Reno reveals history hidden in 144-year-old New Hamburg hotel
Shoes for luck, letters of loss and handpainted ceiling discovered in Imperial Hotel
Drive through most small towns in Ontario and you will spot an old hotel, once grand but now a little rough around the edges. The Imperial Hotel in New Hamburg fit that description, built in 1872 and until recently, boarded up except for the local tavern on the first floor.
Marie Voisin,a former teacher with no experience in real estate or renovations, bought the building in 2013 with a plan to restore it and to turn it into apartments for seniors. What Voisin did not expect was how much history was hidden inside the 144 year old Imperial.
The first big find: three shoes sealed behind a wall in the hotel lobby. Voisin suspects they belonged to the children of the original owner who would have been following an old custom of concealing shoes to ward off evil spirits and to bring good luck to a home.
There was also a box of letters written in the 1920s by a hotel tenant who had fallen on hard times. Discovered by accident when builders randomly selected a small section of flooring to pull up, the letters tell the story of a man who lent all his money to a friend seeking his fortune in California. The borrowed money was never seen again and the lender wrote about surviving in the hotel.
Some of the interior decorating that once made the Imperial a grand dame in the region and exemplified Victorian tastes was hidden under other layers of modifications. When the drop-down ceiling in the hotel lobby was torn out, there was a tin ceiling under it, and under that tin ceiling was a hand-painted ceiling dating back to the hotel's opening in 1872.
Wallpaper from the turn of the century, faded and torn, and walls built using timber likely taken from barns build in the mid-1800s were additional surprises. Voisin said she tried to preserve as much as she could but a lot of structural issues prevented it. Builders even suggested it was a "miracle" the hotel was still standing.
The Imperial Hotel, which has housed everything from a butcher shop to a bank, is now fully renovated and is home to a group of seniors. Many grew up in New Hamburg and say they are "delighted" to be able to call this piece of local history home.
