One of the first buildings raised in our hometown was a hotel to house the anticipated guests arriving on the trains of the Central Military Tract Railroad. While track had yet to be laid, the line had been graded and a location for a depot had been selected. The hotel would sit opposite the depot, the first sight passengers would see disembarking in the new village. It would simply be called the Kewanee House.

This is a brief history of that hotel.

As we know, in the early 1850s the CMTR had already decided to bypass Wethersfield. In early 1854 it had also decided to locate a depot about a mile-and-a-half to the north. That spring, Wethersfield entrepreneurs acquired 155 acres of the northwest quarter of Section 33. Combined with another quarter-section to the east, those men owned most of the land which would become the new village of Berrien, later changed to Kewanee.

After Berrien was platted, two of those Wethersfielders, Ralph A. Tenney and Sullivan Howard, acquired two lots near where the depot was to be located, on the condition that they build a hotel. Howard was one of Wethersfield’s original colonists, arriving in 1836. Tenney was related to original colonists Abner and Nancy Tenney Little (her nephew), and he arrived in Wethersfield in 1852. 

Howard had been responsible for designing and constructing numerous buildings in the county, including the first Henry County Courthouse in Cambridge. He took charge of designing and building what became the Kewanee House. The hotel was completed in August, about a month-and-a-half before the railroad reached the village in late 1854. 

In 1856, E. V. Bronson acquired the hotel. Bronson was born in Connecticut and became a merchant in New York before moving to Rockford, Illinois, in 1854. A year later, He relocated to Kewanee.

For many years, the Kewanee House was the only hotel in the village, and was the center of many of the activities in Kewanee and Henry County. In addition to providing accommodations for overnight guests, the hotel hosted a myriad of events – symposiums, dances, meetings, music recitals, plays – requiring an elegant space. 

Bronson was in the center of many civic and social activities. He also was associated with multiple business activities. Bronson helped organize and then served as president of the Muscatine, Kewanee & Eastern Railway and of the Continental Railway Company, the former a failed attempt to bring another railroad through Kewanee and the latter an Eastern railway. He also was a temperance man and allowed no alcohol to be served in the hotel. 

In the late 1870s, Bronson withdrew from day-to-day operations of the Kewanee House due to his health. In 1883, he sold the property to A. O. Warner, who would operate a soon-to-be new hotel, and Henry Clay Merritt.  

Merritt, born in New York in 1831, moved to Henry County in the 1850s and Kewanee in the 1860s. He eventually developed notoriety as a hunter, businessman, traveler, and author. 

When Merritt came west, he saw the abundance of golden plover and prairie chickens as, well, a golden opportunity. He soon began hunting and hired other hunters to gather game and ship to New York and other large cities, and Merritt became wealthy. He eventually owned valuable business blocks in Kewanee, including the Cliff House building at the corner of Chestnut and Second Streets, and all the rest of that block except the Butterwick Brothers building. He also owned property in Atkinson and other surrounding villages.

Merritt immediately made plans for a three-story, brick commercial building on the southwest corner of Tremont and Third Sts., where the old Kewanee House stood. That old frame hotel would be moved to the back of the lot to the west and a new, three-story brick hotel would be built in front of the relocated old hotel. The new hotel would also to be called the Kewanee House. The new and old hotel would be connected, with the old hotel housing a dining room, kitchen, and storage.

The new buildings opened the following year, and each was highly successful. The “Merritt Block” housed a multitude of businesses, while the hotel added a modern respite for visitors to Kewanee, as well as a saloon. There were now other hotels in the growing city. But the Kewanee House, conveniently located across from the train depot, adjacent to the main shopping on Tremont, kitty-corner from the city hall, and at the east side of “Whiskey Row,” was still the prominent location for out-of-town visitors, as well as for special events.

Sometime in the 1890s, the original frame Kewanee House behind the 1884 iteration gave way to a brick building used as a “sample room” and for storage. Another link to Kewanee’s birth was lost.

By the beginning of the 20th century, changes were afoot. In 1903, the Pekin Brewing Company leased most of the first floor of the Kewanee House for a saloon – another saloon already was operating in another part of the first floor – and the hotel’s office was moved into a store front in the Merritt Block at 219 N. Tremont St. The two upper floors in the Block were extensively remodeled to create 17 additional hotel rooms, and a covered connection was added between the second floors of the block and the existing hotel. By early 1904, the “new” Kewanee House was in operation.

In 1919, new ownership took over the hotel and renamed it the Wilson Hotel. Later, another change in ownership led to another change in name, to the Earle Hotel. Then, in 1958, the entire hotel was destroyed by fire and not rebuilt.

Today, hotels are a thing of the past in cities like Kewanee, with motels taking on the task of housing visitors. But when Kewanee was born, a hotel along the rails in a town poised to grow was a necessity.

Kewanee’s founding fathers foresaw the need, and built one which brought fame to our hometown for over the first half-century of its existence.

[After I finished this story, I happened across a Dave Clarke column from 2005. Dave described Richard Lee Daniel who, in June 1958, was “a 6-foot-5, 310-pound army veteran who worked at Walworth and played a gorilla in a traveling horror show.” What

made Dave write about Daniel was that three months after the Earle Hotel fire, Daniel was arrested by the Henry County Sheriff and subsequently confessed to setting the fire. Daniel was eventually committed to the East Moline State Hospital, later released, and ultimately had all charges against him dropped. It turned out to be a case of a “false confession,” brought about by a “ride” with the Sheriff who “helped” Daniel understand the circumstances of the case. Based on those elicited facts, the judge found the confession inadmissible.

I once was part of a team of attorneys representing a Louisiana death row inmate who similarly “confessed” to a murder after a long interrogation. After 15 years on death row in Angola State Prison, he was exonerated through DNA testing and set free. “False confessions” continue to plague us to this day.]