Outdoor school restores hotel that once lured Yellowstone visitors
CHRIS MERRILL Star-Tribune correspondent | Posted: Monday, January 15, 2007 12:00 am
LANDER -- The project was part restoration, part preservation, part modernization.
At a cost of about $5 million, the National Outdoor Leadership School has rejuvenated a historic landmark in the center of Lander, continuing a somewhat improbable tradition started by H.O. Barber in 1917, when he bought the land and constructed the Noble Hotel.
Originally opened in 1918, the Noble was built as a luxury hotel to accommodate wealthy Easterners at the end of the rail line, before they headed out to Yellowstone National Park. When it was constructed, it was one of the nicer hotels west of the Mississippi. Its advertising pamphlet boasted, "Hot and Cold Running Water in every room," "Business Men's Luncheon 65¢," and "All dinners $1."
The hotel is now used to house most of the 2,500 to 3,000 NOLS students who come through Lander every year.
For NOLS, the goal of the renovation was two-fold.
"I kind of relate it to going into open-heart surgery and plastic surgery at the same time," said Dave Glenn, Rocky Mountain director at NOLS. Glenn said his organization was concerned with improving the old building whenever necessary, and preserving and restoring the original aesthetics whenever possible.
The original Italian mahogany and decorative floor tiles were kept and refurbished. The magnificent stained-glass skylight in the hotel lobby, which has been absent since the 1980s, was reinstalled with an exact reproduction of the original.
"You'll see where we've maintained the history and where we've had to modernize," said David Cowles, associate director of development at NOLS.
The original 1908 bison head still peers down at lobby passersby, the full-sized street windows have been reinstalled, the original swank light fixtures still dangle from the ceiling. Modern additions include an elevator and a brand-new commercial kitchen.
John Gans, executive director of NOLS, said that for the most part the project went smoothly. Wyoming's labor shortage, however, did have an effect.
"We did have some challenges just in the last year with finding subcontractors, and in a couple of cases we were forced to go out of state (to contract work) when we would have preferred not to, but there was just no one available to do the work," Gans said.
An unlikely run
For Lander business owner and amateur historian Lynn McRann, the history of Lander's Noble Hotel is an unlikely one.
"The three main people that have owned the Noble were kind of visionaries and risk-takers," she said.
McRann spent months researching the landmark in order to create the large, three-paneled display for a NOLS open house, depicting the 89-year history of the hotel.
"I just thought it was an interesting thing -- that building has somehow always attracted those kinds of people," she said.
H.O. "Shorty" Barber, the original owner of the hotel, did something that would have taken a lot of temerity in 1917 Wyoming, according to McRann. He had a vision for a tourist industry that didn't yet exist.
"It was very much an 'if you build it they will come' kind of idea ... His idea was that he would bring tourists from back East on the railroad, to the end of the rails, have them housed here in Lander, and then take them up to Yellowstone ... I thought (it was a real gamble) to put this first-class hotel at the end of the world here," McRann said.
For a time, Barber's gamble paid off. He succeeded in creating the tourist trade he had envisioned, so much that the south entrance to Yellowstone National Park was called, at the time, "the Lander entrance."
When the Depression hit, however, the Noble, like many businesses, faltered. It was time for the hotel's second major era to begin.
"Harold Del Monte, when he was a young guy, came here and worked at the bank. The hotel was going under; he bought the note on the hotel in 1929 or 1930 during the Depression ... I felt like he was such a risk-taker too, the hotel was on its way down," McRann said. But Del Monte turned things around.
"He built it up, made it the center of town again, and again it was the place where adventurous people came to go to the West."
The Noble continued to be a successful venture for more than three decades after Del Monte purchased it. It continued to bring in tourists, held banquets, proms and town meetings, and had a successful restaurant. But that, too, was temporary. In the 1960s it had a couple of short-term owners, but neither could make it a success again.
"Then back in the (early 1970s) when the hotel was going down again, Paul Petzoldt with NOLS needed a place to house his people," McRann said.
Since Petzoldt bought the hotel in 1973, NOLS has continued the tradition of bringing people out to Lander as a point of departure for -- and point of return from -- the wilderness. The success of NOLS has ushered in the third major era for the Noble, and again the Noble is thriving.
In 2007, people are staying in the building that H.O. Barber built, proving his conjecture right again -- that if he built it, people would come.