The Rock House Fire 
Quantum Leap 
Hotels
Victorian splendor in Jefferson, manly minimalism in Archer City: Check into ten charter members of Texas’ inn crowd.
I AM ALONE IN THE OLD HOTEL, THE ONLY GUEST. The innkeepers are out for dinner. My room has no phone, no television, and no radio. I am vibrating from my long drive, and my eyes are too tired to read, so I take a hot bath in the claw-footed tub beneath the chipper gaze of a framed Shirley Temple paper doll. I put on my practical pajamas and lie down on the many-pillowed bed, struggling to keep my nose above the ruffles. I admire the twelve-inch baseboards and the twelve-foot-high walls for a spell. I study the doodads covering every horizontal surface—a hairbrush-and-mirror vanity set, a teddy bear, a tray bearing a couple of wineglasses and a dainty porcelain plate (even though eating and drinking are not allowed in the rooms). I don’t feel as if I belong here. Then an antique nightgown hanging on the wall catches my eye. It looks so inviting, so delicate and appropriate. I wonder if I should slip it on. Is it allowed? It is on a clothes hanger, after all; it’s not like it’s nailed to the wall. I gently take it down and wiggle into it. Carefully, I lie down again and await some sort of epiphany. I am no longer a tourist; I am a traveler.
And here’s my epiphany: A successful adventure at a historic hotel in small-town Texas requires total immersion. You need to drown in the experience. Ideally, you should arrive in town on horseback or by rail, decked out in period costume, holding a scented handkerchief to your nose. At the very least, you should pop in a Bob Wills CD on the way to Turkey, his hometown, and listen to a Larry McMurtry audiotape en route to Archer City (I recommend Horseman, Pass By). You should haunt the harbor in Palacios and try to score some shrimp. You should wear boots, maybe even chaps, at the Gage in Marathon. Above all, you should slow waaay down.
The things you shouldn’t do? You shouldn’t expect luxury, but be grateful when you find it: Thick towels, free shampoo, and direct-dial phones are scarce. You shouldn’t go for nightlife or haute cuisine, although there’s always a chance that you might stumble onto some local festival or a great restaurant along the way. You shouldn’t forget your reading glasses, since it’s a good bet you’ll be without television, or a pair of earplugs, the best defense against rattling pipes, thin walls, and passing locomotives. And at most of these places, you shouldn’t count on the “continental breakfast”—which must be French for “rubber muffin and weak coffee”—for your morning nutrition.
This is a story about “historic hotels,” so to be included a place had to be, first, a hotel, not a restored historic home recently converted to a bed-and-breakfast. And second, it had to be historic. Although Europeans, Central Americans, and even New Englanders might snort at my criterion, I figure that any hotel built before 1939 should qualify. Let’s face it: In light of Texas’ short hotel timeline, the inns surviving from the mid-1800’s are beyond historic; they’re positively antediluvian.
Only a couple of the following ten hotels have been in continuous operation all their lives. Most were snatched from the jaws of decay by civic groups or passionate individuals. Some soar off the funky chart, a few are temples to understated style, and a couple are over-the-top studies in ruffles and flounces. And while spending a night at these unique hotels wasn’t really like stepping back in time—what with electric coffeepots, flush toilets, hot water, air conditioning, and the ever-present option of automotive escape—it sure was fun trying to turn back the clock.
Hotel Turkey, Turkey
I’M NOT SURE IF ONE HUNDRED MILES northeast of Lubbock and one hundred miles southeast of Amarillo qualifies as the middle of nowhere, but it’s as close as you’ll come without intergalactic travel. Here in the tiny burg of Turkey, you’ll find confirmation of the theory that nature abhors a vacuum: the memorabilia-packed Hotel Turkey. Built in 1927 at a cost of $50,000, the Turkey—which has never closed its doors to guests since it opened—was bought in 1988 by Jane and Scott Johnson, who undertook its restoration. After seven years, the industry standard for hotelier burnout, the couple sold the hotel to a cousin, Gary Johnson, and his wife, Suzie. Just three years into the hospitality business themselves, the Johnsons are still eager to please guests, even rising at six-thirty in the morning to make sweet-potato pancakes for their lone guest, me.
Sensory deprivation isn’t an option at this hotel. Music fills the lobby. Books are everywhere. Treasures abound: a grandfather clock, Edwardian settees, crocheted gloves and doilies, wire-rim spectacles, old photographs, crucifixes. So much stuff, in fact, that when I checked into room 6, I wondered where I was supposed to put my things. Maybe I should have sprung for room 10, a spacious suite that could accommodate Bob Wills and all the Playboys, with a view of the hotel’s patio, empty fishpond (a lightning bolt wiped out its population several years ago), and two-story cross strung with colorful Christmas lights.
