The Nimitz Hotel - Amazing Hospitality. (original) (raw)

When finished, the new hotel had it all. There were 3 wells on the property. The building had wood floors made of cypress boards cut and hauled from the "mill the Mormons had built and were operating on the Pedernales about 4 miles below the colony."

The Nimitz wasn't home, but it was darn close to it. A traveler willing to splurge could sleep in a bed all by himself. The outhouse was a short but polite distance away. The Nimitz was the only place between San Antonio and El Paso a traveler could soak in a hot bath.

At other frontier hotels a guest could take a bath in clean water (unheated) for a dime or bathe at a discount if he was willing to "take a turn."

After the new Nimitz opened "it became the place where the mail drivers of the U.S. mail line from San Antonio and El Paso stayed. They found good quarters here and a fine place to keep their horses."

The hotel was a charming place with comfortable furnishings. On the walls were Hermann Lungkwitz drawings of Bear Mountain and Enchanted Rock. By all accounts the hospitality was amazing.

Quite a few famous people registered at the Nimitz. General Robert E. Lee and General Phil Sheridan stayed there. The Fredericksburg Standard reported that "Dr. Ferdinand Roemer, whose studies for the new country were the first to be printed in Europe made this hotel his home at various times."

William Sydney Porter, better known as the writer O. Henry, slept at the Nimitz when he wasn't absorbing the local culture at the bar.

The Germans had a lukewarm relationship with O. Henry. They admired his talent but weren't always charmed with his treatment of their culture.

An article in the Fredericksburg Standard concluded "The beautiful story of 'The Chaparral Prince' which uses as a setting the one time frequent mail robberies on the mail routes from here to San Antonio and which pretends to depict the life of the people of our country, was undoubtedly begun while the writer was at the hotel."

Charles Nimitz was a ship captain before he came to Texas, and by the late1880s he had socked away enough money to remodel his hotel to reflect his love for the sea. The wheelhouse of a Mississippi steamboat looming above the oak trees must have been a strange and mysterious sight to first time visitors coming to Fredericksburg from Austin or San Antonio.

The hotel was a busy place in its prime. Prominent families from Houston and Galveston spent summers there. Locals had banquets and dances in the ballroom. The Lions Club, the Rotary Club and the Casino Club met there.

The hotel was the center of social life in Fredericksburg for a century.