As soon as the railroad provided easy access to Colorado’s sprouting towns, overnight accommodations became a brisk commodity. Travelers of all backgrounds needed overnight rooms – miners and mine owners, tourists and travelling salesmen, adventurers and health seekers. Fancy famous hotels provided luxurious comfort – Denver’s Brown Palace, Estes Park’s Stanley Hotel, the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and the Strater Hotel in Durango.
Prior to auto courts and motor inns and modern motels, hundreds of hotels provided a domestic situation for the travelling public in prices that fit most pocketbooks. The railroad depot became the gateway into and out of town for every community of any consequence. Travelers clambered aboard a horse-drawn wagon or coach that took them and their luggage to overnight lodging.
The west was restless then, and the travelling public included all types of people. Newcomers, job seekers, transient workers, relocating families and unattached women – spinsters, mistresses, widows – took up temporary abode in hotels. Sales people came to town: salesmen called “drummers” peddled everything from mining machinery to pots and pans; saleswomen brought in the latest fashion creations or sold Bibles or sewing machines. Clairvoyants and gypsy fortunetellers travelled a town-to-town circuit earning a living by sooth saying for a rapt audience. Theatrical troupes and other entertainers came and went.
The working class bunked at working class hotels – railroad workers laboring along the line and professional baseball players on the rural circuit. Cowboys went from summer roundups or winter pasture. Tramp miners rambled from mine to mine, from strike to strike. Immigrants arrived from foreign countries for employment prospects. Writers, painters and photographers sought inspiration and depicted splendid mountain settings. Schoolteachers on summer holiday came to relax. A few folks came purely for vacation: moderately, such as wealthy travelers came to Glenwood Springs, Hot Sulphur Springs and Ouray to soak in the steaming waters and gawk at the gorgeous views.
Possibly the oldest lodging still operating as such in Colorado, the Peck House in Empire dates back to the stagecoach and freight wagon days of the early 1860s.
The central lobby greeted these visitors – a clerk in a stiffly starched collar behind an oaken counter took their payment and pointed them up the steep stairs to sleeping rooms outfitted with the basics – a bed, dresser, small table, chair and, perhaps, a wardrobe. The hotel lobby became a thriving social venue. Visitors lounged, reclining on often-ornate settees and chairs covered in velvet and horsehair conversing with other guests, flirting, courting, handling business and watching new arrivals.
Amenities were functional if not lavish. Meals were served at the hotel restaurant and liquid refreshment in the hotel saloon accessible only to the men. Better inns also offered a ladies’ wine room. High ceilings, tall double-hung windows, and transom doors made the best of natural lighting and ventilation. A creaking hissing radiator gave heat. A solitary light bulb offered the only nighttime illumination. In all but the very best, a bathroom with a toilet, tub and sink served the masses. Sitting on porches, verandas and balconies provided views of scenic vistas, the messy muddy frontier town and, more often than not, bustling industrial activities like mining, ore milling or an operating sawmill.
By the second decade of the 20th century, Henry Ford’s four-wheel invention gave people the power to drive themselves in their travels rather than relying upon railway transportation. Lumbering old hotels fell into disfavor as tourists preferred one-story lodging where they could park their car right outside. Most old inns served an ever more seedy clientele until finally closing their doors for good. As boomtowns dwindled, numerous unused inns fell vacant and many, many burned to the ground.
Only a few hotels remain from the period when a room with a bed, a dresser and a table provided overnight – if not short-term or longer-term – comfort for the travelling public.
Built during Colorado Territory’s stagecoach settlement days, then accessed by the Colorado & Southern Railroad, the Astor House Hotel in Golden became a way station for travelers on their way up Clear Creek canyon toward the blooming towns of Central City, Black Hawk, Georgetown or Silver Plume. Within the thick stonewalls an elegant parlor and small tidy rooms upstairs accommodated gold prospectors, coal miners, mill workers and, later, engineering students at the Colorado School of Mines. It is now a museum.
Another pre-railroad hotel, the long, gable-roofed Peck House in Empire has been in nonstop operation since its 1860 construction during Colorado’s very first gold rush. Wealthy Chicago merchant James Peck outfitted with maple furniture brought by wagon train from Chicago and his family ran the hotel for nearly ninety years. It functioned as a focal point for fun and festivities, including as sleigh rides, wagon parties, political gatherings and concerts by the Empire Silver Cornet Band.
In Leadville, the three Calloway Brothers built the Delaware Hotel during the cities mining boom. The three-story brick beauty on a prominent downtown corner was designed by architect George King with nearly 50 overnight rooms upstairs and retail shops on the first floor. As mining declined following the Silver Panic of 1893, business slowed then stalled then stopped. In 1983, the property went into foreclosure and was auctioned off in a delinquent tax sale. Subsequent owners have restored the fine old hotel and reconfigured it into 36 rooms and suites.
The spacious three-story Western Hotel in Ouray opened in 1892 one block from the D&RG railroad depot – as well as close proximity to the city’s red light district – renting affordable rooms to miners, railroad men, teamsters and other hard workers. After standing empty for a decade, the Western was purchased in 1916 by Floro and Maria Flor who turned it a respectable boarding house. Under the Flors’ management, the Western Hotel provided domestic comforts for miners, many of them bachelor miners from “the old country” – Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. These seasonal guests worked at the outlying mining districts from spring thaw until early winter. When the mines became snowed in, the miners rented rooms at the Western until spring. The Flors served meals family style, and “Mother Flor” provided laundry services for miners. During the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic, Mrs. Flor took in miners from the Atlas and Camp Bird mines.
The Flor family sold the property in 1961 to Johnny and Helen Johnson, who converted the rambling hotel into a museum with the second-floor rooms exhibiting lives of various historic guests. Johnson became the manager for the Switzerland of America Jeep company in 1968.
Today, the Western has two corner suites and the rest of the rooms are sleeping rooms with the bathroom down the hall. A bar and restaurant serve guests and the owner’s Jeep tour company does business next door. The false front beauty – two three-story sections behind a common façade – is believed to be the largest remaining wooden-built hotel in the west. The Western Hotel and other vintage inns are feature in the “Historic Ouray County Hotels” exhibit that runs through Nov. 20 at the Ouray County Museum.
Nearly every historic Colorado town has an elderly hotel. You can relive the lifestyle of a century ago, some with minimal modern amenities and others totally upgraded, if you don’t mind hauling your luggage up a steep stairs to the upper story rooms.
