GAYLORDSVILLE—Perseverance paid off Sunday, June 30, for the historic Merwinsville Hotel when the organization unveiled its third floor ballroom after 53 years of restoration.
It is the last major project of the restoration of the building that first opened in 1843 as a meal stop for the Housatonic Railroad. The building fell into disrepair and was literally falling down when a group of local residents banded together in 1971 to restore the building.
Described as a labor of love multiple times, the organization has been 100 percent volunteer run. George Haase was the first president of the Merwinsville Hotel Restoration. He passed away in 1984 and both of his daughters, Jeremy Ruman and Jennifer Haase, have been closely involved in recent years. Ruman is president and Haase serves as vice president and treasurer.
“It feels really good to have the third floor ballroom open,” said Ruman.
The Board of Directors hosted a party Sunday to show members and area residents what’s been accomplished in the past few years on the uppermost floor of the wooden structure. It attracted 85 people who shared their congratulations to the board.
“I want to thank everybody because you made this happen,” Ruman said. She especially thanked the late Ed Dolan, who donated the building for payment of $1 by the Merwinsville Hotel Restoration organization. His daughter Barbara Thorland was an original member of the board and she continues to this day. When she looks at the images of what the building looked like in the 1970s, it reminds her of how bad it really was.
“It’s astonishing when you see the pictures. I wish George was here to see it. He would be really gratified and on cloud nine,” Thorland said. She got involved with the restoration project early on because she and her husband, Ray, were best friends with George and Geraldine Haase. “We used to go there and sit around the kitchen table and have coffee. George would talk about the hotel.”
One of George Haase’s favorite expressions was, “It’ll only take a half a second,” Thorland remembers. He was always trying to get Ray Thorland to do something with him.
“Off they’d go and they’d be gone for three hours,” she said with a laugh.
“My father was a builder and he’d store lumber in the waiting room. You’d come in and smell the old wood and sawdust. Those were my earliest memories of the hotel,” she said.
When the work to bring the building back was started, many local residents would gather on Sundays to do the work.
“The building was sagging,” she said. The foundation needed replacement. Thorland remembers how persuasive and charming George Haase was in getting people to do things for the hotel. “He got the Morris House Movers to shore up the foundation. He conned them into doing it and they didn’t charge us anything,” she said. “We never had a mortgage ever. It was all pay as you go.”
Two South Kent residents, Debbie Chabrian and Ed Martinez, have been involved for decades. Chabrian, an award-winning watercolor painter, has shown her work in many of the hotel’s art shows. Martinez, a renowned portrait painter, also painted portraits during a spring show to demonstrate his techniques as people watched.
“We first got involved because Dave Jalbert mentioned the show,” Chabrian said of the longtime Gaylordsville resident, whose wife, Carol, owned Country Clothes in Kent. “We started participating in the shows and then about 18 years ago Georgenne (Bensh) needed help with the Christmas show.”
Chabrian is a fixture running the bakery for the Christmas show for the past decade. She has seen the ballroom from the bare studs when she would go up to retrieve items stored there over the years and set up holiday decorations. As owners of an old home themselves, the couple have a deep appreciation of the work that went into the transformation.
“We noticed the same kind of trim that is in our house,” Martinez said.
A small group of 11 artists participated in the hotel-themed art show and cash prizes were awarded in three different categories: painting/drawing, photography and mixed media. The artwork is up all summer and the hotel will be open for tours on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. Visitors are encouraged to select their favorite art for the “People’s Choice” award that will be announced in September at the hotel’s annual meeting.
Judging for the art contest was done by Kent resident and artist George-Ann Gowan. She was asked to do it by board member Jane Mullen. Both attend St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.
“What made it so hard was individually I could have given a prize to every single one,” Gowan said. She really enjoyed being able to explore the three-story hotel after she was done judging.
The hotel ballroom was the site of many dances and events over the hotel’s long history. Due to current fire codes, there is a limit to how many people are allowed in the ballroom at any one time.
When performer Kandie Carle heard about the plans for the party, she offered to perform demonstrations of period dancing with her husband, Casey. She has done two different programs about period clothing for the hotel in past years. They performed three different dances, representing three different decades of the hotel’s history, in 12-minute segments to an audience of 12 people at a time.
“The first dance we’re going to do is scandalous – it’s a waltz,” Carle said, explaining that it represented a dramatic change in how dances were conducted moving from side by side to couples facing one another. It was from the 1870s era.
The 181-year-old building is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Funds for the ballroom restoration and ongoing maintenance come from local donors and the three annual seasonal fundraisers that incorporate art shows and sales of artisans’ and craftspeople’s work. More information about the hotel at 1 Brown’s Forge Road in Gaylordsville can be found here.
