Through fire and demolition, Palmerston has lost a large portion of its 19th century commercial and industrial buildings.
Though the railway dominated the town’s economy until the 1950s, Palmerston built up a significant manufacturing sector in the 1870s and 1880s. Few remnants of those activities remain.
Palmerston’s role as a railway junction brought a big demand for hotels from travellers, salesmen visiting local merchants and changing trains, and for crews of those trains laying over between runs. Those not taking rooms overnight often had thirsts that needed to be slaked in one of the bustling hotel bar rooms.
Before World War I there were six or seven hotels competing for all that trade.
Perhaps the most famous was the Queen’s Hotel, located across the tracks from the passenger station. Passengers and crews ate and drank there. In its prime, the Queen’s dining room could be busy at any hour of the day or night.
Other hotels, long forgotten, included the Commercial, the Albion, the Union Hotel and the Hesse House.
The finest of the Palmerston hotels was the Imperial. Located at the eastern corner of William and Main Streets, it was an architectural gem, a three storey structure in the second empire style and faced with red brick and white brick detailing. The third storey, with a mansard roof that typified the second empire style, set off the building and the entire corner in a dramatic way.
The Imperial Hotel dated back to 1872 or 1873, when Palmerston was a brand new town and booming with railway construction activity. The original portion of the hotel was east of the corner, and built of frame construction, as was most of the town in those early years. There were four successive owners before 1880.
The corner seemed the ideal location for a hotel. The Great Western’s station was a short distance down William Street, and Main was obviously destined to be the chief commercial street of the town.
In 1879 a new owner named John Watt, from the town of Mitchell, took over the property. Seeing the need for more and better hotel facilities in Palmerston, he built a new three-storey wing that extended the hotel out to the street lines of Main and William, and more than tripled its size. The name of the architect does not seem to have survived, but the design of the new wing eclipsed anything in the town. Watt faced the original part of the hotel in brick at the same time.
Though remembered as the Imperial, the hotel operated under several names over its life. In the 1880s it was known as Watt’s Hotel. For a time the hotel was known as the Central, and at other times by the name of the owner or lessee.
The Imperial name may be a late change, perhaps a salute to the imperial fervour of the 1890s and the celebrations surrounding Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897.
John Watt operated the hotel for about a decade before moving on to other business activities. That was something of a record for the Imperial, and other hotels as well.
Hotel owners sold their properties and bought others in the 19th century, constantly looking for a more profitable one. Some owners leased their hotels to operators for one and two-year terms. Those men drifted from one location to another. Many names pop up in various locations in Wellington and beyond during those years.
After Watt, the Imperial was under the direction of Matt Upkin, Sam Schneider, Fred Crouse and finally George Daum.
The Imperial’s bar room closed in 1917 with the introduction of prohibition. The hotel itself struggled on briefly, then closed completely. Soon after, Daum sold the building, with its large adjoining stable and a collection of various outbuildings, to members of the Bramhill family, who farmed just to the north of Palmerston.
Under the new ownership the main floor became a retail store operated by the Farmers Co-operative Company. When that operation wound down a few years later, the hotel became home to a handful of residents in rooms fitted up as apartments. The Palmerston chapter of the Eastern Star rented a second floor room. On the first floor were offices for a chiropractor, dentist Dr. N.L. Milne, the grocery store of Nye & Collins, C.W. Brown’s tailoring shop and the Naturelle Beauty Salon.
Late in 1935 the partnership of McRae and Embury purchased the property, and gave notice to all the tenants to vacate the building. The new owners intended to demolish the buildings on the property and put up an automotive service station. They had been operating their business from the old stables and carriage storage buildings at the rear of the property.
The tenants had little difficulty finding other quarters. The Depression was lingering in Palmerston, and other quarters could be found readily. McRae and Embury began their demolition in mid February 1936, starting with the original portion on the eastern side of the building. The old structure was down by the end of March. “Old” was perhaps not a good adjective: the main portion had stood for only 57 years, and had been a hotel for only 38 years.
Initially, most people greeted the news of the new service station favourably. Business was stagnating in Palmerston. Many railway workers had been laid off for most of the previous five years.
But when the hotel building was down, the corner of Main and William presented an empty vista. Locals immediately regretted the destruction of the downtown landmark.
McRae and Embury lost no time in putting up their new service station. Contractors poured the concrete foundation in April, and by summer the new business was in full operation.
Photographs of the old Imperial Hotel are rare. In my own collection I have a couple of postcards, taken from roughly the same angle, across the intersection of Main and William. They date from the first decade of the 20th century. One shows the building decorated for the Old Boys Reunion of 1909.
Regrettably, the building was demolished before colour film came into use, so there is no documentation of the multi-colour brickwork that distinguished what was perhaps the finest old building in Palmerston.