The significance of the Washington Hotel lies in the fact that it is an unaltered example of an early twentieth-century working class hotel and in its close association with Lewis P. Larson, the founder of Metaline Falls.
Lewis P. Larson, who was born in 1876 in Denmark, became a notable prospector, miner, metallurgist, promoter, financier and industrialist. After coming to the United States in 1895, he worked at various jobs in the West. As early as 1904 he explored the Metaline area around the Pend Oreille River. This remote valley in the foothills of the Rockies was unsettled, having no railroad, roads, or even trails. Attracted by the undeveloped mineral resources he found in the area, Larson energetically began promoting its development in several ways.
By 1911 he had already accomplished a great deal. Because of his encouragement, the Idaho and Washington Northern Railroad, now the CMSP&P, was extended at great expense to Metaline Falls. He organized the Pend Oreille Mines and Metals Company, which is now a division of the Bunker Hill Company. He promoted the development of a cement plant for the area and succeeded in persuading the Inland Portland Cement Company, now Lehigh Portland Cement Company, to build a plant in Metaline Falls. He incorporated the Metaline Falls Light and Water Company to insure adequate supplies of electricity and water for the new town. Finally, he founded the Larson Realty Company, which platted the town of Metaline Falls and built a hotel appropriate for the near-term dreams he had for the town.
Larson was a pioneer in the field of metallurgy. His company, the Pend Oreille Mines and Metals Company, was the first in the United States to use the Tainton Electrolytic process for reducing zinc ore, and a subsidiary company pioneered the Hybinette-Cary vacuum processing for smelting zinc, lead and cadmium.
At a cost of $15,000 in 1906, the Larson Realty Company built the Washington Hotel as the start of the town's commercial district. For a new town, the hotel had impressive proportions and was praised for its steam heat and the fact that it had porter service. It, along with Larson's fine home, remains a tangible reminder of the area's greatest entrepreneur.
The hotel enjoyed a long history of service to the people of Metaline Falls and their visitors, but not under Larson's ownership. Because of his debts to the cement company, the Washington Hotel passed into their corporate ownership in 1914 and was operated by them until 1956. Larson later suffered the further indignity of being evicted from the hotel he had built.
His fortunes recovered, and he began construction in 1930 of another hotel in Metaline Falls. Local tradition says that he wanted to avenge his eviction by putting the Washington Hotel out of business.
Unfortunately for Larson, his fortunes again declined, and he was unable to complete the newer, grander hotel. Ownership of the half-finished building also passed to the Lehigh Company, which completed the building in 1949 and now operate it as an apartment house. Larson's company experienced the ups and downs of the market for zinc, but, at his death in 1955, Larson was again a wealthy man. The Washington Hotel was purchased from the Lehigh Portland Cement Company in 1956 by Mr. and Mrs. Wilson Lowe, who operated it as a hotel and boarding house until 1974. Since then it has been owned by Ernestine McGowan and is now vacant.
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