The Victoria Hotel in its heydey

“It was looking so bad I was hoping they would tear it down,” said Helen.

Doug Hankinson’s grandfather, Charles, bought the property in 1923 for $4,000 from

Captain Norman Smith. Charles wife, his daughter Daisy, and Doug who was one at the time moved into the hotel.

The price was $1,500 down with $500/year due annually at five percent interest.

At that time, rooms were $1.50 each. Meals sold for .50 cents. The clientele was primarily salesmen who arrived by horse and buggy.

There was a huge barn and carriage house and a community post office was located in the hotel. Over the years a third floor was added to expand the room count from eight to 25.

To celebrate the purchase of the new enterprise, the Hankinsons baked a rhubarb pie. From then on, every May 10th, the tradition was repeated - through three generations over the next 80 years.

Doug remembers hard work at an early age.

“I used to stand up on a chair and help wash the dishes,” he said.

He and Helen carried on the business with his mother after her parents died and when she passed away in 1957, the couple continued.

Helen says she still marvels at how Daisy managed to cope alone during the war years.

“Those days people were more caring. Lots of times the people who stayed there helped her,” she said.

“One of the men who stayed there named it the home away from home,” added Doug proudly.

“If they were sitting around in the evening and they wanted a glass of milk, they’d go out in the kitchen and help themselves,” he said.

Helen provided other examples of the exceptional hospitality.

“In my day it wouldn’t be uncommon for someone to say the button’s gone off my coat, would you sew my button on? Or sew my pants for me? We treated them like family and they respected us, every one of them,” she said.

Helen says she remembers Nova Scotia Light and Power workers from Yarmouth coming in after working outside in the freezing, wet cold all day.

“We’d make a good fire in the coal stove and had ropes strung all around the hall so they could hang their clothes to dry,” said Helen.

In the 60s, the Hankinsons added a 10-unit motel at the rear. The complex cost $80,000 to construct. Rooms were $4/each when it was completed.

The business changed hands four times after the Hankinson’s sold it.

“We got out of it just in time in the 70’s. When the computers came in, they took the salesmen off the road,” said Doug.

The couple, who are both in their 80s, say the 25 years they spent running the hotel were tough ones, but that that was the way they chose to make a living.

“Life went by so fast and our children just grew up around us,” said Helen, who did all the laundry on a wringer washer and no dryer.

“I was up in the morning at 6 a.m. and never got to bed till after midnight,” said Doug, the resident pie-maker.

“It certainly made us close; because we worked so closely all those years. It shows that hard work will not hurt you, because we did it,” concluded Helen