Skip to content

‘Hell is burning’ – hotel fires

Many of the hotels that once commanded the corners of Railway and Main in small-town Saskatchewan have burned to the ground over the years.

Many of the hotels that once commanded the corners of Railway and Main in small-town Saskatchewan have burned to the ground over the years. Most recently (at the time of writing), the 72-year-old hotel at Kyle ended up a pile of ashes in less than two hours.

It doesn’t take much – a cigarette butt carelessly tossed aside or a live cinder drawn up the chimney by a strong wind igniting a flat tar roof – to set these rambling old wooden buildings ablaze. Many have been torched by arsonists. Hotel fires mean the loss of property, the loss of a community gathering place and, sometimes, the loss of life.

One of the most tragic hotel fires in Saskatchewan’s history occurred in Macoun in April 1914. Thirteen people died and many were injured when an acetylene lighting plant in the hotel basement exploded. It was lunch time, and the hotel dining room was full. The owner’s son smelled gas and decided to go down to the basement to investigate – with a lit cigar in his mouth. As soon as he opened the basement door, the entire building was thrown about 30 feet in the air, and then crashed back down. The young man with the cigar survived with only a few bruises, singed hair and eyebrows. Everyone else caught in the explosion – save two – perished in the fire or died later because of their injuries.

Not everyone was sad to see their town’s hotel burn down. According to the Clavet history book, when the women of the town heard the hotel was on fire in 1915 – the year Prohibition was introduced in Saskatchewan – they were heard to say, “Hell is burning.” 

In the early days, few of Saskatchewan’s small towns had the means to extinguish the flames of a big fire. Disastrous fires prompted many a town council to buy firefighting equipment. Some towns passed bylaws mandating the construction of firewalls between adjacent buildings to prevent the spread of fire. (A firewall built in 1915 can still be seen on Main Street in Ogema, marked by the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society.) Roofs had to be made of incombustible materials. The front verandas and balconies had to be removed as they were fire hazards. In 1933, the town of Radville passed a bylaw requiring any hotel to provide fire escapes, fire extinguishers on each floor and ropes firmly fastened to the windowsill of each guestroom.

The hotel at Young was destroyed by fire on Nov. 13, 2011. The hotel had a 100-seat bar, a 27-seat dining room, living quarters for the owner and seven non-modern guest rooms. “In a place that’s small like Young, when you lose your bar and your restaurant, a sense of community starts to be lost as well,” Darcie Hellman, a former resident of the village, told the CBC the day after the fire. “When the people don’t have a place to get together, you start to feel less like a town, right? It’s just really sad.”