Smelter City Stories

In this wonderful photo a crowd gathers on the street in front of the Arlington Hotel, soon after it was built. Everyone appears to be lining the street waiting to see the Dominion Day parade. You can also see curious onlookers peering out of many of the hotel's windows.
The Arlington Hotel was built in 1896, the same year the smelter opened. At four storeys it was the new city's most prominent building. Richard T. Daniel, the Spokane mining magnate who built it, spared no expense. It had 45 richly furnished rooms, and the interior fittings alone are said to have cost $10,000, around $400,000 today. The Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia called it the "finest hotel in the West."¹
At the time it was built it was only one of eight hotels in Trail, and they were the main places where social life happened in the city. Only the Arlington Hotel, and the Crown Point across the street, have survived to the present.

Here we see another Dominion Day celebration, this time showing the festively decorated Crown Point Hotel. The Crown Point was built right at the founding of Trail in 1895, and along with the Arlington Hotel, has overlooked the city's main intersection throughout its entire history.

This business block was built in 1928 by W.K. Esling, the member of parliament for West Kootenays. It was built after a fire destroyed the Steele and Macdonald store that had previously occupied this prominent street corner.
It still looks brand new in this photo, and its first main tenant was the Hunt's Gift store. A few years later the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce moved its branch from the Arlington Hotel into this building. People started calling it the Commerce Building as a result, and the name has stuck to this day, even though the CIBC has moved elsewhere.

Harry McLean and Mike Butorac built this Art Deco garage in 1926 at the corner of Bay Avenue and Farwell Street, operating it as McLean-Butorac Motors, the local dealer for the Hudson Motor Car Company and its lower-priced companion brand, the Terraplane. The dealership was a major sponsor of local radio and backed a weekly program on CJAT that featured the "Terraplaners", a banjo and guitar duo.¹

Once located on the south side of Cedar Street was the Strand Theatre. We can tell that this photo was taken in 1945 because the theatre is playing Roughly Speaking, which came out that year. It was a comedy about an American mom leading her family through the First World War and the Great Depression.
The Strand was built in 1917 for the Trail Opera House Company. It opened in the era of vaudeville and plays, but as those forms of entertainment gave way to movies in the 20s and 30s, the theatre was renovated many times to keep up with the times. "It became The Strand as we remember it in 1936 after the last bout of renovations," said Trail archivist Addison Oberg.
In its heyday it was described as "finest theatre in the Interior of British Columbia, and one of the finest in the entire Dominion."¹
Unfortunately it burned down in 1956.

This is the Knights of Pythia building in the 1920s. At the time this photo was taken the knights would meet on the top floor, while the bottom floor was home to the F.W. Woodworth department store until the 1950s. Trail's CJAT, also first broadcast from a studio in this building in 1931 under the name 10AT.

Sitting atop the bench is the Central School, Trail's first modern school. Of course Trail needed a school from the very beginning, and it didn't take long for the community to band together to build the first school on this spot in 1896. It was a rudimentary one-room schoolhouse that quickly burned down, but was quickly replaced by another somewhat larger schoolhouse. Not long after, in 1912, Trail's growing population and growing prosperity led to the construction of the impressive school you see today.

This is the Knox Church, which opened for worship to Trail's Presbyterians in December 1921. Four years later Trail's Presbyterian church merged with the Methodist and Congregationalist Churches to form the Knox United Church. This was part of a historic nationwide amalgamation of the three churches, so they could resources in small frontier communities and better coordinate their overseas missionary work.
Trail's United Church celebrated their 100th anniversary in September 2025.

Here we see Trail's fire brigade and police departments posing with their fancy new fire trucks and police cars in front of Trail's city hall and fire station. This corner has been the heart of Trail's municipal governance for over a century.
You might be surprised to learn that the building behind them in the 1929 photo is actually the same one you see here today. In 1961 it underwent a rather dramatic exterior remodeling, but it is still the same. The fire station has moved however. Today it is located at a big regional hall on Rossland Avenue, while the city hall expanded to take over the fire station part of this block.

As we can see, this lot was once home to an Eaton's Department Store. This has been where people in Trail have gone to shop for much of the city's history, though the store has changed names a number of times.

Kids pose for a class photo outside Trail's then-new Technical School. It was built in 1923 to offer grades 9 to 11, while opening up space at the Central School, which was becoming overcrowded. In the first year they had 90 students, which is about the number of students you can see in this photo. They began offering grade 12 in 1926.

At first glance the brick house you see here looks like an upper class family's 19th century home. It was actually Trail's first hospital.
When we think of a hospital today we think of a sprawling campus filled with hundreds of highly trained and overworked professionals, one or two dozen specialist departments, and many, many extremely expensive machines.
Trail in the 1890s didn't have any of those things because they hadn't been invented yet. This hospital however, was well ahead of its time and an institution that all Trail could take pride and comfort in: the doctor lived in-house and had a great reputation; the eight beds were comfortable and the rooms airy; and it had state-of-the-art electric light bulbs above the operating table. What more could one ask for in a hospital in 1896?¹

It's payday in Trail and dozens of smelter employees, still holding their lunch pails, have lined up outside the Bank of Montreal to cash their cheques. It's not surprising that everyone looks pretty happy--you probably know that feeling!

This photo shows the Odeon Theatre in 1948. As you can see it is mostly underwater: this photo was taken during the disastrous 1948 floods, when the waters of the Columbia River rose to the top of the ticket booth. Thankfully, the theatre survived, and continues today as the Royal--Trail's beloved independent community cinema.