How we choose, check and write

Which buildings are here

Every building is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), the official federal list kept by the National Park Service. We started from Wikidata items that carry an NRHP reference number and are classed as a hotel, inn, tavern, lodge, resort, guest ranch or bed-and-breakfast, plus English Wikipedia articles on NRHP-listed houses that describe a later use as a bed-and-breakfast or inn. From roughly 2,300 candidates we chose 116 by hand for a spread of regions, eras, styles and kinds of lodging, preferring buildings whose nomination forms and records give enough material for a real account. We excluded high-rise city hotels, buildings that have been demolished (two candidates were dropped for that reason) and anything we could not place reliably. We prefer a smaller set done carefully to thousands of thin entries.

How the pages are written

The primary source for each building is its NRHP nomination form, the document that argued for listing it, downloaded from the National Park Service's NPGallery (or a state historic preservation office where NPGallery has no scan). These are U.S. government works in the public domain; we quote them only briefly and mark every quotation. Facts were cross-checked against the building's Wikipedia article (CC BY-SA 4.0), which we link but do not copy. The history, architecture and setting sections are our own summaries. Where sources disagree, or a story is legend rather than record, the page says so under "Where sources differ".

Is it still an inn? How we check

The National Register records why a building matters, not whether it takes guests today, so we check that separately and by hand: for each building we looked for the business's own website (or the park concessioner's, or the state agency's) and read it for current rooms and reservations. We did not use booking sites, review sites or hotel directories as evidence. Results, checked 2026-10-26:

• 95 confirmed taking overnight guests. A few large hotels' sites block automated visits; for those the page says the confirmation came from the official site as indexed by a search engine.
• 12 with a citable sign that they do not take guests now (museums, restaurants, buildings closed or under restoration).
• 9 we could not confirm either way (no official site found, or the business's old web address now belongs to an unrelated site, which we found several times).

Only the first group is described as taking guests; everything else is described as a historic building with a lodging history. Status changes: always confirm with the business before you travel. We publish no prices, ratings or reviews and take no bookings or commissions.

Data and licences

Photos were chosen by eye and pinned by exact Commons file name; only public-domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA files are used, re-encoded and served from this site.

Validation

Locations

Each building's coordinates (from Wikidata) were tested against the full-resolution outline of its state (Natural Earth, 1:50 million scale): 101 of 116 fall inside. The other 15 are all on a coast, an island or a state line, within 5.41 km of the outline, which at this scale smooths coastlines and river borders by a few kilometers. Those that the outline places just across a state line sit on a river border, where the 1:50m line runs slightly off the river's true course.

Distances

"Near me" and "nearest historic stays" use great-circle (haversine) distances on a sphere of radius 6,371 km. Checked against published great-circle airport distances, which use a slightly flattened Earth:

The sphere costs well under 1%, far less than the difference between straight-line and driving distance.

Construction dates

Our "built" year comes from the nomination form. For the 55 buildings that also have an inception date on Wikidata, 43 agree within two years. The others usually differ because one source dates the first building on the site or the business's founding and the other the surviving structure:

Styles

Style labels follow the terms used in nomination forms and in standard American field guides. Many buildings mix styles; we list the main one first. The drawings on the style guide are composites made for this site, not portraits of particular buildings.