The Weatherford Hotel and the Road Through Town

John W. Weatherford was a Texan who arrived in Flagstaff in the eighteen nineties and decided the town needed a proper hotel. He built a general store on the ground floor of a new brick building in eighteen ninety-eight, with family quarters above, and in nineteen hundred completed a three-story brick hotel addition on New Year's Day. The brick was not optional: a city ordinance passed in eighteen ninety-seven required all new commercial construction to use brick, stone, or iron after a fire had moved through the wooden downtown buildings.

The Weatherford Hotel quickly became the social center of Flagstaff. Among its guests were the artist Thomas Moran, whose paintings of the American West had made him famous; the publisher William Randolph Hearst; and the novelist Zane Grey, who reportedly wrote his novel The Call of the Canyon in the hotel's third-floor ballroom. The building contained a restaurant, a theater, a billiard hall, a radio station, and a sunroom where dances were held.

The hotel sits one block north of Route Sixty Six, which ran through downtown starting in nineteen twenty-six. The Mother Road, as John Steinbeck called it in The Grapes of Wrath, brought a new class of traveler through Flagstaff: not the railroad passenger in a first-class car but the family in a dusty Ford, driving west with everything they owned piled in the back.

Purchased in nineteen seventy-five to prevent demolition, the Weatherford was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight. The third-floor ballroom reopened in nineteen ninety-seven after renovation. It is the kind of building that has witnessed every version of Flagstaff that ever existed.