It’s always nice to see a story like this. It’s about a pending rebuild and reopening of the shuttered and dilapidated Hilltop Hotel in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The Hilltop is a famous, old-fashioned hotel of the sort that almost every small town or city once had. The current building is from 1914, but the hotel has existed since the 1880s. It was open until 2008—one of my former colleagues used to stay there with her family. One of the current co-owners notes in the linked article that it’s “a place where anyone who is anybody on the East Coast came, from Mark Twain, to Carl Sandburg, and Alexander Graham Bell and all the presidents.”

It’s always remarkable to me just how many quaint small towns—many, unlike Harpers Ferry, with little or no tourism traffic today—were once quite notable. See Clifton, Virginia. Or Stockton, New Jersey, about which I’ll be writing soon.

But Hilltop Hotel closed down and slowly fell apart for many years. My wife and I visited Harpers Ferry about a year ago, and I got this picture of the back of the hotel. The front had begun to collapse—I could see it way up on the hill from across the river, but I couldn’t get a clear picture.

And also like so many similar properties, there were years of controversy over what to do with the old building, involving questions of land use, project scale, traffic considerations, and plain old NIMBYism. So it’s heartening to see a project that looks like it will finally take off.

It meets in the middle on the question of preservation: the project involves disassembling the building and reusing as much of the original material as possible, in a relatively historically faithful rebuild. For preservation stickers for whom even that isn’t enough, just consider the expense of renovating a water-damaged, sagging, early 20th century building with state-of-the-art plumbing, HVAC, electric, telecom, etc. Even so the project is a labor of love, but I hope it succeeds and can perhaps inspire similar ventures to save other iconic but dilapidated structures.

It’s interesting, in fact, how often the old downtown hotel is a flashpoint debate in small towns. My hometown of Flemington has argued over its Union Hotel since the late 2000s as well, and only now is construction finally underway (that project involves restoring the façade while gutting and completely rebuilding the actual building.) The aforementioned Stockton also has an old hotel controversy.

These are landmarks, pieces of local identity, compendiums of history, but they’re tricky. They’re very old, and they operated at a scale that is too large for a bed and breakfast and too small for a lot of hoteliers. This is something I’ll be revisiting, and it’s a good way to suss out legitimate arguments from folks who take the NIMBY side in new proposals for these old properties. But in the case, it seems to have worked out well enough for everyone.

Related Reading:

A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again

The Small Towns of the City

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