all imagesthis page David Murray
left and above: The Pendennis Hotel remains behind the brick façade, photographed in 2007
below: Business card and food coupons from San Francisco, found among the retrieved artifacts in the Pendennis.
Over the years, the hotel has gone through numerous iterations. The economic slump after the collapse of the Wheat Boom in 1913 and prohibition in 1916 put Nathan Bell out of business, and in 1920 the Pendennis was repossessed by his mortgage company. It became a lodging house and over time was known as both the Stanley Block and the Lodge Hotel. In 2001 as part of Edmonton’s Jasper East Village Main Street Project the façade of the Lodge Hotel was designated as a municipal historic resource. A few years later the building was purchased by the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta. At that time the plan was to insert the new museum into the shell of the old hotel. During an interior demolition, the original 90-year old Pendennis Hotel was discovered inside, surprisingly intact and relatively untouched. During the demolition, hundreds artifacts were recovered, many of which had been stored in the attic of the original Pendennis Hotel. They include early maps and papers, snake oil drugs and remedies, an opium-based medicinal, the prohibition-era alcohol substitute Jamaica Ginger, kitchen and restaurant food containers, new immigrant information and reading material, early cosmetics, an ammunition box from London, England, medical records including an account book of a 1940 mass vaccination for Whooping Cough. Interesting are the numerous objects that attest to a not-completely understood relationship with the United States, especially California — likely an association with the lure of gold in the North Saskatchewan and the Yukon. Among the items found in the demolition was a strange and dangerous-looking device meant to screw onto a board, and which had two curved prongs with pointed teeth at the ends. A handle moved the prongs through a shield down into a channel with two hollows in it. This is a tool whose form is not immediately evident as to purpose unless you already know what it is. A search through Google images revealed it is a Goodell Cherry Pitter, manufactured in the mid-1880s in Antrim New Hampshire. Many Goodell tools still exist both in both museums and on internet antiques and collectible sales sites.
on site review 39: tools
43
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator