Hotels have been part of Waterdown’s history from its earliest days. The village’s location on Dundas Street ensured east-west traffic and the need for hotels to serve travellers. The economic development of the milling industry in the village generated the need for a shipping outlet on the lake and resulted in a north-south traffic route through the village. By 1851, hotels were part of the village’s economy. As the village prospered, the number of hotels dramatically increased, and as it declined, so did the hotels.
Two hotels on Dundas Street have been prominent throughout the history of Waterdown, and both are still in operation. The American Hotel, although the oldest hotel has seen many owners, and great changes in its interior design, but its position on the important south west corner of Mill Street has ensured its continuance. The second hotel of long standing, the Kirk Hotel owes much of its development to a prime location, but also stable family ownership that operated the establishment for almost a century.
The Kirk Hotel situated on the north west corner of Dundas Street and Main Street North in Waterdown, has been a popular “watering hole” for locals since the last decade of the nineteenth century. Unlike the American Hotel, it has undergone comparatively little change since its early days, and still retains many of its original exterior features.
The two storey brick building is roughly rectangular in shape, with various small additions added to the rear over the years. Originally the property extended to just beyond the present Post Office, but the wooden stables and large barn that fronted onto Main Street North, and appear on several 1900-1930 postcards held by the Archives, have been demolished. Many village residents still recall the open area north of the hotel, with trees, a small rustic bridge and a stream that until the 1950s, ran south from the McGregor estate on Main Street, and meandered across the Kirk property before disappearing under the hotel building. Water from this stream was reputedly used to help douse the Great Fire of 1922. Sadly the stream has been led into a drain and the trees removed to make way for the present parking lot.
The main facade, with its central entranceway faces onto Main Street. The doorway which is slightly recessed has been completely altered several times. All the window openings at ground level have radiating brickwork or voussoirs above the frams and concrete lugsills below, and to each opening, decorative shutters and mirrors have been added. Along this side, and the Dundas Street facade, a verandah provides a sheltered walkway.
The outstanding architectural feature on this side of the building is the beautiful ornamental frontispiece with decorative bargeboard beneath the roof peak. This bargeboard was designed to frame the three paned, half round window surrounded by vertical planks, that sits level with the eaves. At one time there was a finial atop the roof peak – it appears in the famous photograph of the village core following the 1922 fire that was taken from the roof of the Kirk Hotel. In the centre of the frontispiece are two windows, and on either side, two doors that once led onto a balcony with a railing. When the verandah at ground level was replaced in the late 1960s, the new roof was sloped, and so the balcony was eliminated.
The truncated hip roof was originally capped by a belvedere that was enclosed by a wrought iron railing. In the centre of the roof on both the north and south sides are two hooded dormers, both still retaining their trim and wooden brackets.
Today there is only one single stack chimney towards the rear of the south facade left, the remains of another can be seen just above the three window bay on the corner of the hotel. The two matching chimneys on the north facade have been pulled down.
The property on which the present Kirk Hotel stands, was originally granted to Alexander and then passed through the ownership of Alexander Brown and Ebenezer Griffin. In 1862, this north west corner was purchased by Thomas English, a prominent local inhabitant, a carriage manufacturer and donor of the property on which the original St. Thomas Catholic Church was built. Directory Listings of the 1860s record this corner as the location of his carriage works, but in 1868, the property changed hands and William Heisse became the owner. In the same year, Heisse is recorded as a Hotel Keeper, although no name for the establishment is given until 1875, when he is listed as the Proprietor of the Right House Hotel.
In 1888 Patrick Kirk purchased the property an it then remained in the Kirk family until 1966, passing through three generations of the same family. Soon after the Kirk family took ownership, they converted the frame hotel to a brick building. Patrick Kirk added a kitchen and pantry with two rooms above at the rear, and added four rooms, two on each storey to the front of the building. This enlargement of the original hotel building may have been necessary to serve the increasing village traffic, as the Kirk was a stop on three different stage coach routes that passed through Waterdown.
When Patrick Kirk died in 1897, his son John Henry Kirk and his wife, Annie Isabella Organ took over the running of the hotel. During their early ownership, the hotel was one of the sites of John Prudham’s annual winter banquets, alternating with the American Hotel. This was a time when whiskey cost 3 cents a glass, and to reserve a hotel room cost $1.50 a day.
After the great village fire of 1922, the Bell Telephone Centre was installed in the hotel, and remained there until 1931. John Henry Kirk died in 1944, and for three years his son John Leo Kirk operated the hotel before his ill health forced his sister Mary to take on the responsibilities. She continued the family ownership until 1966 when it was sold out of the Kirk family, although she remained living there in her own suite until her death in 1985.
After a series of proprietors, the hotel was again returned to family ownership in 1990, when members of the Morgunov family from Toronto took possession and undertook the task of a major facelift to a building that has been an important part of village life throughout its existence.
© The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society 1993, 2022.
Editor’s Note:A few years after this article was originally published, the Kirk Hotel changed hands again and was transformed into a British Pub in 1995. Now known as The Royal Coachman, it remains a popular spot within Waterdown for food, beverages and social gatherings.
