Hotel · Clewiston, Florida · Built 1937–1938
Clewiston Inn
The U.S. Sugar Corporation's columned company hotel of 1938 in Clewiston, built after the first, flammable Clewiston Inn burned, and known for its Everglades wildlife mural in the lounge.
History
The sawgrass south of Lake Okeechobee was one of the last frontiers in Florida until drainage canals opened it to farming. Bror G. Dahlberg, who manufactured Celotex wallboard from the waste fiber of sugar cane, bought up land and small cane operations around Clewiston and formed the Southern Sugar Company. In 1926 its development arm built a large hotel on the lakeshore ridge out of Celotex panels, the first Clewiston Inn. Southern Sugar failed after the crash, and in 1931 Charles Stewart Mott bought its assets and organized the United States Sugar Corporation, under which the company town prospered. On the evening of September 19, 1937, the Celotex hotel burned to the ground in less than an hour, and travelers had to be lodged in private homes and the company hospital.
Within weeks U.S. Sugar chose a new site facing the city park and hired the West Palm Beach architects L. Phillips Clarke and Edgar S. Wortman; their fireproof hotel of steel, concrete and brick veneer, which the company wanted designed along West Indian colonial lines, opened on June 2, 1938. It became the town's social center. Visitors from Naples, Fort Myers and West Palm Beach drove out for Sunday dinners of local game, fish and produce, British cadets from Riddle Field gathered here during the Second World War, and residents took shelter in it when hurricanes threatened the lake. In the 1940s the Palm Beach artist J. Clinton Shepherd spent months at the inn painting the Everglades mural around the lounge. U.S. Sugar sold the hotel in 2007.
“The new inn will be a fireproof, wind- and weather-proof, termite-proof structure of low maintenance cost, architecturally designed along West Indian colonial lines.”
Architecture
The inn is a two-story, U-shaped masonry building under hipped roofs, its five-bay west front centered on a full-height portico with a plain gable, a decorated oculus and four colossal square columns. The double entrance doors sit beneath a fanlight that repeats the oculus's muntin pattern, flanked by wrought-iron lamps. Wood and iron casement windows with fanlights or fixed transoms run across the front, and the projecting end bays have small balconies. Inside, the lobby is paneled in bird's-eye cypress with a fireplace and a dogleg stair with brass and iron railings, and the dining room's columns echo those of the portico. The lounge walls carry Shepherd's continuous wildlife mural. A one-story apartment block closes the courtyard.
What to look for
- Colossal square-columned portico with oculus
- Fanlight over the double entrance
- Bird's-eye cypress paneling in the lobby
- Everglades wildlife mural in the lounge
- Glass-brick enclosure of the rear porches
Setting
The inn faces the city park on Sugarland Avenue (U.S. 27), the main road through Clewiston, with a broad circular drive in front framed by palms. The town sits on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee, behind the Herbert Hoover Dike, surrounded by miles of cane fields and the U.S. Sugar mill.
Timeline
- 1926Southern Sugar builds the first Clewiston Inn of Celotex
- 1931Charles Stewart Mott forms U.S. Sugar Corporation
- 1937First inn burns on September 19
- 1938Present inn opens on June 2
- 1940sJ. Clinton Shepherd paints the Everglades mural
- 1991Listed on the National Register
- 2007U.S. Sugar sells the hotel
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia dates the mural to the early 1940s; the nomination says the mid-1940s.
- Southern Sugar's failure is dated 1929 by Wikipedia and 1930 by the nomination.
