An old snapshot of the Quilchena Hotel.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Brent Gill

Wander through the saloon and rooms of the old Quilchena Hotel and you may the whispers of an era long past and see the bullets left behind.

The hotel, located along 5A northeast of Merritt, has been a landmark of the Nicola Valley for 114 years.

“It’s an iconic piece of property on the old Kamloops highway… which used to be wagon trail,” said Brent Gill, reservations manager for the hotel.

The hotel is popular among paranormal enthusiasts and photographers.

“It’s completely still preserved to era and there have been hundreds of supernatural experiences reported,” Gill said. “We have numerous paranormal activity groups rent the hotel to do studies.”

The saloon still has the bullets left behind from an angry cowboy in the 1940s, he said.

The bar and saloon of the Quilchena Hotel.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Brent Gill

“The story is they were cut off from drinking so a cowboy pressed the server and fired two shots at the bar to try and puncture a beer barrel and they’re still embedded in the bar today. There’s not a lot of bars with bullets embedded from the ‘40s,” Gill said.

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The original hotel was built in the early 1800s by Joseph Blackbourn near the site of the current hotel, according to the Nicola Valley Museum and Archives.

Blackbourn sold the land to Ed O’Rourke in 1891 for $8,500, about $250,000 today, according to the museum. A previous tenant of the hotel and operator, O'Rourke pushed for the area to become a leisure and recreation operation until it was sold again to Joseph Guichon in 1905, the youngest of five brothers who had come from France in pursuit of the gold rush in B.C., according to Douglas Lake Ranch.

The bar and saloon at the Quilchena Hotel.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Brent Gill

The new hotel opened in 1908, but closed less than 10 years later in 1917 as business dropped due to the First World War.

“It was anticipating the railway was going to go through and it never did. The year it was completed, they moved the CN Rail to the other side of the Thompson River so it actually closed for almost 40 years,” Gill said.

It reopened again in 1958 and has remained open ever since.

The Quilchena Cattle Company was purchased by Douglas Lake Cattle Company on December 31, 2013. The hotel is currently only open to private bookings, with 15 rooms, a saloon and full commercial kitchen.

The former One Eleven Grill is no longer in operation because the commercial kitchen didn’t go well with COVID-19 and the hotel's closed spaces. Social distancing is difficult and it needs to be more people in the surrounding community to make it a viable business option, Gill said.

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Cameron Bridge, manager of the Nicola Valley Museum, said the hotel is the oldest wooden frame hotel in the Nicola Valley and it’s still in very good condition.

It’s an old, beautiful building that’s stood the test of time, Bridge said. “It was a pretty big, pretty prominent hotel.”

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