Hotel · Newark, Delaware · Built 1851; wings later 19th century
Deer Park Tavern
Listed on the National Register as Deer Park Hotel
A three-and-a-half-story brick hotel built in 1851 on the site of Newark's colonial St. Patrick's Inn, later widened to nine bays and long the only nineteenth-century hotel left on Main Street.
History
A log tavern called St. Patrick's Inn stood for about a century at the corner where the Elkton and New London roads meet Newark's Main Street. Its best-documented guests were the surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who used it as a base in the fall of 1764 while running their line. James S. Martin bought the property in 1848, had the old inn pulled down, and in 1851 put up a brick hotel about 60 by 40 feet in its place, which he called the Deer Park.
The hotel served the small college town in many roles. In the 1850s and 1860s it housed Miss Chamberlain's School and the Deer Park Seminary, and its ballroom and auditorium hosted traveling performers. In the second half of the century, wings on the east and west widened it from five bays to nine, and a two-tier wraparound porch with a six-sided corner tower was added; a 1911 advertisement offered steam heat, electric light, baths, a barber's parlor and a livery. The porch and tower came down in 1951. By the mid-twentieth century the building had stopped working as a hotel, and at its 1982 listing it held a bar, restaurant and liquor store, popular with University of Delaware students; George Thorogood's band played its back room in the 1970s. Local tradition adds that Edgar Allan Poe spent a night at the earlier inn in 1843.
“The Deer Park Hotel is also the only remaining nineteenth century inn or hotel on Main Street and in Newark.”
Architecture
The hotel is a U-shaped building of load-bearing brick in American common bond, three and a half stories high and nine bays across its south front, with a belt course beneath the third-floor windows. The five center bays are the original 1851 block, which had a gable roof with paired parapet chimneys; later additions folded that roof into a modified hip roof with a continuous molded cornice and four gabled dormers. Window sizes change by floor, with six-over-six sash on the first and third stories and unusually tall sixteen-over-twelve sash, nearly seven feet long, on the second. The central entrance has a paneled door with transom and multipaned sidelights.
What to look for
- Tall sixteen-over-twelve windows on the second floor
- Brick belt course below the third-floor windows
- Original five-bay center block within the nine-bay front
- Paneled main door with transom and sidelights
Setting
The building stands at 108 West Main Street, at the northeast corner where Elkton and New London Roads meet Main Street at the west end of Newark's downtown. The University of Delaware campus adjoins the commercial strip, and the railroad line that brought hotel trade in the nineteenth century runs a short distance to the south.
Timeline
- 1764Mason and Dixon base themselves at St. Patrick's Inn
- 1848James S. Martin buys the property
- 1851Brick Deer Park Hotel built
- 1850s–1860sHotel houses two private schools
- 1951Porch and corner tower removed
- 1982Listed on the National Register
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia dates St. Patrick's Inn to 1747 and says it burned; the nomination says Martin had it demolished.
- Visits by George Washington and Edgar Allan Poe, a Poe ghost, and Underground Railroad use of the basement are local legends without documentation.
- When the building stopped taking overnight guests is not recorded in the sources.
