an editorial stated on April 24. The newspaper advocated for laws requiring that gas plants be housed in separate buildings a safe distance away from inhabited buildings. The arrival of electricity in villages and towns during the 1920s, however, spelled the end of gas lighting in the province.

Final Resting Place 

Gertrude Hochhaus and her daughter Emma are buried at Tumwater, Washington, along with Carl Sr. and other Hochhaus family members.

Source: www.findagrave.com

©Joan Champ, 2019

The Colonsay Hotel – Canada’s “Leading Case” in Insurance Valuation Law

The Colonsay Hotel around the time it was built in 1910. Source

The Colonsay Hotel was at the centre of a major insurance case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in the early 1920s. The Court’s decision, handed down on June 15, 1923, greatly limited the liability of insurance companies on old buildings. It also became known as the “leading case” in Canadian insurance valuation cases.

Built in 1910, the 22-room hotel at Colonsay was sold two years later to John Daley for $20,000. In 1912, even though Colonsay had a population of only 150 people, optimism ran high. At that time, the bars were open, and the sale of liquor was lucrative for the hotel business.

With the advent of Prohibition in 1915, the value of the Colonsay Hotel, as with all Saskatchewan hotels, plummeted dramatically. In 1917, Daley was forced to turn the hotel was over to – ironically – the Saskatchewan Brewing Company to which Daley owed $3,300.

In February 1920, Peter and Rosalina Pura, in partnership with John Lashkewicz, formed the Colonsay Hotel Company and bought the village’s hotel from the brewing company for $3,950. The Puras decided to operate a movie theatre in the hotel and had a $400 addition built. They took out three insurance policies totalling $14,500 – one with the Canadian National Fire Insurance Company for $6,500 on the building and contents; one with the Union Insurance Society of Canton, Limited for $4,000 on the buildings and furniture; and one with the British Crown Assurance Corporation, Limited for $4,000 on the building and contents.

Lashkewicz sold the Puras his half interest in the hotel property on September 20, 1920. Three weeks later, on October 2, 1920, the hotel was destroyed by fire. What resulted, according to newspaper reports, was a lengthy court battle between the hotel owners and the insurance companies. 

Courts Hear Insurance Case

Leader-Post, June 16, 1923

The Puras had insured the hotel at a value that they believed to be the replacement value of the building -- $14,500. After the fire, however, the three insurance companies offered to indemnify the Colonsay Hotel Co. for only $5,100. The owners appealed and were awarded $13,500 by the Court of King’s Bench in Saskatoon.

The insurance companies turned to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, claiming that the original verdict should have been based on the actual value of the hotel at the time of the fire rather than on the cost of replacing the structure. The Court of Appeal maintained the original judge’s verdict and dismissed the appeal with costs.

The insurance companies then took the case to the Supreme Court of

Canada, which rendered its verdict on June 15, 1923. The five judges decided with the insurance companies, stating that the appeal should be allowed. They referred to the Saskatchewan Insurance Act, chapter 84, R.S.S. 1920, section 82 which stated that insurance companies were not liable for loss “beyond the actual value destroyed by fire.” The Supreme Court then ordered a new trial which took place in September 1923.  The insurance companies were eventually awarded $8,000.

The Leading Case in Canada

 

Star-Phoenix, Sept. 22, 1923

According to Marvin G. Baer in his article on insurance law published in the Ottawa Law Review (Winter 1976), “Canadian National Fire Insurance Co. v. Colonsay Hotel Co.” became “the leading case” in Canada for determining actual cash value in property insurance. Baer notes, however, that “Canadian courts have been reluctant to be tied down to any particular test” for valuation. The courts have since used some combination of replacement value less depreciation or market value.

The unique factor in the Colonsay Hotel case, Baer asserts, was the fact that the building’s depreciation in value came about not by physical deterioration, but by “obsolescence caused by external factors.” The external factor in this case was, of course, the closure of the bars. The value of a large hotel in a small town following Prohibition “is an obvious example of the kind of obsolescence which should be considered” when assessing its actual cash value.

 

After the ashes settled, a new, smaller hotel was built in Colonsay which still stands today. It is now called Kobis Bar and Grill.

The Colonsay Hotel, April 2006. Joan Champ photo

©Joan Champ, 2019