Boone Tavern

Berea College was founded in eighteen fifty-five with a radical promise: to educate Black and white students together, and to do so tuition-free by having students build and operate the college themselves. By the early nineteen hundreds the college's reputation had drawn so many visitors that the president's wife, Nellie Frost, had hosted a steady stream of guests in her own home.

That was enough. In nineteen oh nine, Berea opened Boone Tavern, a Colonial Revival hotel whose bricks were made in the student brickyard and whose construction was carried out by the college's woodworking department. Students have staffed the Tavern ever since. Named for Appalachian hero Daniel Boone, it has welcomed many notable guests over the years. The tradition of student labor that built it has never stopped.