Built in 1906-1908, this Colonial Revival-style building was built by Joseph Kenney and Walter Christy as a 100-room railroad resort hotel at the Balsam Gap along the Southern Railroad Murphy Branch at Balsam, North Carolina. The hotel, originally known as the Balsam Mountain Springs Hotel, originally had a spring on the property that was a major attraction for early tourists, and the hotel operated seasonally during the warm months, being closed in the winter. The hotel thrived until the Great Depression, when it was foreclosed upon, and auctioned by Jackson County, being won in the auction by Ephriam Stillwell, whom owned the hotel for the next few decades. The hotel, however, had fallen somewhat into decline by this time, with the third floor being unused and closed off. After World War II, the rise of automobile travel led to the hotel declining further in popularity, but it did remain in operation due to its location between the towns of Sylva and Waynesville just off US Highway 23.
The three-story wood-frame building is clad in wooden clapboard with two-over-two double-hung windows, a mansard and hipped roof, gabled dormers, a two-story gallery-style 100-foot-long front porch with doric columns and a decorative wooden balustrade, a rough-hewn stone and brick foundation, a service wing on the south side of the building with a kitchen and dining room on the first floor, and an enclosed sun porch on the front facade of the service wing. The interior of the building features painted beadboard walls and wooden floors, broad hallways, wooden balustrades at the staircases, doors with transoms, fireplaces with wooden mantles and decorative tile surrounds, historic plumbing fixtures in the hotel rooms, doric columns in the dining room, and period-correct light fixtures in the lobby, lounge, and library.
The hotel declined throughout the postwar period, and closed in the 1980s. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. The building remained empty until 1990, when it was acquired by Merrily Teasley and underwent a significant rehabilitation and restoration, which received a preservation award in 1995. The hotel was sold by Teasley in 2017, closed in 2020, and was sold to its present owners in 2023. Today, the hotel is undergoing yet another much-needed rehabilitation and restoration project.
Use Flickriver Badge Creator to create a badge linking to your photos, your group or any other Flickriver view.
You can place your badge on your Flickr profile, Blog or Website.
Add to your iGoogle or Netvibes page
Flickriver widget for iGoogle or Netvibes can display almost any Flickriver view - most interesting today, by user, by group, by tag etc. Once added to your personalized homepage, just edit widget settings to select your desired view.
Clickr on one of the buttons below to install:
Embed on your Web site
To embed this view, Copy and Paste the following HTML code:
Add 'Search on Flickriver' to your browser's search box. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Install search plugin
"View on Flickriver" Greasemonkey script
A Greasemonkey script that adds Flickriver links to various Flickr photo pages - user photos, favorites, pools etc, allowing to quickly open the corresponding Flickriver view.
Also, allows quickly viewing any Flickr photo on black background in large size.
