Hotel · Berea, Kentucky · Built 1907–1909; third story 1910; west portico 1953–55
Boone Tavern
Listed on the National Register as Boone Tavern Hotel
Berea College's columned brick hotel of 1909 on the old Dixie Highway, built of student-made brick by the college's woodwork department and staffed largely by students under the school's labor program.
History
Berea College, founded in 1855 to educate poor students of every race without tuition, needed somewhere to put up its visitors. The college commissioned the New York firm of Cady & See, whose J. Cleaveland Cady had designed the original Metropolitan Opera House, and built the hotel itself: students made the bricks in the college brickyard and the woodwork department did the construction, for about $20,000. Named for Daniel Boone, who explored the country around Berea, it opened in the fall of 1909 with twenty-five rooms under a flat tin roof. Traffic on the dirt road that became U.S. 25, the Dixie Highway, filled it so quickly that a third story was added in 1910. Eleanor Roosevelt spent a night in 1934.
From the start the hotel was part of the college's labor program: students worked as clerks, bellhops and waiters, and by the 1990s they made up some eighty percent of the staff, with a hotel management major built around it. The college's interracial mission had been cut off by Kentucky's 1904 Day Law, which forbade Black and white students to study together, even at private schools; Berea opened the separate Lincoln Institute in 1910, and the law was not repealed until 1950. Richard T. Hougen, a Cornell graduate who managed the Tavern from 1940 for some thirty-five years and wrote three cookbooks, made its Southern cooking widely known, and it appeared in Duncan Hines's guides. A $9.6 million renovation in 2008–09 aimed to make it Kentucky's first LEED-certified hotel.
“The Boone Tavern Hotel was the first commercial building in the Berea area that was built in the Colonial Revival style.”
Architecture
Boone Tavern is a three-story Colonial Revival building of brick and stucco, stretching nearly a block along Main Street with guest rooms above adjoining shops. The original south entrance is sheltered by a two-story portico of four Ionic columns under a full entablature, with a long lower porch and a smaller upper porch beneath it. The west entrance portico, with paired and single Ionic columns and a lattice balustrade, was added in 1953–55. A dentiled belt course marks the 1910 third story, whose shuttered windows carry triangular pediments that read like dormers against the hipped roof. Inside, the furniture is reproduction Early American pieces in cherry, walnut and mahogany made by the college's Woodcraft student industry.
What to look for
- Two-story Ionic portico on the south front
- Later six-column west portico with lattice balustrade
- Pedimented third-floor windows added in 1910
- Student-made cherry furniture in the public rooms
Setting
The hotel stands on College Square in the center of Berea, where the old Dixie Highway (U.S. 25) crossed the Berea College campus. College buildings, many also Colonial Revival, surround the square, and the shops of the block grew up alongside the hotel. The Cumberland foothills rise just east of town.
Timeline
- 1907Construction begins
- 1909Hotel opens in the fall
- 1910Third story added
- 1934Eleanor Roosevelt stays a night
- 1940Richard T. Hougen becomes manager
- 1953–1955West portico built
- 2008–2009Major renovation for LEED certification
Where sources differ
- The nomination dates construction to 1909 and Wikipedia says work began in 1907; both agree it opened in 1909.
