Mrs. Folsey’s Hotel, Wickliffe, Ballard County, Kentucky

While traveling home from the beach last month, we spent a nervous half hour frantically trying to find a hotel room off of I-65 in Alabama. It was a Saturday night and traffic proved a nightmare – a nightmare which would balloon into epic proportions if two adults and two small children had to spend the night in a room with two double beds! We did find a room, complete with two queen beds and a fancy sort of trundle bed that pulled out from the couch, and we passed a reasonably quiet night.

But our experience has made me reconsider how much our notion of “hotel” has changed since the Interstate Highway system unfolded across the country. The meaning of the word, its likely geographic location, and even its probable appearance has shifted so far from the time when the second story of almost any commercial building could function as a hotel. I imagine that this slightly downtrodden brick building on Court Street in Wickliffe, Kentucky, would not fit into most people’s idea of a hotel.

The two-story brick building was constructed around 1895 for Newton Trimble, who lived across the street. Not long after that, the building was sold to a Mrs. Folsey, an enterprising woman who ran a dance hall and saloon on the first floor, and dedicated the second floor to 17 hotel rooms.

The facade of the first story of the hotel is seven bays wide, with four windows, and three doors. One of the doors likely led directly to a stairwell to the upper story. Apparently a long hall ran down the middle of the second story, with eight hotel rooms on one side, and nine rooms on the other side of the hallway. The second story windows are segmentally arched, and all boarded up.

Given the footprint of the building, I would imagine the rooms were much more spartan than the one we snagged off of the interstate in Alabama.

The building was vacant when first documented in the 1970s, and it was vacant when I stopped and took these photographs. Wickliffe, the county seat of Ballard County, is a historic river port town, but river trade and traffic isn’t what it used to be – Cairo, Illinois, only six miles away is a moving testament to the fading economic powers of America’s waterways.

If you don’t know where to look for information, this building seems just another derelict structure. It’s certainly not going to pop up on Google maps as a former historic hotel – but there was life in those rooms once, and layers of stories of the men and women who danced, drank, and slumbered under its roof.