Ansorge Hotel - Curlew, WA - Lucky 7 on Waymarking.com

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Ansorge Hotel - Curlew, WA

in Lucky 7

Posted by:  T0SHEA

11U E 382718 N 5415753

This little turn of the century small town hotel once housed Henry Ford, according to locals. Centred around the hotel, this Lucky 7 takes in a tiny bit of the tiny town of Curlew, Washington.

Built about 1903, the Ansorge Hotel has become a major landmark in the little village of Curlew. It was, for a small town, an elegant and well equipped hotel. The hotel remains clad in the mock stone stamped steel siding which it wore when built. It was likely the site of the first telephone in Curlew and contained the only long distance phone in town until well into the 1950s.

The area around Curlew was settled solely as a result of gold strikes, primarily in the area of Republic, to the south. The riches quickly petered out, however, and by the time the railroad arrived in Curlew in 1902, the boom was over. The Ansorge, though, soldiered on, with William Ansorge expanding into various other businesses, including a bakery, a butcher shop, stable, feed store and a barber shop which operated in the hotel lobby.

With the expected economic boom in the area never materializing, the hotel hasn't been economically viable for quite some time. As a result, the hotel has been reborn as a museum. Both the exterior and interior are very much as they were when built, including interior furnishings and fixtures. Open weekends through the summer, visitors may tour the entire hotel, ambling from room to room at a leisurely small town pace.

There are three areas in which the Ansorge Hotel can be considered historically significant. This striking building is best known as a local landmark and a former center of social life and communication in the Ferry County area. Its close association with the area's early railroads gives it a firm place in Curlew's economic history and its final claim to significance is the strong possibility that it once, briefly, housed the well known industrialist, Mr. Henry Ford.

William Ansorge, builder of the hotel which bears his name, arrived in Curlew in 1900. This was the same year that the first railroad in the area, the Republic and Kettle River Railway Company, was incorporated. This privately funded line was intended to connect the booming gold fields of the Republic mining district with the railways and smelters of southern British Columbia. A railroad "boom" was predicted and Curlew, as the railroad center of the area, looked forward to prosperous days...

...The Ansorge at this time was an unusually elegant and well equipped hotel for the area. Its amenities included a pay phonograph with a selection of cylindrical records (still in place and functioning in the lobby) and one of the first gravity feed water systems in the area. The water was pumped to a cistern on the roof.

Curlew's boom days were short-lived. The railroads, to whose fortunes the Ansorge's prosperity was so closely linked, had come to the area too late. The productivity of the Republic gold fields had peaked in 1900. By the time the first R. and K.R. train arrived in Curlew in 1902, the rush was over. Neither the arrival of the Great Northern line a short time later nor the merger of the local line with the Spokane and British Columbia Rail Road in 1905 produced the long-awaited boom. (The latter rail road is still remembered locally as "the Hot Air Line" due to the discrepancy between its promises and its performance.)

In 1912 Mr. Ansorge was imprisoned for selling liquor to an Indian. In his absence his wife's family, the Keihls, took control of the hotel and leased it, the four lots and various out buildings, to George and Augusta Thomas for three years. It is during this period or very slightly earlier that telephone company signs first appear in photographs of the Ansorge, signaling the installation of its first telephone. From this time until the mid 1950's it housed Curlew's only long-distance telephone...

...The guest register for July 31, 1917 bears the signature of a "Henry Ford, Detroit Mich." and local residents agree that this was the Ford of the Ford Motor Company.
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