Hotel · Corydon, Indiana · Built 1873
The Kintner House
Listed on the National Register as Kintner House Hotel
A two-and-a-half-story brick Italianate hotel of 1873 at Capitol and Chestnut streets in Corydon, the fourth Kintner family hostelry in Indiana's first capital; restored in 1986–87 for guests after decades as offices.
History
Innkeeping in Corydon ran in the Kintner family for most of a century. Peter and Hannah Kintner kept a boarding house for the legislators and travelers who came while the town was Indiana's capital, from 1816 to 1825. In 1836 their son Peter opened a larger house to handle the crowds attending circuit court sessions, and in 1841 the family business moved to a better spot facing the public square. That hotel was the one John Hunt Morgan used as his headquarters after his Confederate raiders took Corydon in July 1863, after the Battle of Corydon, and local tradition says he learned there of Lee's defeat at Gettysburg. The hotel and its whole block burned in 1871.
Two years later the family built again, more ambitiously, at Capitol and Chestnut streets. The 1873 Kintner House had 35 rooms, 26 of them for guests, with an office, double parlor, dining room and kitchen on the main floor. It served people coming to the county seat on court, political and farm business. In the early twentieth century it was turned into apartments, and it left the family in 1922 when Sallie Kintner Jones died. For decades afterward it held a doctor's office and other businesses, its rooms cut up into cubicles under dropped ceilings.
Kintner House, Inc. bought it in the mid-1980s and began removing the partitions, ceilings and a rear concrete-block addition, with plans to rebuild the lost front porch from photographs. It opened as a bed-and-breakfast in 1987, the year of its National Register listing.
“The dormers and paired arched windows add a richness to the building which demonstrates the pride of family ownership and importance of this structure to the community.”
Architecture
The front is a gable end, three bays wide. Paired, glazed wooden doors under a segmental transom, with sidelights, open beneath a hood on carved consoles, and coupled round-arched two-over-two windows under double rows of header brick flank the entry and repeat above. The gable carries two single arched windows, and the raking cornice and returns have wooden brackets and modillions. Along the north side run seven segmental-arched bays per floor and seven small dormers with round-arched windows and pedimented caps, alternating with chimneys. Inside, a central hall holds a walnut staircase; one parlor keeps a cast-iron mantel, and the dormered top-floor rooms were little changed.
What to look for
- Coupled round-arched windows on the gable front
- Seven arched dormers with pedimented caps on the north roof
- Bracketed raking cornice with returns
- Walnut stair rail and newel in the central hall
- Cast-iron parlor mantel
Setting
The hotel stands at the corner of Capitol Avenue and Chestnut Street in downtown Corydon, two blocks from the old capitol square and its historic district. The 1816 limestone capitol building, the Governor Hendricks headquarters and a row of Victorian commercial blocks are within a short walk, and the Corydon battlefield site lies just south of town.
Timeline
- 1836Peter Kintner Jr. opens a larger Kintner House
- 1841Family hotel moves to the public square
- 1863Morgan's raiders take Corydon; the Kintner hotel serves as his headquarters
- 1871Hotel and its block burn
- 1873Present brick Kintner House built at Capitol and Chestnut
- 1922Leaves family ownership on the death of Sallie Kintner Jones
- 1987Restored and opened as a bed-and-breakfast; listed on the National Register
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia says the building remained a hotel until 1920; the nomination says it was converted to apartments in the early twentieth century without giving a year.
- The story that Morgan learned of Gettysburg at the earlier Kintner hotel is a local tradition.
- The listing date is read from a partly garbled OCR stamp (February 12, 1987).
