Saskatchewan’s Hotel Bars Before Prohibition

Bar at the Fielding Hotel, 1915.  Glenbow Archives, NA-3853-23

"You have to be a certain type of person to look after a bar in a hotel, as you meet all kinds of people under the influence of liquor.”

     - Irene Lessard, Baldwinton Hotel

The hotel bar was a busy place in small-town Saskatchewan in the early 1900s. The Legislative Assembly of the North West Territories passed the Liquor License Ordinance of 1892.  For about $200, hotels could obtain a license which allowed them to sell liquor by the glass at the bar, as well as off-sale liquor (by which bottles could be taken out of the premises).   

License for the Beaver Hotel at Denholm, 1914.

From Western Development Museum,

WDM-1973-NB-5524

The typical Saskatchewan hotel in 1910 had a long, ornate wooden bar complete with a large mirror behind it, brass foot rails, and brass spittoons.  A sign over the beverage room door read, “Licensed to sell spirituous or fermented liquors.” These were stand-up bars for men only – there were no chairs. Over the bar, the bartender served lager beer, wine, brandy and gin, as well as soft drinks.  Whiskey sold for ten cents a glass.  

W. Laing behind the bar of the Grand Hotel at Moosomin, c. 1905.

From Moosomin Century One: Town and Country (1981)

 The hotel bars did a roaring trade. According to the Pense local history book (1982), the Carlton Hotel was built at a cost of about $48,000, and the original owner made $25,000 in a single year. “It had 30 rooms and for several years after it was built it was full every day. It also had a large bar, which on one picnic day sold $1,000 worth of liquor, the liquor being purchased by the carload.” The hotel at MacNutt stayed open on sports days. “It was on days such as this that we usually sold 500 to 600 bottles of liquor in one day,” Philip Schappert, the hotel bartender recalled.   

Prud'homme Hotel bar, n.d. Owner Joseph Marcotte on right.  Glenbow Archives, NA-3853-33

Things really got hopping on Saturdays.  Farmers who had to haul their grain for many miles stopped into the hotel to eat and quench their thirst after a hot and dusty journey “With families dispersed into the country stores to shop, visit friends, and exchange gossip,” James Gray writes in Booze (1974), “the farmers had the opportunity [to slip away for a drink] if they had the urge.” There were a few fights on Saturday nights at the hotels in those days.  T. L. Ferris described the scene for the Fielding history book (1984). “A Saturday night was quite different from anything you might see today,” he recalled. “There were no street lights in those days and only the hanging light on the wide north porch lit up the entrance to the bar. We’d see noisy drunks come reeling out and many a fight livened up our evenings.” A story is told about the North-West Hotel in Ceylon owned by William J. Coffron of a certain Irishman who had a few too many drinks and wanted to cause a disturbance. “Mr. Coffron got him upstairs and handcuffed him to the bedstead,” the Ceylon history book records (1980). “Before long, he was coming down the stairs carrying the bedstead with him.” At the Strasbourg Hotel, rumour had it that a fellow rode his horse in and shot up the bar.  Subsequent owners maintain that the bullets are still in the wall.  

Parkside Hotel bar, c. 1910.  From Follow the Spirit (1980)

Concern about the high rate of alcohol consumption led to the appearance of Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Saskatchewan. Its primary objective was to combat the evils of whiskey. Pressure from the WCTU and the Banish-the-Bar movement resulted in an announcement by Premier Walter Scott in March, 1915 that all bars in Saskatchewan would be closed as of July 1, 1915.

© 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

Gasthaus Neudorf: "A Place to Frolic"

Neudorf Hotel on right, c. 1930.  From Doug McHardy

I have been to the Gasthaus Neudorf near the Qu'Appelle Valley twice now -- once on a rainy day in the spring of 2006, and once in mid-winter when I stayed overnight in one of the newly renovated guest rooms - complete with its own bathroom (a rarity in old hotels)! During my stay, there happened to be a dinner show featuring a magician from Nova Scotia. I was the only non-local in the audience, so the good people of Neudorf naturally suspected that I was a "plant" for the magician's act!

Fritz Engelland and his cousin John Paysen, recent arrivals from Germany, saw a business opportunity when the Canadian Pacific Railway chose the town of Neudorf as the location for a divisional point in 1904. The building of the rail yards, roundhouse, shops, station, and water tower sparked the growth of the town. In 1906, Engelland and Paysen purchased two lots on the corner of Railway Avenue and Main Street and built a hotel.  

From Neudorf Memories of Pioneer Roots

Perhaps the two partners flipped a coin over which one of them the hotel was to be named after, and John Paysen won. After the Paysen Hotel opened in 1907, Engelland, his wife Augusta, and their four children lived in the hotel, as did his bachelor partner, Paysen, and all the hotel staff. The staff included chambermaids, dining room staff, and the cook – all from Austria, a “pool table man” from Wales, and the hotel barber from England. Living in such close proximity eventually led to a romance between Paysen and one of the maids, Barbara Ulmer.  By 1911, the two were married with two children and farming in the Moose Jaw district.  

