Helms: Chattanooga’s early hotels were ‘especial’

Crutchfield House

Stanton House

A staff correspondent for Harper’s Monthly Magazine visited Chattanooga in 1857 and described the scene at the Crutchfield House.”The hotel swarmed with people arriving and departing with the trains, east, west, north and south, hurrying to and fro with eager and excited looks … . Chattanooga is a new place, apparently just cut out of the woods. It has lately sprung into importance as a point on the great railway thoroughfare connecting the Mississippi river at Memphis with the Atlantic ocean at Charleston, S.C.”

The first railroad arrived in Chattanooga in 1850, when the state of Georgia constructed the Western & Atlantic Railroad. Allen Kennedy and Thomas W. Newman announced in the Chattanooga Gazette that their Chattanooga Hotel on the corner of Market and Fifth streets was “arranged for the especial comfort of their guests … .” Another hotel with the same name existed earlier, which John G. Glass offered for sale in 1848, declaring, “The present and prospective travel through Chattanooga makes this one of the most desirable Tavern stands in the country.”

The Crutchfield House, located across Ninth Street from the Union Depot, opened in 1856.

Owner Thomas Crutchfield contracted with the Western & Atlantic requiring trains to stop at Ninth instead of allowing them to run on the trestles of Railroad Avenue, now Broad Street, to the Tennessee River.

Traveling home to Mississippi in 1861 after resigning from the U.S. Senate, Jefferson Davis stayed at the Crutchfield House. He delivered a brief speech on the sectional crisis, which prompted a heated reply by William Crutchfield, brother of the hotel owner and an “uncompromising Union man.” Pistols were drawn and tensions were high, but no duel ensued.