As prosperity returned for the South's upper classes in the last decades of the nineteenth century, there was an increasing demand for hotels and Godfrey Norrman, one of Atlanta's greatest entrepreneurial architects jumped to fill this need for luxury hotels dramatically perched on hillsides or adjacent to mineral springs and other natural features of the southern uplands. One of his designs was the Bellevue Hotel on a Lookout Mountain precipice, 800 feet above the valley containing the prospering town of Gadsden, Alabama.
Norrman came to Gadsden to design the Printup Hotel in 1887 for Daniel Printup of Rome, Georgia, who was largely responsible for extending the the Rome & Decatur Railroad to Gadsden. (1) While the Printup was being built, it was reported that Norrman had also designed a "mountain hotel" near the city. It was not constructed concurrently with the Printup, but the success of that hostelry probably inspired the leading citizens involved in the Gadsden Land and Improvement Company [GLIC] to take up the project of a resort hotel on Lookout Mountain overlooking the city and near a mineral spring as well as the scenic Noccalula Falls. (2)
J. L. Tanner, a leading lawyer and former secretary/treasurer of the organization which had erected the Printup Hotel, was president of the GLIC. He and his associates apparently decided in 1889 to follow up on the original plans for the resort hotel with an investment ranging from $25,000 to $60,000. At various times and in various publications, the hotel was called the Fall View, Belle-View, Mineral Springs, and finally, after the turn of the century, the Bellevue. The hotel appears to have been completed in late 1890 and the Southern Architect for October of that year stated that Norrman was the designer. As was usual for the architect, he picked up two private commissions for homes valued at $10,000 each for unnamed Gadsden residents in the same year. (3) It is unknown if these homes remain standing.
The Bellevue was a beautiful structure and the developers constructed a rail line from the valley to the future hotel with a winding carriage drive already marked off for building lots for private residences. With 100 rooms and a large dining room, the two and three story hotel had extensive porches and its many electric lights vied "with night's diadem of stars in brilliancy." (4) The main entrance with its porte cochere, the chimneys, and the piers supporting the hotel were of rough cut stone [probably granite]. The rest of the building, including a three story octagonal tower with matching roof next to the porte cochere, was sheathed in shingles. The roof line was broken by large hipped and small shed dormers, numerous chimneys, an observation tower or belvedere, rounded projecting bays, and gables. Norrman was certainly a master of the Queen Anne style in public buildings as well as private homes.
The Bellevue was also a wonderful example of the shingle style in a resort hotel. It rose almost naturally out of the hillside on its stone piers and the long sweeping roof line matched the shape of the mountain. Norrman used a mixture of wood shingles [these were presumably also on the roof] and quarry cut stone to make the hotel blend into its surroundings, just as did the structures designed by the nationally important architects of New England and the northern states at the time. In other words, this regional Southern architect brought the most modern styles of the era to the small towns and cities of the South.
Sadly, the Bellevue did not have a long and storied life. It reportedly burned to the ground in 1912 and the site remained hauntingly vacant even into the 1990s when the author last visited Gadsden. (5) A sketch made just before it burned in 1912 gives some idea of its massive size which the photographs fail to do [see below]. Nevertheless, the photographs and postcard view truly bring the Victorian opulence of the hotel to life and hint at the grand parties once held there and the hours of leisure enjoyed by those Victorians who had the means to enjoy these rural hotel "palaces." One can only surmise that it was also a place where romances began on hot summer days on the shaded porches or walks to the nearby natural landscape features. The postcard view of the hotel [first image above] was mailed in 1908 from a Miss Nettie Dacy [?] of Harpersville, Alabama to Mr. Calvin Turner of Prague, Oklahoma. She writes that she is "pleased to ex-change postcards" and "how much I enjoyed the 'swell' song" which the dashing young Calvin might have sung to her in the Bellevue's romantic belvedere one summer evening when the lights below vied with the "diadem of stars" above. History is often a romance.
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(1) Hotel Subject File at the Gadsden Public Library.
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(2) Atlanta Journal [AJ], 6/3/1887; "Gadsden, Alabama," Atlanta Constitution [AC],10/5/1890, 33; "Gadsden, Alabama," AC, 11/231890.
(3) Gadsden newspaper article titled "At Last" and dated 7/12/1888 from the Hotel Subject File of the Gadsden Public Library; Frances Underwood, "Strolling Down Memory Lane: Old 'Mineral Springs Hotel'," The Gadsden Times, 6/29/1958, n.p.; John Jones, "History Holds Story of Gadsden's Early Luxury Hotel," The Gadsden Times, 6/16/1968, 5; Southern Architect, October 1890, 179.
(4) AC, 10/5/1890, 33; Jones, 5; Underwood, "Strolling," n.p.
(5) Jones, 5.
