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On
June 19, 1941, a cross-country traveller who had spent the night at
Alpine’s
Holland Hotel picked up a black-and-white postcard of the hotel and
mailed it to a relative. While the sender’s scribbled message amounted
to nothing out of the ordinary, a promotional blurb printed on the
card did a good job of summing up the venerable Big Bend hostelry
in a catchy way:
The Largest Hotel
In the Largest City
In the Largest County
In the Largest State
In the Largest Group of States
In the World
While all that could not be disputed, the Holland had only 70 rooms,
certainly no giant. But beyond being a comfortable overnight stop
for motorists passing through on U.S. Highway 90, a major east-west
route, the hotel stood as the social center of the Big
Bend. Cattlemen drank coffee and made deals there, Alpine’s
civic clubs gathered there each week and the hotel’s ballroom accomodated
chamber of commerce dinners, dances, wedding receptions and other
events.
Brewster County
rancher John Holland built the hotel in 1912 at the corner of Sixth
Street and the broad thoroughfare that bears his name, just across
from the town’s railroad depot. Though Alpine
had neither dikes nor tulips, in pondering what to name his new inn,
Holland saw Holland Hotel as imminently suitable. Holland’s son Clay
took over management of the hotel when the elder Holland died and
had it renovated in 1923, adding a third story and bathrooms in each
room.
“[The Holland] is so thoroughly equipped that it will do credit to
cities many times the size of Alpine,
and the traveling public are invariably surprised as the advantage
enjoyed at this modern hostelry,” the Marfa
New Era bragged in 1924.
The glowing article continued: “No one enterprise in this
part of Texas has given to this city, and to this part of the
Southwest, more favorable publicity nationally than has the Holland
Hotel. No trip through this section is complete without a stay at
the Holland, and without question one of the pleasantest memories
of the journey is the time spent at this hotel.”
Three years later, Holland thoroughly transformed the hotel, adding
a three-story addition. Designed in the Spanish colonial style by
noted El Paso
architect Henry C. Trost (his credits also include Marfa’s
Hotel
Paisano and Van
Horn’s El
Capitan Hotel), the new building cost $250,000. According to a
special edition of the Alpine Avalanche published when the
hotel reopened on March 16, 1928, the Holland had “common battery
telephone service, and many other modern conveniences.”
By
the end of World
War II, American travel tastes had begun to change. Railroads
saw fewer and fewer passengers as automobiles became the nation’s
primary mode of transportation. Tourists liked the convenience of
motels where they could park right in front of their room, unload
their bags and then head for the motel swimming pool. With business
declining, Clay Holland sold the hotel in 1946.
A year later, the hotel’s new owner got the kind of publicity no innkeeper
wants. On March 20, 1947 a married woman armed with a handgun confronted
the hotel’s assistant manager in the lobby of the Holland and shot
him five times. The woman left the man bleeding on the floor and went
to her residence, where Brewster
County Sheriff Clarence Hord arrested her about an hour later
for assault with intent to murder. The hotel employee survived, but
whatever its nature, his relationship with the woman did not.
A few years later, Holland figured in a more upbeat news story. In
June 1950, rancher Gene Cartledge presented hotel manager Frank Hofues
with what he represented as an eaglet. The bird turned out to be a
common blackbird, not the majestic and threatened American bald eagle,
but Hofues made a pet out of it anyway. Named Blackie, the bird became
one of the hotel’s permanent guests. But during the day, he made his
rounds around town, begging for food or sipping suds at a nearby bar.
The bird took particular pleasure in soaring toward some unsuspecting
victim from behind, landing parrot-like on his or her shoulder.
The
hotel continued through a succession of owners until 1969. That year,
the latest owner opted to shut down the hotel, selling off all the
furniture and equipment.
Gene Hendryx, local radio station owner and state representative,
bought the shuttered hotel in 1972 and restored it as a combination
hotel and office building. The Hendryx estate sold the building in
1985 and it again went through several owners. Jennifer and John Jones
of Sonora bought the Holland
in 2009 and did some substantial remodeling.
The Holland is no longer the largest hotel in Alpine
and Texas is no longer the largest state
in the union, but it’s still popular with visitors. The management
even provides ear plugs for guests who don’t find the rumble and clatter
of passing trains sleep inducing.
© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" August
18, 2011 column
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