Calvert Hotel, Lewistown Montana

I've written a bit on old hotels here from time to time.  Here's another example.

This is the restored Calvert Hotel in Lewistown Montana.  This hotel, however, didn't start out as one, which may explain why I was surprised that it wasn't near a rail line.  This hotel was built in 1912 as a girls dormitory, for rural Fergus County Montana students.  It says something about conditions at the time that girls would have been housed by the county in a dormitory, like college students are today, in order to attend high school.  I didn't take a picture of it, but a building that was obviously built as a high school, but which is now used for some other purpose, is nearby.

The big dorm went idle in the 1920s but was revived decades later as a hotel, for which it was likely well suited.  In 2007 it was purchased again and rebuilt.  It's been nicely done, and some of the original features remain.  It's located nearly in the center of Lewistown, and the dome of the Fergus County Courthouse is visible on the right hand side of the photograph.

This is a nice hotel, and the room rates are really reasonable.  There's a nice restaurant in the basement, which is a restaurant that serves the towns people of Lewistown in addition to the hotel's patrons.  Like older hotels, and perhaps like older dormitories, the rooms are small. The one thing I noted about staying in it is that the walls are thin, but the walls are just as thin on a lot of modern motels as well.  Usually in these solid older buildings that's note the case, but this hotel wasn't originally built as one.  Perhaps the original dorm had fairly thin walls as well, reflecting either a relatively regimented life in the dorm, or perhaps an acknowledgement that it was going to be noisy anyhow.  Or maybe the rooms were added much later.

 Early morning view.