The Clairndon Hotel at Mapleton

The Clairndon Hotel stood in the center of Mapleton. The town's 1966 centennial book says it was built about 1905, and another chapter of the same book says the building was completed in 1906. An old frame building was torn down to make room for it, and its concrete blocks were made at the Mapleton Limestone Company's quarry across the river. The first owners, the book says, were Clair and Don Wright of Huntingdon. The book does not explain the hotel's name.

Stores and business places took up the first floor and part of the basement, along with the lobby, a large dining room and a kitchen. The two upper floors held rooms for boarders and apartments for housekeeping. At one time it was a popular stop for travelers, the book says, and vacationers from as far away as Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., spent the hot summer months there or at their cottages in the Gap. A photograph in the book names Thomas Grady as manager about 1907, and the book counts Mr. and Mrs. Frank Godard among its good innkeepers. Clay Park opened a general store in part of the first floor, and the printing plant of the town's newspaper, the Mapleton Item, moved into the east end of that floor.

On November 15, 1907, the Democratic Watchman of Bellefonte reported an explosion at the hotel. About 8 o'clock on a Thursday night, the generator of the acetylene gas plant in the basement exploded. The paper said a young man who had been left in charge of the plant for the night caused the explosion by holding a lighted candle close to the engine. The plant was badly wrecked and a portion of the generator was driven through the porch roof. Several people were on the porch and none of them was hurt, but the young man was severely injured.

On October 28, 1909, two weekly papers, the Centre Reporter of Centre Hall and the Fulton County News of McConnellsburg, printed a dispatch from Lewistown saying that a fire "of incendiary origin" had practically wiped out the business section of Mapleton. It began in the building Leonard Dell used as a general store and spread to the adjoining buildings, entirely destroying William Stambaugh's store room, a barber shop and several occupied flats above the store rooms. "The Pennsylvania Railroad depot and the Clarendon Hotel, with a number of other buildings, were badly damaged," the dispatch said, spelling the name its own way. Mapleton had no fire-fighting apparatus and depended on a bucket brigade, and the summer's drought had left water short. Huntingdon sent a company and equipment, but the flames had burned themselves out before they arrived. The dispatch expected the loss to exceed $40,000, with very little insurance, if any.

The centennial book remembers the buildings beside the hotel on the north side of Main Street as lost in the 1909 fire, with Leonard Dell in the general store at the time. Its history of the Item says several buildings adjoining the hotel on the east were destroyed and the Item's plant was heavily damaged. The plant was moved and set up in another building, but the book says the paper was never published from that site. The Item was bought by Joseph F. Biddle, publisher of the Semi-Weekly News of Huntingdon, who combined its circulation list with his own paper's.

The building went on being used. The First National Bank first opened its doors in the building on December 16, 1918. After the flood of 1936 Jesse Wible moved his general store into it, and his son Walter W. Wible ran the store from 1947 until his death in 1963. In 1966 the book called the place "essentially an apartment hotel and business establishment."

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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