Anderson House Hotel — Minnesota's Oldest Inn

Pull over near the river bluffs of Wabasha and you're looking at one of the oldest hotels in Minnesota, a brick building that has been welcoming travelers since eighteen fifty-six, long before Minnesota was much more than timber camps and river docks.

The building began as the Hurd House, erected by B. F. Hurd in eighteen fifty-six. It stood at the commercial heart of Wabasha, a Mississippi River port where steamboats from Saint Louis and Saint Paul stopped to load lumber and supplies. Hurd's inn catered to river captains, timber brokers, and land speculators riding the great westward boom.

In eighteen eighty-seven the hotel gained a third story and a west wing, and in nineteen oh nine the Anderson family purchased the property, gave it their name, and set a century of continuity in motion. The hotel stood on the same Main Street block that had watched river commerce peak and slowly yield to the railroads. When the paddlewheel era faded, Wabasha shrank, but the Anderson House held on, an anchor when other river-town hotels closed their doors and converted to warehouses or fell to demolition.

What made the Anderson House memorable beyond its age was its personality. For most of the twentieth century, the hotel kept a small colony of cats that guests could borrow for the night, a tradition that earned national press and drew travelers specifically for the feline company. The cats have since retired from that role, but the legend survives in the local telling.

The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight under its original name, the Hurd House, recognized for its significance to the commercial history of the Upper Mississippi. Today, after a period of closure and new ownership, it operates again as a boutique hotel, the same address, the same staircase, and the same view of the river that B. F. Hurd watched from his front porch more than a hundred and sixty years ago.