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The Inn at Wise

The main structure of the Inn was built in 1910 on a site which has been used for a hotel since the Civil War.  The home of Andrew Jackson Dotson, the first sheriff of Wise County, first occupied this site. Captain Henderson Dotson operated the first hotel and tavern called Dotson Hotel which burned in 1909 on this site.  A group of local business men along with Virginia Governor George Peery rebuilt and named this structure Colonial Hotel.  The name was later changed to The Inn at Wise Courthouse.

The hotel fell into decline and was purchased by Herb Thompson who restored the old, rundown building to a grandeur seldom seen.  At one time in the main dining room, the crystal chandeliers were made of 200 year old Venetian glass.  Hand-blown bottles graced the Early American corner cupboard and cabinet.   Original oil paintings decorated the walls of the main dining room, the lobby and the second floor parlor.  One painting, "The Nativity" by Carrachi, was painted in the 1500's, and was once owned by The Chicago Institute of  Art.

Hanging between the main dining room and the Pine Room were early American Skating Lanterns, originally designed to hold lighted candles which had been rewired for electricity.  Italian tables from different periods of the Renaissance, and a five hundred year old lamp which was once a funeral urn, were placed unobtrusively in the lobby. 

A stairway led to the Tap Room downstairs where a fire often burned nightly in the huge fireplace during the fall and winter months and people dined by candle-light.  On the walls were historical documents and an old map of Virginia showing the state stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.  There was also a library and a collection of old German beer steins.  

On the third floor of the Inn there were two suites:  The Russian Suite and The White House Suite.  The Russian Suite contained furniture built by Russian Peasants for the Czarina,  Alexander , wife of Nicholas II, and was used in her suite at the Royal Palace.  The White House suite was so named for the fireplace built of bricks from the White House in Washington D.C.   Among the antiques in the room was a bed often used by Abraham Lincoln when he stayed at the Old Grand Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio. 

The Inn was added to the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Historic Landmarks Register. 

By: Rhonda Robertson

This story of the Inn is in "The Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton Volume I"
More interesting stories of the Old Inn are in The Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton, Volume II.

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