The Eagle Hotel: Stagecoach Stop on the Northwestern Frontier

The building that sits on High Street in Waterford, Pennsylvania, the same road that is now US Route Nineteen, was built in eighteen twenty-six by a man named Thomas King. They stacked it two and a half stories high in the Georgian style, and opened the doors as a stagecoach inn at a moment when northwestern Pennsylvania was still very much a frontier.

Waterford in the eighteen twenties occupied a strategic position. Fort Le Boeuf had stood nearby since the French and Indian War, when the French used it to anchor their chain of forts from Lake Erie south into the Ohio country. George Washington had come through Waterford as a young Virginia militia officer in seventeen fifty-three, delivering an ultimatum to the French commandant. The fort changed hands, burned, was rebuilt, and eventually faded as the frontier moved west. But the town that grew around it remained a waypoint on the route connecting Erie on the lake to Pittsburgh to the south.

The Eagle Hotel was purpose-built as an inn from the start, not an innkeeper's home that expanded but a dedicated establishment. It was advertised in its day as one of the finest hotels in the country, which speaks more to the scarcity of competition in the region than to any metropolitan luxury. But it was substantial enough to serve as a genuine stopping point for travelers, merchants, and officials moving goods and people between the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley.

The building was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey in nineteen thirty-three and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-seven. Today the Fort Le Boeuf Historical Society operates the upper floors as a museum. The first floor houses a restaurant, continuing the building's two-century tradition of feeding travelers on US Route Nineteen.