Audio
Kettle Falls Part I (Hotel)
Transcript
Welcome to the Kettle Falls Hotel and Dam Podcast. The Kettle Falls area is one of 15 visitor Destinations within Voyageurs National Park.
You have finally made it to Kettle Falls. I’m sure it was quite a journey for you. Did you come to fish for Lake Sturgeon below a fast moving water fall? Or you have been paddling a 26-foot canoe and the water is too low to go any further so you need to get out and portage around the falls. Maybe you’re looking to get rich quick and have traveled thousands of miles and are in a hurry to catch the steamer on the other side of the falls. Perhaps you’ve come to sell your fish to people or sluice logs through the newly constructed dam.
Whatever the reason is that you have come to this gathering place, there are many others just like you, here for an opportunity. For thousands of years the Kettle Falls area has provided a wealth of opportunity for a variety of people and been known as “the crossroad of history”.
Geographically, the falls, and later the dams, created a barrier that people had to bypass in order to travel from one lake to another. At Kettle Falls there are actually two falls separated by an island: Kettle Falls on the United States border and Squirrel Falls on the Canadian border. The falls were well-known to Indian people, early fur traders, explorers, gold miners, commercial fisherman, lumbermen, and early tourists as an important gathering spot.
For the Ojibwe Indians the opportunity at Kettle Falls was Lake Sturgeon. For the voyageurs, it was a chance to shorten a portage route on the 3,000-mile water highway of the fur trade. Others saw the economic opportunity of the falls to generate power and store water for paper mills.
No matter what the reason was for people to gather in the Kettle Falls area, the land has provided a means and way of life for everyone.
In 1910 construction of the dams drew even more people to the Kettle Falls area. One such group were lumber companies as it was a major route for transporting logs to International Falls and timber assessor Ed Rose saw potential to provide lodging to travelers using the portage.
Ed began construction of the Kettle Falls Hotel and finished in 1913. One rumor states the construction of the Kettle Falls Hotel was financed by the famous Madame, Nelly Blye.
After several years of operating the hotel, Ed Rose sold the hotel to Bob Williams in 1918. The price for the hotel was 1000 dollars and four barrels of Bob’s homemade whisky. This was a good deal for Ed with prohibition lurking around the corner, but an even greater opportunity for Bob, whose family owned and operated the hotel for the next 59 years.
During the early years of the dam construction, the hotel was a thriving business and a way of life for many people. Over 150 dam laborers lived and worked at Kettle Falls, lumberjacks came with their week’s pay to enjoy some of the homemade, and illegal, whiskey, and commercial fishermen came to hold fish auctions. At times there would be 200 to 300 people watching fish auctions that were held several times a week.
Early tourists eventually became the mainstay of life at Kettle Falls and in 1930 the hotel was advertised as a place where tourists could find an opportunity to escape their allergies, “Not a sneeze on the border!”
The chance to escape allergies wasn’t the only thing that made Kettle Falls a bustling tourist destination. Word spread of Lil Williams’, Bob’s wife’s, cooking. Her fried chicken was especially popular. When asked how many chickens were fried on a Sunday night she responded, “A hundred or more sometimes!” Most visitors came back year after year, and the friendly environment made them feel so at home they would start doing their own dishes.
Wear and tear on the hotel became apparent over the years and the hotel began to be affectionately known as the Tiltin’ Hilton. The decay of the logs and clay soil caused the building to settle over the contours of the log foundation and as the building settled, the hardwood floors gradually took on the contours of this foundation and the entire hotel was bowed and warped. That never stopped the hotel from prospering. The Williams family sawed off table legs, the piano and pool table were stabilized with pots and books, and the bottoms of the doors were sawed off once or twice a year to fit their doorways all in order to keep up with the shifting of the hotel.
In 1977, the Williams family decided to change their way of life and sold Kettle Falls Hotel to the National Park Service. The hotel remained closed for many years until it was renovated. Before it was torn down the floor was mapped, then most of the floors were straightened but the bar still retains its warped floors, which became part of the charm and nostalgia of the hotel.
The Kettle Falls area has been many things to many people. For Ed Rose and the Williams family it was the opportunity to run a successful hotel. For lumberjacks it was a place for relaxing after sluicing logs through the dam. For the Ojibwe it was a gathering place to fish for sturgeon and trade blueberries for items at the trading post. For the gold seekers it was a portage route to get to the gold field of Rainy Lake and for commercial fisherman it was a place to sell their wares. Kettle Falls truly was and is a crossroad of history, a place where opportunity still exists and history comes alive.
This concludes the Kettle Falls Hotel podcast.
Description
The Kettle Falls Hotel is located between Namakan and Rainy Lakes in Voyageurs National Park. Even today, no road leads to the hotel; it is accessible only by water. Why was a hotel constructed in this seemingly inconvenient location? Find out here!
Duration
6 minutes, 11 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
04/16/2010
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