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    The Ship Hotel: A Grand View along the Lincoln Highway
    The Ship Hotel: A Grand View along the Lincoln Highway
    The Ship Hotel: A Grand View along the Lincoln Highway
    Ebook129 pages59 minutes

    The Ship Hotel: A Grand View along the Lincoln Highway

    By Brian Butko

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    About this ebook

    In this fascinating book-liberally illustrated with vintage postcards, photos, and blueprints-author Brian Butko weaves together interviews and surviving documents to tell the eight-decade story of this beloved icon of the road that was also a monument to grand ideas, whimsy, and good old hucksterism.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateFeb 19, 2010
    ISBN9780811743853
    The Ship Hotel: A Grand View along the Lincoln Highway

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      Book preview

      The Ship Hotel - Brian Butko

      Motorists were stopping at Grand View Point long before there was a stand to draw their attention. CY HOSMER

      ABOUT EIGHTY MILES EAST OF PITTSBURGH, at a downhill curve on U.S. Route 30, travelers have stopped for more than a century to gaze out on a marvelous patchwork of farms and fields. Known as Grand View Point, the overlook has been home to a number of roadside stands, most notably a large hotel in the shape of a steamboat. The Ship Hotel was perhaps the best-known roadside attraction on the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway. It even caught the eye of the Depression-era WPA guide writers:

      The S.S. Grand View Point Hotel was remodeled in 1931 to give the impression of an ocean liner, because the owner saw a resemblance between early morning mists rising from the valley and billowing ocean waves. Constructed of steel and concrete and known locally as the Ship, it has a top deck promenade with a view of seven counties and parts of Maryland and West Virginia.

      The Ship was larger than life, a monument to grand ideas, whimsy, and good old hucksterism. People loved the outlandish white steamboat with flags snapping in the breeze. In darkness or bad weather, its lights appeared like a fantastic mirage—a boat docked in Pennsylvania’s rolling hills.

      It declined over time, but in 1997 the Ship was entered in the National Register of Historic Places, and there were hopes of revival. It’s gone now, burned to the ground in a freak fire in 2001, but meet any of the people who knew the Ship and you’ll hear their voices waver with overwhelming joy and tremendous sadness for a landmark that is no more.

      Grand View Point was just one of many scenic spots in the mountains of Pennsylvania where entrepreneurs thought they could sell some pie and cold drinks or pennants and postcards to motorists pulled over to cool their radiators, brakes, and tempers. The mountaintop view gave added reason to stop, and soon many stands had lookout towers or telescopes.

      It was the Appalachian (or Allegheny) Mountains these early cars were struggling to ascend, and although the range pales in comparison to the Rockies, its peaks were tall enough to scare early motorists into finding an alternate route. Many travelers heading west from the Atlantic Coast avoided the Alleghenies by crossing the state of New York. If they didn’t mind tackling the mountains through Pennsylvania, they angled southwest to Philadelphia and then west through Lancaster, Gettysburg, Chambersburg, Bedford, and Pittsburgh.

      These 1926 postcards show the ups and downs of the Lincoln Highway through the Allegheny Mountains.

      Minick’s Place was a little to the west of Grand View at Bald Knob Summit. CY HOSMER

      The Mountain Inn sat halfway up Laurel Mountain on a notoriously sharp bend. The inn was demolished around 1995, when opposing lanes at the curve were separated.

      Once past Chambersburg, westbound Lincoln Highway motorists could see the first peaks looming—Cove Mountain and then Tuscarora Summit. The road would soon rise from six hundred feet above sea level to more than twenty-one hundred feet. Even today, winding through the mountains on two-lane U.S. 30 can be daunting.

      Just before Tuscarora Summit, travelers found Cove Mountain Tea Room. Sylverta Blaugher spent summers there with her great-aunt Pearl and great-uncle Harry Forrester in the late ’50s and early ’60s:

      My mother lived with them in the ’40s after they bought the property. She often talks of buses stopping there and serving sandwiches. After Aunt Pearl had a stroke they stopped serving but they still sold Shell gas and had a small store, where they sold pop and candy. Unfortunately, vandals started destroying the property in the late ’70s, so the house was demolished and new owners built an A-frame further back on the property.

      Bill’s Place, one of the most famous mountaintop stops, was east of Breezewood.

      Bill Wakefield at his Place.

      Doc Seylar’s at Tuscarora Summit offered a number of postcards showing its evolution from a shack to the greatly enlarged roadhouse it became in the 1950s. The rooftop lookout can be seen in this 1920s view.

      Atop Tuscarora Summit sat Doc Seylar’s Place. Dozens of postcards document Seylar’s, from a shack in the teens to the rambling 1950s roadhouse that still stands today, renamed and remodeled. Peaks that follow include Scrub Ridge (1,469 feet), Sideling Hill (2,193 feet), and Rays Hill (about 1,900 feet). William Wakefield opened Bill’s Place on Rays Hill in 1922. Among his diversions was a six-by-eight-foot post office, touted as the

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