c. 1860 Hotel in Alma, CO

~~$295,000~~

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Added to OHD on 7/14/22 - Last OHD Update: 10/21/22

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55 S Pine St, Alma, CO 80420

Maps: Street | Aerial

6 Bed
2444 Sq Ft
0.23 Ac.

National Register Property

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK! This is the Ultimate Opportunity to own the Town of Alma's Founding Father James Moynahan's home and former 6 Bedroom Hotel! Continue the Restoration and Stewardship of this Historical Treasure. The"Spring House" has been worked on to Stabilize & Curate this ONE OF A KIND LANDMARK you see today! The property is zoned mixed use and boasts a natural spring! The POTENTIAL is plentiful with this prime location. Don't miss your chance to be a part of Mountain Life History!

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Marilee Devries, Caniglia Real Estate Group :: (719) 836-2766

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Island Girl | 3 comments

Supporter

8 months ago

In 1983, I visited here when they were renting out rooms. (I owned a home & lived down the road in CONIFER off Hwy 285 then.) The hotel was actually in decent shape then. We had a lovely night & discussed the amazing history of this place. Funny thing is, I very nearly bought it. LOL.

Angie boldly going nowhere | 1026 comments

I hope someone owns that gorgeous dog in Photo 7. He looks happy enough.

KEYLIME | 1944 comments

Reply to Angie boldly going nowhere | 1026 comments

Caption: “Look how good I’m being. I’m staying out of the water!”

CindyH | 432 comments

This place just screams with history. I love that there’s an old mine on the property. What do you think is going on with the ceiling in pictures 20 and 21?

Reply to CindyH | 432 comments

I wondered about that, too. Maybe the ceilings collapsed and are now covered with sailcloth? Is the model sailboat in pic 21 a clue? Or mere coincidence?

The interior is extremely appealing, in a museumy kind of way. I’d be loath to change anything; better to sort of fit myself in around the existing furnishings. There are so many beautifully composed still lifes; I can envision myself taking up painting. I think I’d begin in the pic 24 room.
I see that pic 34 shows an old headboard, just waiting for me to set it up and turn that room into my bedroom. Pic 33 shows a section of wall in that room, a section at which I could happily gaze for who knows how long. Simple things make me very happy.

dhh177 | 91 comments

Love this! A real step back in time. The mining equipment just abandoned.

| 118 comments

Quite an interesting place!! Considering it was a ‘hotel” and all in the 1860’s you can see where the room walls have been removed, I wonder how many “rooms” it originally had, and if blacklight still works after all that long…!

Gregory_K | 1427 comments

I lived in South Park, for which the cartoon was named, for a number of years. It was, and probably still is, just as screwy as the cartoon named for it. Fairplay, the county seat, is just a few miles down the road from Alma.

South Park City, a 30+/- building museum at the end of Fairplay’s Front Street, had been founded in 1959 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Colorado’s gold rush, ‘Rush to the Rockies. However, in 1972, I was the museum’s first curator. I was only 18, and my paychecks weren’t much, so I rented cheap rooms in Alma, then Fairplay. I ate lots of breakfasts in this particular hotel, although I lived a few doors down in another old hotel….more about which further on!

The lady who cooked breakfast stirred up the coals about 6:00 every morning, and she’d feed old gold miners till about 2:00 in the afternoon. Most of the miners were in their 70s and 80s, and had arrived in South Park before the First World War.

For breakfast, they ordered 4 or 5 fried eggs, hash browns, 5 or more slices of crispy bacon or sausages, the big ones, not the silly little things available for breakfast today, and toast with butter, and jam or marmalade. And gallons of full caffeine coffee. Then they’d finish it off with a large glass half full of cream, and slip a LARGE wedge of apple, peach, or cherry pie into it.

At first all I could do was think of the calories, but we were at 9,953 (Fairplay) to 10,578 (Alma) feet above sea level, the air was very thin, and everybody worked very hard. Didn’t take much for me to start having a pile of eggs, bacon, sausage and browns every morning, although I preferred scrambled eggs, and I never got used to cream with pie in it.

I had a wonderful time, although my first hotel, just down the street, didn’t have full
indoor plumbing, an experience which taught me to ask more questions before
registering the next time.

My room was on the ground floor, and there was a privy out back, attached to the building with a rambling porch and shed. My first morning, I threw a bathrobe on, and staggered out to the privy. I was occupied when I heard a door open above me….then lots of obvious noises. There was another privy directly above me, which emptied onto sloping planks just above my head!!!! Fortunately for my sanity, there was a sheet of metal on the boards above me, antique (?), but there were no apparent leaks, so I learned to relax, an attitude which has served me well in the succeeding years..

Tragically, hippies moved into the hotel partway through the year, and on cold nights, I
was told they invited their horse to share their rooms. The mayor stated he’d burn the hotel to prevent any more hippies from moving into his town – he was proud of being politically somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun – and mysteriously, the hotel was damaged by fire and demolished. I always wondered about the fire and demolition. It was a great old building.

I finally moved to the 1931 Hand Hotel in Fairplay – still standing – and ran into my first
ghosts in the museum’s funeral parlor and carpentry shop.

It was a couple of wonderful years.

I remember breakfasts in this hotel here with a big smile. I got into memories of the museum in my other remarks, but forgot how much fun those breakfasts were. The miners are an important part of my memories; they were determined men, most still single or widowers after decades of searching for gold in between real but ordinary jobs digging at larger mine operations.

Some of them had gone off to France and war, but they wouldn’t talk about
it. As an historian I tried to coax them to talk, but no dice. One man,
Charlie, wouldn’t speak of the war, but he did tell me about how much he loved
his 1916 (?) army truck, he said it was a Standard B Liberty, and ‘more
reliable’ than most of the women he’d loved. “Boy, she was a honey!”
About 30 years before I met him, he’d rescued a 1920s motorcycle from an
abandoned, snow crushed cabin from about 12,500 feet on Mt. Bross. I think it
was a Harley model J, which reminded him of his motorcycle in France. You could
hear him a mile away, and everyone in the dining rooms would start laughing at
the distant grumbling that announced his arrival on Main Street. He’d come into
the room with a broad smile, and announce, “Boy, she’s a honey!”

Subtract about 75% of the buildings in the Victorian photograph of Main
Street, and that is what Alma looked like when I rented rooms there. More
buildings have disappeared since I stayed in town. The road has been
straightened but this hotel once served Main Street, and it is south of where
the photographer stood for the Victorian view. The late nineteenth century view
illustrates the Capitol Hotel where I lived with the privy. The white false
fronted building across the street was moved to the Fairplay museum in 1959, as
the Bank of Alma exhibit building.

roxxx | 971 comments

Reply to Gregory_K | 1427 comments

Thanks for the great read.

Reply to roxxx | 971 comments

I was very self-indulgent to recount all that, so thank you very much for the complement.

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