Paysen Hotel dining room, c. 1910.  From Neudorf Memories of Pioneer Roots (1980)

In 1909, the hotel’s name changed to King George Hotel; that name stuck until 1929. The hotel featured a dining room, a pool hall, a theatre, a dance floor, and a barber shop. The theatre was likely on the third floor, where, it was reported, there was a large painting of a gruesome battle. In the spring of 1911, the Neudorf hotel was purchased by business partners, Michael Bateman and Henry Shatsky, who came to Canada from Russia in 1880. Like the previous owners, Bateman and Shatsky lived at the hotel with their wives and young children. The census for 1911 shows that there were fourteen guests (mainly CPR workers) and seven staff members – two teenage chamber maids, a “dining room girl” age 19, a 16-year-old kitchen maid, a 45-year-old Chinese cook who had been in the country since 1876, and Joseph, the 24-year-old hotel porter from Switzerland. 

Prohibition came into effect in Saskatchewan on July 1, 1915, closing down the bars, and with them, many rural hotels.  While the Neudorf hotel remained open, there was a noticeable downturn in business; by the time Prohibition ended in 1924, the third floor of the hotel had been closed off. During the 1920s, the hotel was owned and operated by Percy Bradley and his wife Tillie, who was renowned for the meals she cooked for hotel boarders – still mainly railroad workers. Owners came and went over the years, and at some point the name was changed to the Leland Hotel.

Neudorf Hotel under renovation, June 2006. Joan Champ photo

Out of the Ashes

Janice and Bernhard Caulien

in their work clothes, June 2006.

Joan Champ photo

In the 1990s, the hotel became known for some unique food served in the bar: pickled chicken gizzards.  In 1998, the hotel’s name changed to the Gizzard Inn to reflect this culinary novelty. The hotel was given a more cosmopolitan moniker in 2002 when Bernhard and Janice Caulien became the owners. Their goal was to turn the old hotel into a European style “guest house” (Gasthaus), or country inn, so they called it Gasthaus Neudorf.   

The Cauliens realized that the hotel could not make a go of it just by serving as a “filling station” - Bernhard's playful reference to the bar. What was required was a restaurant which served good food, as well as modern, comfortable guest rooms. The couple began the work of renovating the Neudorf hotel, when disaster struck.  In 2004, a fire started in a stove in the Caulien’s living quarters destroying part of the Gasthaus Neudorf. Bernhard and Janice were devastated, but they didn’t give up. They tore down the damaged part of the hotel and took up the work of renovating the remaining parts of the building. By 2007, three guest rooms were ready. The Gasthaus Neudorf was advertised as "a place to rest, a place to dine, a place to frolic," with international home cooked meals, and “the biggest selection of local and import beer, wine and spirits east of Regina.” 

The Cauliens’ Gasthaus project came to an end in 2015 when the couple sold the hotel and moved to British Columbia. The business then became known as the Neudorf Bar and Grille.

In the early morning of September 3, 2017, Neudorf’s old hotel burned to the ground. The owner and his son, the only two people in the building when the fire broke out, managed to get out safely. “Well, its been a long, tiring, not to mention devastating, week for our family and this great community,” the owners posted on Facebook. “At this time our plan is to rebuild."

_______________________________

Stairs being refinished in the foyer, June 2006.  Joan Champ photo

Guest room, June 2006.  Joan Champ photo

Beverage room, June 2006.  Joan Champ photo

© Joan Champ, 2011

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The Hotel at Radisson: A Family Business

The Zimmerman Hotel, conveniently located across the street from the railway station, 1905. Western Development Museum photo, 3-A-35

I enjoyed my "research junket" to the Radisson Hotel in May 2006 -- especially the refreshments in the bar!  I phoned ahead and the owners offered to give me a tour -- which they did -- from the stone-foundation basement to the guest rooms on the second floor. Unfortunately, the third floor was closed off and inaccessible. 

Radisson’s first and only hotel was built in 1905 on the corner of Railway Avenue and Main Street by Joseph and Ella Zimmerman. The couple had previous hotel experience. In 1901, Joseph worked as a bartender in Indian Head, Northwest Territories (now Saskatchewan).  When the village of Radisson was founded in 1905 - the year the railroad arrived - the Zimmermans saw an opportunity. They moved their young and growing family to the town, located on Highway 16 between Saskatoon and North Battleford, and built the hotel. First called the Zimmerman Hotel, the hotel’s name changed to the Queen’s Hotel in 1906. 

Zimmerman Hotel, c 1912 Source

The original plans called for a two-storey building, however a third storey was added.  It had a full and very solid stone basement. By 1911, the Zimmerman’s five children between the ages of 5 and 10 must have enjoyed living in the spacious hotel, with its large lobby on the main floor. On the second floor, hotel guests gathered in the parlour to enjoy the piano and the library, which was stocked with books donated by local residents. Thomas Craig, the hotel manager, set up a “sample room” for commercial travelers to display their wares to local business owners.   

