Tom MacCallum

Richmond County Daily Journal

For a small town in the early 1900s, Hamlet had a lot of visitors when trains pulled into town, said Norva Jernigan, one of the guest speakers Monday night for a meeting of the Richmond County Historical Society.

John Hutchinson of Rockingham spoke on hotels in Rockingham. Both speakers have written history books which include information on hotels.

In 1900, Jernigan said the census for Hamlet was 639 people with 138 homes. Then with the railroads came an explosion of people, and hotels were build to accommodate them.

Hamlet’s first hotel resembled a rooming house and was also a hotel providing a place for railroad men to stay. Most of the hotels were in the area of Raleigh Street with the depot not far away.

The second was the Hamlet Hotel which later had an annex to take care of the overflow boarders.

Conditions in early hotels, including the Boyd Hotel, included iron beds, wash stands, chairs, spittoons and a chamber pot. The Boyd burned in 1909.

One of the larger hotels was the Seaboard Hotel with 65 rooms. It had a French chef cooking in the kitchen.

After Sunday lunch in the hotel, Jernigan said women went into one room and men went into another to smoke their cigars. Famous guests included Gov. Cameron Morrison and Babe Ruth.

On one occasion the restaurant was asked to prepare meals for a special guest and his entourage.

The dilemma for the hotel was that the guest was black, and it was during days of segregation. The problem was solved, Jernigan said, by dividing the dining room with bed sheets. White guests never knew who was on the other side of the sheets eating with them in the same dining room.

The special guest was Booker T. Washington. He was on his way by train to Washington, D.C., in 1901 to be a guest of President Theodore Roosevelt and was the first African-American ever invited to the White House. He also received an honorary doctorate degree from Dartmouth College.

There was high class dining. Jernigan said the Seaboard Hotel had quail on toast for breakfast on its menu.

By 1935, such dining faded when railroads added dining cars to their trains.

The only old hotel remaining from that era is the Central Hotel which is now used for other purposes at Main and Raleigh streets. Further from the tracks, Jernigan said the owner advertised “free rides to the Central Hotel” in his vehicle.

It had 30 rooms with running water and was a popular dancing place for young people with a 1,800-square-foot ballroom.

A lot of pictures Jernigan has collected over the years were taken by Frank Marchant. “Hamlet should erect a monument to him for chronicling the history of Hamlet,” she said.

Some years ago she borrowed Hamlet pictures from someone to reproduce them for publications. Later, the house of the owner burned with all the original pictures.

One of the last big hotels was the Terminal Hotel beside the tracks on Main Street. Before it burned, it was used in the filming of the movie, “Billy Bathgate.”

Rockingham

In 1885, Hutchinson said Rockingham had four hotels, by 1888 two had burned.

He said the first accommodations in the county were taverns with one established by John Cole when he was 27 years old.

Hutchison told a story about when the great fire burned 28 buildings — including two hotels — in downtown Rockingham, whiskey was saved from one building and consumed when the fires were out.

Other hotels in Rockingham also went out of existence after being destroyed by fire.

One of the old hotels, the Rockingham Hotel, was torn down in the 1970s.

He said it was a three-story building on Washington Street popular during World War II for soldiers from Camp Mackall. There were retail stores on the first floor with rooms on the second and third floors.

Bellhops at the hotel were tipped well for providing whiskey and girls.

Related to Ellerbe, Hutchinson said Ellerbe Springs was added in 1906 to local hotels and was one of the first with electricity which was generated with its own facility generating it from a dam on the lake.

People went there for vacations, not just for an overnight stop.

The R. W. Goodman and its annex — the Long building — were once among Rockingham hotels.

The McKeithan family in Hamlet had opened a hotel in Hamlet for African Americans. There were also other boarding facilities in both cities for blacks and whites.

n Contact reporter Tom MacCallum at 997-3111, ext.15; e-mail tmaccallum@yourdailyjournal.com.