Miss Emma Brown, the owner of the Arlington Hotel in Asquith from 1912 until 1947, was 47 years old when she arrived in Asquith in 1910. She was born in London, England, in 1863 and may have spent some time in Colorado before coming to Canada. I wish I knew more about her life before she arrived in Saskatchewan, but I can only tell you some of her story from the last years of her life.
Emma Brown worked as a chambermaid at the Arlington Hotel before buying the hotel in 1912 and operating it on her own for the next 35 years. In 1911, she survived a terrible explosion at the Arlington, the result of the acetylene tank igniting in the hotel’s basement lighting plant. A year later, Miss Brown became the proprietress of the Arlington Hotel. The three-storey, wood-frame structure had been built by Andrew Lunn in 1906 and doubled in size in 1907, giving it 60 rooms. The Arlington had a laundry, a barroom, a barbershop, and a four-table poolroom.
It was unusual for a woman to own a hotel in Saskatchewan, especially a hotel with a bar that women weren’t allowed to enter until 1960. But Emma Brown had a stellar reputation and soon became known throughout the district as a woman of immense kindness. Many tributes were paid to her throughout her years in Asquith. On March 2, 1939, nearly 100 women of Asquith and area held a surprise birthday party for her, presenting her with flowers and gifts. Travelling salesmen from Toronto sent Emma a Christmas gift in 1945, remembering how she always left a light on in the lobby during the days when travellers came and went at all hours. Young hockey players from Saskatoon once gave her a bouquet of roses, thanking her for her kindness during their stay at her hotel.
Every year, Emma Brown hosted fundraisers for various charities at the Arlington Hotel, bearing all expenses for these events herself. During the Depression, Emma Brown fed and looked after many homeless men at her hotel. “It was typical of Miss Brown,” the Asquith Record (1982) notes, “that when pressed to notify police of a break-in at her hotel one night, she said, ‘He committed no crime. He was hungry and he only took what I would have given him gladly had he asked for it.’”
On July 11, 1946, Emma Brown, now 83 years old, was fined $25 or one hour in jail on a charge that she had failed to make an income tax return in 1944. Outraged, Miss Brown refused to pay the fine and spent the hour in jail. During her hearing, according to the Star-Phoenix, she told the magistrate she felt she was being persecuted. She was “an old woman doing her best to keep the hotel running, most of the time without any help. She had kept the hotel open during the depression with the aid of $10,000 she had received from [family in] England. When she had any money available now, she used it to send food to [her family in] that country. … Despite her age she worked 18 to 20 hours a day and she thought she should be left alone to carry on.”
This incident may have precipitated Emma Brown’s retirement from the hotel business. In 1947, she sold the Arlington Hotel to Leonard Reichert and moved to Saskatoon where she died on Oct. 10, 1956 at the age of 93.
Reichert worked for months extensively renovating the old hotel, renaming it the Asquith Hotel before reopening it in 1948. It was scaled down to about half its original size and still stands at 615 Main Street in Asquith, 40 kilometres west of Saskatoon.
