Nicolett Hotel (Lubbock, Texas)

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The Nicolett Hotel c. 1891 (Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas)

The Nicolett Hotel was a two-and-a-half-story frame white building which provided lodging for more than fifty years and was particularly important to the settlement of Lubbock County in West Texas.

History

The Nicolett Hotel was constructed by Frank E. Wheelock at North Town in 1889 some three miles northeast of what became the new town of Lubbock, Texas. Less than a year later, it was moved intact on rollers to the corner of Broadway Street and Avenue H to be inside the new county seat, located north of Yellow House Canyon and east of the current Interstate 27. Wheelock named the Nicolett Hotel after the Nicollet Hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he had once stayed and which was demolished in 1923. The Nicolett was operated by a real estate agent, George Maddon Hunt (1843-1919), who came to Lubbock from Sterling, Kansas, and became Wheelock's father-in-law. About 1940, the hotel was moved to the northeastern part of Lubbock for use as a community center before its demolition a few years later.

The hotel had eighteen rooms; the top floor was a lighted and ventilated attic. It had a restaurant known for low-priced good cooking. The hotel register, in the possession of the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, shows that area pioneers, businessmen, and cowboys from the IOA Ranch stayed at the Nicolett. So did the leaders from the two rival villages. W. D. Crump and H. M. Bandy, established Lubbock or "North Lubbock", and W. E. Rayner, who had earlier founded the town of Rayner in Stonewall County, built South Lubbock, also known as Monterey. Both aspired to be the county seat. These men subsequently met at the Nicolett to merge their efforts to establish what became Lubbock. The original site of Rayner's settlement was north of the present Texas Tech campus.

Historian Paul H. Carlson, professor emeritus at Texas Tech, identified some of the Nicolett guests as H. H. Campbell, one of the founders of the Matador Ranch in Motley County to the east of Lubbock, and among the founders of Lubbock, Rayner, Crump, Bandy, Rollie Burns, and George Wolffarth. Carlson writes that:

From the very first in early 1889 the Nicolett stood as something of a sentinel on the prairie, luring cowboys, farmers, townspeople, traveling salesmen, and others to Lubbock. It and the Lubbock village in which it stood encouraged two groups, the Crump-Bandy camp and later the Rayner party, to establish towns that might become the Lubbock County seat. It was the site of merger talks that began as early as June 1890, a date even before Whit Rayner or W. D. Crump and H. M. Bandy had established their towns, and ended on December 17 with a mutually beneficial agreement."

Early in its existence, the Nicolett was the temporary place of worship of what became the large Broadway Church of Christ in Lubbock. Many of the worshippers had been brought to Lubbock by H. M. Bandy, a pastor who came from the settlement of Thorp Spring in Hood County in Central Texas.

Besides building the Nicolett, Frank Wheelock went on to become one of the first county commissioners and the first mayor of Lubbock. He introduced to Lubbock County the first cotton gin, self-binding harvest machine, and Hereford cattle. He was the first postmaster of Lubbock and president of the Lubbock Cemetery Association. He died in 1932 of a heart attack outside his hotel.

The first burial at Lubbock City Cemetery in March 1892 was that of Henry Jenkins, a 32-year-old cowboy on the Bandy Ranch who died at the Nicolett Hotel while obtaining medical attention from a physician in Crosby County.