The Queen’s Hotel bar prior to 1915.  From Reflections of Radisson, 1982

In 1915, Prohibition hit Saskatchewan, and the bar of the hotel was closed and converted for use by the provincial police. The beer cooler in the present-day hotel was once used as the town jail.   

In 1922, the Zimmerman family sold the hotel to Tom Weeden. Several other owners followed.  Walter and Sylvia Bronsch, who owned the Radisson Hotel from 1953 to 1968, made major renovations to the building, including the installation of water and sewer lines. At some point in the hotel’s history, the third storey was sealed off – probably to save on heating bills. In about 1965, mixed drinking was allowed in the hotel bar. To accommodate female patrons, the owners had the beverage room completely redesigned in a 1960s motif, calling it the Shadow Room.  There is a photograph of the Shadow Room hanging in the bar.

The Radisson Hotel Today

Radissson Hotel, May 2006.  Joan Champ photo

Joan Champ photo

In May 2006, the Radisson Hotel was put up for sale once again. Of the fourteen guest rooms on the second floor, five had been renovated and were available for accommodation. There were sinks in each room and guests had to share one of two bathrooms, one with a shower and toilet, and the other with a tub and toilet.  

The main floor of the Radisson Hotel featured a beverage room and the two-bedroom living quarters for the hotel operator. The bar, with a 57-seat capacity, had a rustic, western-style decor. Three VLTs were located in a separate room off the beverage room. Entertainment in the bar included arcade games, Foos Ball, a juke box, a billiard table, a karaoke machine, and two television sets with satellite service.  

 

The beverage room at the Radisson Hotel, May 2006.  Joan Champ photo

© Joan Champ, 2011


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Fire at the Leask Hotel

Volunteer firefighters battle the fire at the Leask Hotel, Feb. 9, 2011.
Photo by Derril Rogerson, Saskatchewan Valley News

I was sad when I heard that another old Saskatchewan hotel had burned down.  Fire is their worst enemy.

At 3:00 AM on February 9, 2011, Ed Musich, the owner and manager of the Leask Hotel, woke up to the sound of his smoke alarm.  He barely had time to escape the hotel in his stocking feet before the 99-year-old hotel burned to the ground.  “It was an older building, one of our originals,” said Murray Donohue, volunteer firefighter. “Lots of dry wood, layers of paint and varnish ... when it went up, it went up like a Roman candle.” 

The Leask hotel is another in a long line of hundreds of hotels that have been destroyed by fire in Saskatchewan over the decades.  Most of them were rambling wood-frame structures that didn't stand a chance, especially in the days when most towns had no firefighting equipment.  In the early days, when a fire broke out at the corner of Railway Avenue and Main Street, the townspeople formed bucket brigades, passing pails of water from hand to hand in an effort to put out the blaze.  Today, well-equipped volunteer firefighters work to save these heritage buildings.


The Windsor Hotel 
 

Hotel Windsor, c. 1914.  From A Lasting Legacy; Leask and Districts, 1990.

The Windsor Hotel in Leask was built in 1912 by Emil and Marie Cuelenaere. Emil, formerly of Belgium, and Marie were married in 1908 at Duck Lake, where Emil owned a hotel. The couple had four children, three of whom were born at Duck Lake; the fourth was born at Leask. The Cuelenaere family moved to Leask in 1912 and built the Windsor Hotel. Emil had apprenticed in meat cutting while in Belgium. The Windsor Hotel had a Chinese cook; Emil, however, did all the butchering himself. He also made sausages and blood pudding which was considered a delicacy. After Prohibition in 1915, the bar at the Windsor Hotel became an ice cream parlour. 

In 1942, Emil and Marie retired and moved to Chilliwack, B.C., and their son George and his wife Mildred took over the Windsor Hotel. Another son, John Cuelenaere, born in the Duck Lake hotel, and raised in the hotel at Leask, practiced law in Prince Albert for 30 years. He was the mayor of PA for eleven years and was elected to the Saskatchewan legislature as a Liberal member for Shellbrook in 1964. He served as the Minister of Natural Resources in the Thatcher government. The youngest son, Marcel Cuelenaere served as a wing commander during the Second World War. As a result of his war tours, Marcel was twice awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Marcel became a lawyer, joining the Diefenbaker and Cuelenaere law firm, and later the law practice of John Macklem in Prince Albert.

Original owners of the Windsor Hotel, Emil and Marie Cuelenaere, n.d.
From A Lasting Legacy; Leask and Districts, 1990.

L to R:  Emile Cuelenaere with his sons John, George and Marcel in front of the Windsor Hotel, 1955

. Image source

Hotel Windsor, c. 1965. Image source

© Joan Champ, 2011

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