William Decimus Godson married Catherine (Kate) Stanley in England on May 8, 1902, and built the Shakespeare Hotel in Carievale a few months later. The hotel opened for business in 1903.
Kate had grown up near Stratford-on-Avon – hence the name of their hotel.
The Shakespeare Hotel was a two-storey frame building on Railway Avenue, with an open veranda across the front. It had seven bedrooms on the second floor, two of which the Godsons reserved for their own use – one as a sitting room, the other as a bedroom. The dining room on the first floor was a busy place, as the train from Brandon to Estevan stopped in Carievale for dinner.
A liquor licence was obtained for the bar, “a good form of insurance against slow business for any hotel,” Decima (Godson) Horsborough recalls in the Carievale history book. Hotel staff included Mrs. Mullet, the cook, and the three Moore sisters who worked in the kitchen, dining room and as chambermaids.
On Sept. 15, 1904, 10 days after his daughter Decima was born, William Godson was accidentally shot and killed while on a prairie chicken hunting trip with a group of friends. Kate Godson, with a newborn and a 17-month old, took over the hotel.
She had never taken an active role in the management of the hotel before this, so her father, an innkeeper in England, came to help her. In 1906, the hotel was sold to R. T. Martin. Kate died in 1949 in Munster, Indiana.
Ford and Blanche Muldoon ran the Empire Hotel from 1923 to 1938. Ford installed a light plant in the hotel’s basement – the first electric power in town. A few years later, he constructed a building behind the hotel to house a larger electric generator and an ice house.
The plant not only provided power to the hotel – it also sent electricity to the Orange Hall, the pool hall, the barber shop and three street lights on Railway Avenue.
This generator also facilitated the installation of a Kelvinator ice cream freezer – the first refrigeration in Carievale – which no doubt proved popular with the young people in town.
The hotel business went into a decline due to the Depression. Ford and Blanche applied for a beer parlour license in 1935 – a last ditch effort to save their business. Despite the amenities that Ford and Blanche had brought to the town, the local voters went against their liquor license bid, and the Muldoons saw no alternative but to abandon the hotel in 1938.
The Empire Hotel had been vacant for two years when Joseph (Joe) and Niame Kemaldean bought it from an insurance company in 1940. The Kemaldean family had immigrated to Canada from Lebanon in 1924 and had operated a general store in Carievale since 1934. When their store burned down in 1940, the Kemaldeans, with their daughter Mabel and son Norman (Sam), moved their store into the Empire Hotel.
In 1946, the Kemaldeans obtained a liquor license for Carievale’s hotel. They moved their store into a vacant shop next door and made extensive renovations to the hotel before opening the beer parlour in the hotel in 1947. Sam worked as the bartender in the Empire Hotel from 1948 to 1977. He witnessed many changes, including the renovation of the licensed premises from a beer parlour to a beverage room in 1962-63 to accommodate mixed drinking. When Joe Kemaldean passed away in 1977, his widow Niame sold the hotel.
The old hotel still stands in Carievale, but it is unrecognizable. The building was completely gutted and renovated in the 2000s to serve as a retail outlet.
