This photo shows Yorkton’s beautiful “first” street around 1916s. The Balmoral Hotel to the right has been enlarged. The Royal Hotel had also been redeveloped with a new third storey. These improvements had happened before Prohibition struck on July 1, 1915. Hotel owners had to develop some plans to make money after the bars were shut down. One thing they did was to improve their restaurants and menus. The main stories about possible tunnels took place on this street. One main reason was because of the strategic location of a large CPR freight shed across from Balmoral Hotel. However, one needs to consider that some possible tunnel entrances may really have been root cellars! After all, we are talking of 2 large hotels cooking up very good meals like roast beef and gravy with mashed potatoes and a regular vegetable of those days mashed turnips! These establishments needed more than one root cellar to keep meals going all winter.
We will continue to consider the existing rumours of tunnels in the next History Corner.
Contact Terri Lefebvre Prince,
Heritage Researcher,
City of Yorkton Archives,
Box 400, 37 Third Avenue North
Yorkton, Sask. S3N 2W3
306-786-1722
heritage@yorkton.ca
