“Shown is an 1898 postal canceled envelope from one of Shinnston’s earliest hotels, The Central Hotel.”
As a photograph collector, I also have a large ephemera collection. Aside from photographs, I have several letterheads, ink blotters, envelopes, and other miscellaneous advertising items. Each one has a little spot to claim in history. The accompanying image is showing an envelope from the Central Hotel, once located in Shinnston. The hotel was located on the southeast corner of Pike and Bridge Streets, a corner currently occupied by WesBanco.
For many years, the corner was known as “Shore’s Corner”. During the middle-to-late 1800’s, a man named Albert Shore operated a blacksmith shop and had a home there. Blacksmithing is a trade often not thought about, but it was an essential need for life during the 1800’s. The town blacksmith would have been one of the more important tradesmen for his time. Farm tools, wagon parts, horseshoes, hinges and hardware, nails, candlesticks, pots and pans, knives, gun parts, hooks, and many other metal goods were both made and repaired by a blacksmith. Hardware stores didn’t start claiming their spot in Shinnston’s history until the latter portion of the nineteenth century. In fact, it is interesting to note that this location housed not only a blacksmith shop, but also a hardware store–Hawker Hardware— for several decades.
During the 1880’s, Mr. Shore began renting rooms in his home, eventually operating it as a hotel. He named it ‘Central Hotel’. I don’t own an image of the hotel itself, but I have a good friend who owns a photograph which shows the hotel in the background. It was a large two story, L-shaped structure, which allowed it to sit parallel with both Bridge and Pike Streets. There were upper and lower porches on the back side as well as a small porch off of the front center second level door.
It was considered a prime location for multiple reasons. This location was as far north as the town was developed at that time. The Fairmont-Clarksburg ‘Pike’ (note the origin of Pike Street through Shinnston), ran from [the current] East Avenue and down Bridge Street (originally named Locust Street), then turned into the town of Shinnston at ‘Shore’s Corner’ where the hotel was. It was the first business seen when coming into town from the north end. There were a couple of structures built between the current Bridge and Station Streets, but most of the area between Bridge Street and the old high school hill was a large fenced meadow owned by David Mahlon Shinn, who lived in a large house at the top of Mahlon Street, a still-standing home currently owned by Bob and Patty Burnett. Wagons and horseback travel were not permitted through his fenced field and town growth did not expand through there until the 1890’s.
The railroad came through Shinnston in 1890, with the depot being located at the base of Station Street (named for the railroad station). Visitors into town via the railroad found the hotel as their source of lodging. Then too, those coming from the bridge across the West Fork River also entered town on the hotel corner. (Again, there was no ‘official’ route of travel at this time on the west side, heading north, as it was all farmlands).
For regular readers, there may be someone out there who remembers an article I did previously on the 1906 Short’s Opera House fire. There were three very large destructive fires to occur in Shinnston during the first years of the twentieth century. There was one in 1902, another in 1904, and yet another in 1906. Sadly, this hotel and the block it was on, claims title to the first disastrous fire. During the night of September 23 rd , 1902, a fire started in the Central
Hotel. It was just around midnight and flames soon engulfed the entire structure. Dr. H.A. Jarrett, a dentist from Grafton, had been staying at the hotel that night. Being surrounded by flames with no means of exiting from the inside, he jumped from his second story room’s window, spraining his ankle in the jump. The instruments he used for his dental practice were lost with the fire.
Most townspeople had been awakened by the flames and headed out to offer help. There was no water supply in Shinnston at this time that could be utilized to help fight the fire, so there was nothing to do except watch it burn and wait for the flames to diminish.
Orville Lowe was a man who owned a livery and feed stable on a site now occupied by both the American Legion and Moose Lodge. His stable caught fire, but was able to be quickly extinguished. (Side note: Orville Lowe’s home was the large brick home which still sits atop the hill above Mahlon Street’s old grade school).
One of Central Hotel’s neighboring buildings housed Lowe Brothers Meat Market, owned by Orville and Seymour Lowe. During the blaze, it also caught fire and burned to the ground. Near to it was a drug store operated by Weden Bryan. It, too, caught fire and burned. Bryan rebuilt his building the following year and it currently stands as the former Rice-Rexall Drug Store building, which was recently purchased by Jason Martin.
The fire caused an explosion to occur in another one of the nearby buildings in town, which further caused destruction to the remaining buildings on the block and also shattered windows to several others.
The hotel passed through a few owners over the years. At the time of the fire, it was owned by a Mr. A.C. Taylor from Fairmont and had been operated by a Miss Florence Ready. As evident by the envelope and postal mark in the accompanying image, Mr. Swiger was the operator in 1898.
The origin of the fire was never known. It wasn’t long before new buildings took the place of the former ones. Central Hotel was soon replaced by a building to be the focus in next month’s story behind the photo.