“Guests began arriving as early as eight o-clock, and at 10:00, when the ceremonies were begun, the elegant and spacious parlors and corridors were thronged with the most brilliant gathering ever seen in Eureka.” The opening of the Greenwood Hotel, October 1883.
Eureka, Kansas, the year 1883
Two years before, Kansas adopted a state constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale or consumption of of alcohol. Upon the assassination of James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Republican became President of the United States. George Washington Glick, Democrat, was Governor of the State of Kansas. Cattle was still being driven up the Chisholm Trail to points like Caldwell on the Oklahoma border and Dodge City in the western part of the state. In 1883, the Board of Railroad Commissioners was established to bring order to the railways that were boom and bust to the economy.
The Eleventh Annual Greenwood County Fair was held in September of 1883.
original photo Kansas Historical Society, (streets were paved 1912)
In October, the Greenwood Hotel, with 43 boarding rooms and 50 beds, was open for business. In attendance were men in broad-brimmed hats and whips, talking of cattle and land, of women in high-collared dresses with bustles who arrived in fine horse buggies. The music heard was mainly classical, but popular music featured tunes like Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day. Alcohol was to be found in abundance.
It was built by The Eureka Hotel Company, a stock company of early settlers of the Eureka community (including J. B. Clogston, Edwin Tucker, and John Warr) at a cost of $23,000. Originally called “Hotel Greenwood” in honor of Alfred B. Greenwood, an Arkansas congressman and Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for whom the county was named.
After falling into disrepair, renovation on the Greenwood Hotel began in 2010, and reopened to the public in June of 2011. It is now an Event Center operated by volunteers of the Greenwood Preservation Society.
Abandoned, old, and interesting Kansas 