By the grace of luck, no lives were lost when Flin Flon’s Corona Hotel met a fiery fate.
But the blaze was nonetheless a tragedy for a town still carving out an identity in the remote northern wilderness.
This year marks 60 years since the Corona burnt to the ground, a disaster that still ranks as one of the most devastating fires to hit Flin Flon.
The Corona Hotel – or Hotel Corona, as the original sign read – was one of Flin Flon’s first businesses, opening on Main Street in 1929.
It housed miners and other new-to-town workers, as well as visitors making the long and arduous trek to the young mining settlement.
The Corona also became a preferred destination for those looking to kick back after a hard week’s work.
“The beer parlour was a favourite gathering spot on payday Fridays,” notes the website for the Salty Water Buoys, a Flin Flon-born musical duo who wrote a song about the hotel, “where tables were pulled together and the price of a seat was a round of beers, a Flin Flon tradition that was observed for many years.”
Another interesting anecdote about the Corona relates to just how rocky – literally – Flin Flon’s beginnings were.
Don Gummerson, an early resident of Flin Flon, recalled an incident from around 1933.
“There were two box cars filled with dynamite and everyone was warned to stay indoors or even get out of the downtown area because of the blast the company planned to set off,” Gummerson told The Reminder in 2004. “I was standing on the steps at our home on Lake Street with my mom and little sister when the blast went off and there was a five-foot boulder that went sailing passed our heads and landed in our backyard. One boulder went right through the roof of the Corona Hotel. That was how the open pit [mine] came about.”
Built around the time of the Depression, the Corona represented something of a sure thing in desperate times.
The hotel was the brainchild of entrepreneur Ernest Edward (E.E.) Foster, an ambitious Englishman, and his business partner
A. (Babe) Allard.
The Corona helped make Foster a familiar face in the budding community. In 1933, two years after assuming full ownership of the hotel, he ran for mayor of the newly incorporated town of Flin Flon.
Foster was no stranger to politics, having served as a town councillor in The Pas before moving even further north. As an avid volunteer, he was also accustomed to community service.
Now in Flin Flon, facing off against Dr. Ernest Joseph Kelly and Arthur C. Horne, the popular Foster won a landslide victory with nearly 70 per cent of the mayoral vote.
Foster would operate the Corona until 1941, when he sold the hotel to the Winnipeg-based Drewry’s Lake of the Woods Brewery.
By the late 1940s, Flin Flon was no longer the frontier town of its early days. A growing population and increased access had brought a wave of new entrepreneurs and an appetite for rejuvenation.
It was against this backdrop in early 1949 that Flin Flon town council rejected a Corona Hotel application to make alterations. Apparently the plans just weren’t up to snuff.
“Council reiterated its firm intention to take every step possible to bring about the modernization or rebuilding of the hotels in Flin Flon,” The Reminder reported at the time, “so that the town and travelling public might find in this city of 10,000 people accommodation more in keeping with the progressive spirit of the north.”
By now the hotel market in Flin Flon had grown crowded. Patrons had their choice of locations, including the New Richmond Hotel and the original Flin Flon and Royal hotels, among others.
E.E. Foster was not only out of the hotel picture, but also out of Flin Flon entirely. After selling the Corona, he had retired to the warmth of BC.
It was in BC, on Oct. 30, 1955, that Foster passed away at the then-ripe old age of 73. No one could have known it at the time, but the hotel he and Babe Allard had built would soon also meet its fate.
On Dec. 6, 1955, a freezing winter day, fire battered the Corona Hotel and surrounding buildings. The 1974 book Flin Flon summed it up this way:
“Six businesses were affected by the blaze, B.A. Biggs, dentist office; R.F. Hiscox, optometrist; Ballard’s Barber Shop; Northern Grocery; Sharon Gaye Ready-to-Wear; P & G Baker; and slight damage to the Hudson Bay Company store and the Blue and White store, the latter two buildings by water only.
“The Hudson Bay store was thereafter extended onto a portion of the property formerly occupied by the hotel company, the other businesses re-established at new locations further along Main Street, while the bakery business and the Blue and White store carried on in the premises occupied at the time of the fire.”
At least one account blamed the blaze on a customer who made the dangerous decision to smoke in bed. It reportedly took firefighters 13 hours to douse the flames.
Reuben Hagan, a long-time former firefighter, joined the Flin Flon Fire Dept. shortly after the Corona blaze, but he had heard what it was like.
“It was terribly cold and the firemen were covered with ice,” he recalled in a 2003 Reminder interview.
Perhaps indicative of the increased competition among hoteliers, the Corona was never rebuilt. Flin Flon, still a fairly young town, marked the end of an era.
The Corona blaze was the first of four major hotel fires in Flin Flon over an 11-year period. Flames also assaulted the New Richmond in 1959, the Flin Flon Hotel in 1962 and the Royal Hotel in 1966.
The Royal Hotel fire marked the demise of the last of Flin Flon’s original hotels, though the landmark was rebuilt and today remains a successful business.
Despite being immortalized in the aforementioned Salty Water Buoys song, a little-known gem of a tune, the Corona is but a fading memory.
Not that that’s surprising. Even for a legend like the Corona Hotel, 60 years is a long time to be gone.
