The Way We Were: Dunlap House was a source of Jacksonville pride

February 27, 2012 5:26 AM

A traveling man could get a pretty nice room for $2 a day at the Dunlap House a century ago.

The old Dunlap was an 80-room hotel which once stood where the Morgan County Center is now located on West State Street.

The Dunlap House was completed in the spring of 1858 and for many years was considered to be one of Jacksonville’s principal buildings. Sketches of the hotel were included on maps and other publications.

The hotel was the brainchild of Col. James Dunlap, a local entrepreneur, who took a residence and enlarged it. The front part of the brick hotel building had three stories, while two rear wings had two floors.

The guest rooms were said to be “neat and airy,” and each room was supplied with a stove and gas fixtures.

“Although this hotel will be a just subject of pride to our citizens, and has involved a very heavy expenditure in its erection, it is entirely a private enterprise on the part of Col. Dunlap, and one which entitles him to the commendations of the community for the liberality and public spirit it evinces,” wrote a local journalist in 1858.

The Dunlap soon supplanted the Mansion House, later known as the Park Hotel, as the city’s leading hostelry.

Samuel Clemens, better known as “Mark Twain,” stayed at the Dunlap when he came to town in 1869 to talk about his travels abroad.

Members of the Dunlap family ran the hotel for many years before Capt. Alexander Smith, a Civil War hero and veteran hotel clerk, bought the place in 1880. He earned his rank fighting for the Union Army and proudly kept it the rest of his life.

“Cap” Smith, who is said to have been “a born hotel keeper,” quickly undertook a complete remodeling of the hotel. An army of painters, plasterers and carpenters renovated every inch of the building.

The renovated Dunlap’s rooms were all equipped with an electric bell connected to the office. And “another feature which few, if any, hotels in our state possess is the ladies private washroom and bathrooms ... fitted up in the best possible manner,” the Journal reported in September 1880.

“As a guarantee that the house will be ably conducted in such a manner as to satisfy the traveling public, we need only state that Capt. Alex Smith, the proprietor, ... will have personal supervision of the house and see that the wants of all guests are promptly supplied.”

For the entertainment of his guests, Smith also had a billiards room added to the hotel in 1880, a room large enough to accommodate six tables.

“Conventions always delighted him, and he was happiest when the great lobby and dining rooms were filled with sociable guests,” wrote an unknown local historian around 1940.

“On one occasion, the Travelers Protective Association state meeting was held (at the Dunlap House) and as each guest went to the desk to pay his bill for himself and his family, the clerk smilingly handed him a bill already receipted by ‘Cap.’”

Smith got out of the hotel business in 1904 and died in a fire in his Jacksonville home in 1917.

A modern, five-story brick and steel-frame hotel building went up just east of the old Dunlap in 1925. Called the New Dunlap Hotel, it dwarfed its outdated predecessor for a few years before wreckers demolished the old hotel.

See the rest here:
The Way We Were: Dunlap House was a source of Jacksonville pride