Repurposed Appalachia Series – Hotel Gunter of Frostburg, Maryland
The Hotel Gunter began as the Hotel Gladstone at a moment when Frostburg was trying to present itself as more than a coal town. The National Register nomination for the Frostburg Historic District places the building within a late nineteenth century commercial streetscape shaped by trade, transportation, and regional business. That same nomination also notes that Frostburg promoted itself as a healthy mountain resort at about 2,200 feet above sea level, and it identifies the Gladstone Hotel, later the Gunter Hotel, as a surviving example of the hotels and rooming houses that served business travelers and tourists coming through town.
Building the Hotel Gladstone
The strongest contemporary account of the hotel’s beginnings comes from the biographical sketch of William E. Gladstone Hitchins in the Portrait and Biographical Record of the Sixth Congressional District, Maryland. That source states that Hitchins, working with his father in law William R. Percy, began erecting the hotel in 1896. It also states that the property opened on January 1, 1897, and that Hitchins took active charge of it six months later. The same source describes the new house as a four story brick building with modern conveniences including plumbing and steam heat, a description that makes clear the project was meant to signal comfort and status as much as lodging.
That opening date is reinforced by early newspaper evidence. The March 19, 1897 issue of The Frostburg News preserved a contemporaneous description of Hotel Gladstone as a recently opened establishment that had begun business on January 1 and advertised numerous sleeping rooms with modern conveniences. Read beside the Hitchins biography, that newspaper notice suggests that the new hotel was being marketed not simply as a local boarding place but as one of Frostburg’s most modern commercial statements.
From Gladstone to Gunter
One of the most interesting parts of the hotel’s history is that its names changed more gradually than later memory sometimes suggests. Maryland’s official preservation inventory lists the property as the Gladstone Hotel while also preserving the later name forms Gunter Hotel and Failinger’s Hotel Gunter. The state inventory places it at 11 West Main Street, while the National Register district nomination refers to the building as 9 to 15 West Main Street, reflecting the way large downtown commercial properties could be recorded under slightly different addressing conventions. The Maryland Historical Trust also maintains a dedicated vertical file for AL-VII-A-016, which indicates that the building has long been treated as a property of special research value in the state’s preservation records.
The printed record shows that the old and new identities overlapped. In the 1917 Official Hotel Red Book and Directory, the property still appeared as Hotel Gladstone in Frostburg, but the proprietor listed was Wm. R. Gunter, with room rates of $2.50 to $3.00. The 1917 Official Automobile Blue Book did much the same, directing motorists to Hotel Gladstone on Main Street and advertising the town’s altitude, mountain scenery, pure spring water, cool nights, and forty rooms with bath. Taken together, those directories suggest that Gunter management was firmly in place by 1917 even while the Gladstone name still carried public value for travelers and guidebooks.
A Downtown Landmark in the Automobile and Midcentury Eras
What the guidebooks recorded in the 1910s, later newspapers continued to confirm. Frostburg was still presenting the hotel to travelers on the National Road in the automobile era, and the building remained tied to the commercial pulse of Main Street. By September 22, 1950, the Cumberland News was advertising the Hotel Gunter Tap Room at 13 West Main Street, a small but useful piece of evidence showing that the building remained an active part of downtown business life well into the mid twentieth century. The hotel had not vanished into memory. It had adapted, changed names, and continued serving the street.
Decline, Survival, and Revival
Like many older downtown hotels, the property eventually passed through years of decline. Yet its survival is part of why it matters. In 1987, the Washington Post, through an Associated Press report, described the building as a vacant but structurally sound landmark purchased by Jake Failinger at a bankruptcy sale for $55,000, after which a major rehabilitation effort began. That report matters because it captures a familiar late twentieth century Appalachian story. A once essential downtown structure had become endangered, but local investment and preservation minded restoration gave it another life.
Why the Hotel Gunter Matters
The Hotel Gunter matters because it preserves several layers of Frostburg’s history at once. It belongs to the era when Frostburg was both a coal center and a place eager to market itself as a prosperous mountain town. It reflects the ambitions of William R. Percy and W. E. Gladstone Hitchins in the 1890s, the later prominence of the Gunter name in the city’s business life, and the long commercial afterlife of Main Street itself. The surviving record does not support every colorful story later attached to the building with equal strength, but it does establish something more important. From its 1897 opening as the Hotel Gladstone to its later life as the Hotel Gunter, the building stood as one of Frostburg’s clearest declarations that the town expected visitors, trade, and permanence.
Sources & Further Reading
Automobile Blue Books, Inc. Official Automobile Blue Book, 1917. Vol. 3. New York and Chicago: Automobile Blue Book Publishing Co., 1917. https://archive.org/details/case_gv1024_a92_1917_v_3.
Associated Press. “Frostburg’s Historic Hotel Gunter Comes Back to Life.” Washington Post, September 28, 1987. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1987/09/28/frostburgs-historic-hotel-gunter-comes-back-to-life/1d90427d-9362-41a2-8693-73a9e1cf33d5/.
Cumberland News. September 22, 1950. https://archive.org/stream/cumberland-news-1950-09-22/cumberland-news-1950-09-22_djvu.txt.
Frostburg City. Comprehensive Plan. Frostburg, MD: City of Frostburg, n.d. https://www.frostburgcity.org/sites/default/files/fileattachments/community_development/page/2332/finalcomprehensiveplanonline.pdf.
Frostburg First. “History of FrostburgFirst.” https://www.downtownfrostburg.com/history/.
Frostburg Mining Journal. December 5, 1896. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85025350/1896-12-05/ed-1/?sp=2&st=text.
Kurtze, Peter E., and Catherine A. Crawford. National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form: Frostburg Historic District. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1983. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/13a455a2-8b31-4180-b52f-c1fcb413827a.
Library of Congress. “Frostburg Mining Journal (Frostburg, Md.).” Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018218627/.
Library of Congress. “The Frostburg Herald (Frostburg, Md.).” Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/sn90057196/1905-08-25/ed-1/.
Maryland Historical Trust. “Frostburg Historic District.” Maryland’s National Register Properties. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?NRID=760.
Maryland Historical Trust. MHT Library. https://mht.maryland.gov/Pages/research/MHT-Library.aspx.
Maryland Historical Trust. MHT Library Vertical File List. https://mht.maryland.gov/Documents/research/MHT-Library-Vertical-File-List.pdf.
Portrait and Biographical Record of the Sixth Congressional District, Maryland. Chicago: Chapman Publishing Company, 1898. https://archive.org/stream/portraitbiograph02chap_0/portraitbiograph02chap_0_djvu.txt.
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Frostburg, Allegany County, Maryland. September 1910. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03604_005/.
The Frostburg News. March 19, 1897. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn90057194/1897-03-19/ed-1/?sp=2&st=text.
“The Hotel Gunter & Toasted Goat Winery: Modern Favorite, Historical Treasure.” Downtown Frostburg, December 20, 2019. https://www.downtownfrostburg.com/the-hotel-gunter-toasted-goat-winery-modern-favorite-historical-treasure/.
The Official Hotel Red Book and Directory. New York: Official Hotel Red Book and Directory Co., 1917. https://archive.org/details/officialhotelred00amer.
Author Note: I am drawn to places like Hotel Gunter because they show how an Appalachian downtown can preserve its past without freezing it in time. Frostburg’s old hotel still carries the marks of ambition, decline, and renewal that shaped so many mountain communities.