You can have your Turkey with all the trimmings if you join some 10,000 Bob Wills fans here during the annual festival held in his honor the last Saturday in April (but you can’t stay at the Turkey: It’s reserved for Wills’s family and the Playboys). If you’re seeking solitude, bike along the Caprock Canyons Trailway, a 64-mile-long abandoned railway running from South Plains to Estelline, or hike in nearby Caprock Canyons State Park, where it was so quiet one cloudy morning that my sneeze sounded like a rifle shot.
Third and Alexander (806-423-1151, 800-657-7110; www.llano.net/ turkey/hotel). Rates for the fifteen rooms (seven of them with private bath) run $50 to $100 and include a full breakfast (remember those sweet-potato pancakes?). No phones or TVs in the rooms, but you can borrow an alarm clock. AE, MC, V.
Excelsior House, Jefferson
MY BEST EFFORTS TO ADHERE TO MY IMMERSION rule were thwarted on the way to the Excelsior House last November. My mom was along for the trip, and as we barreled down the East Texas highways surrounded by logging trucks and scarlet maples, she kept the radio tuned to either—gasp—Rush Limbaugh or the House impeachment hearings. What a way to set the stage for a stay at the state’s second-oldest hotel (after the Menger in San Antonio). In continuous operation since the 1850’s, it was built to accommodate fashionable travelers (Jefferson was once the largest inland steamboat port in the Southwest). But then I made a connection. Here we had a modern-day philandering president, and we were headed for a town named after a historic philandering president. Then, on arrival, we checked into the presidential suites. Coincidence? You be the judge.
I tossed my bags on the red velvet chaise longue in the Ulysses S. Grant Room, richly decorated in jewel tones, and tried not to drool on the Eastlake rocker while my mom claimed the adjacent Rutherford B. Hayes Room, more for its walk-in shower than for its huge canopied rosewood bed. All the rooms in the hotel have been restored to their former grandeur: oriental carpets, brocade fabrics, pristine period antiques. Elegant, luxurious, even slightly pompous—but never cloying or frilly—the hotel’s atmosphere befitted the powerful and important men who once strolled its corridors and filled its ledger with their ostentatious signatures: John Jacob Astor, W. H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould (whose private railroad car, now a museum, is parked across the cobbled street from the hotel), and even the flamboyant Oscar Wilde.
And was it rich and powerful men who saved the Excelsior Hotel when it fell on hard times in the sixties? Hell, no. It was women—specifically, the members of Jefferson’s formidable Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club. Founded in 1939, the club bought the derelict Excelsior and its contents in 1961 for $30,000. As past treasurer Elizabeth Dannelly wrote in a brief history of the garden club, “It is difficult now to imagine the condition of the Hotel then. The lobby was painted black and was as dark as a dungeon . . . there was no central heat or air. . . . Any day there were Garden Club ladies in their work clothes, refinishing furniture, scraping off old paint.” The “before” photos in the lobby support Dannelly’s contention that the hotel was not, as some suggested, a “hobby” for the club: “It was more akin to the plight of the Patriots in 1776 when they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to their cause!” That should persuade you to keep your muddy shoes off the bedspread.
Like any good little restored town, Jefferson is packed with antiques shops. When you tire of pawing through the knickknacks, take a tour up Big Cypress Bayou with Captain Nance aboard the Bayou Queen or ply the swampy mysteries of Caddo Lake aboard the Graceful Ghost, a re-creation of an 1890’s steamboat.
211 W. Austin (903-665-2513; www.jeffersontx. com/excelsior). The fifteen rooms, all with private bath, run from $65 to $100. The generous plantation breakfast—ham, grits, eggs, biscuits, and the hotel’s famous orange-blossom muffins—is $6.50. AE, DS, MC, V.
Tarpon Inn, Port Aransas
TO DESCRIBE A PLACE AS “scaly” would usually be an insult, but not at the Tarpon, where more than seven thousand scales of the inn’s namesake fish cover the walls of the lobby. The translucent disks, dating back decades to a time when the Gulf was lousy with the great fish, bear the autographs and hometowns of the happy fishermen who landed the beasts, along with the size, weight, and date of their less happy catch. The tarpon are all but gone, but the Tarpon has withstood the abuse of coastal living since 1919. (The inn, in other incarnations destroyed by fire and storm, has existed on this site since 1886.)
My Library
