Terre Haute House Informations

The Terre Haute House was a historic former hotel located in downtown Terre Haute, Indiana, USA, that was demolished despite numerous efforts to preserve it. The hotel was replaced by a Hilton Garden Inn, which opened in 2007.

Since being closed in 1970, the Terre Haute House was considered by some as a faded reminder of Terre Haute's somewhat sordid past as a midwestern “Sin City” and, in the years since its closure, it came to be viewed by some in the city as an impediment to downtown revitalization. It was not always looked upon with such scorn — it was once the social center of the city, the site of numerous formal dances, conventions, parties and other events.

The Renaissance Revival-style 10-story building, located on the northeast corner of Seventh Street and Wabash Avenue (U.S. Highway 40), was the pinnacle of high-class accommodations in its heyday, from the 1920s to the 1950s, a time when Terre Haute's well-known illegal gambling operations and other businesses of ill repute brought the highest of the high rollers to town.

The first Terre Haute House was built by prominent early Terre Hautean Chauncey Rose, who called it “The Prairie House” because it was located “in the prairie” several blocks east of the village. Rose operated this original hotel from 1838 to 1841. When federal funding for continued construction of the National Road dried up in 1840 and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who supervised construction of the highway, departed the community, the hotel was closed. In the meantime, historical information seems to indicate that the hotel was turned into a boarding house.

With the anticipated opening of the Wabash and Erie Canal at Terre Haute in 1849, Rose reopened the hotel that year and, in 1855, renamed it “The Terre Haute House.” He also added a fourth floor of guest rooms at that time.

Rose, who by 1866 was tired of the hotel business, considered donating the property for educational purposes. This didn't sit well with some members of the local business community, so they formed the Terre Haute Hotel Co. and purchased the Terre Haute House from Rose.

Two more ownership changes transpired in the 1870s. In late 1888, Charles Baur, brother of Jacob Baur, founder of Liquid Carbonics Manufacturing Company which managed the hotel after the second Terre Haute Hotel Company acquired it from the Estate of William Tuell in March 1888, leased the hotel.

Eventually, Crawford Fairbanks purchased the hotel and property, and promised to demolish the existing structure and build a new hotel — on a much grander scale — on the site. It would be left to his heirs, however, to see this promise through to its completion following Fairbanks' death in 1924. Although the decision was made to go ahead with the project in 1925, work would not begin until early 1927.

Following the demolition of the old hotel, work began on the new Terre Haute House in the spring of 1927. It opened on July 2, 1928 to great fanfare and high hopes. Fred and Harry Van Orman, Inc., a Chicago-based hotel management company owned at the time by E.L. Wenzel, took over the new hotel's operations and Wenzel himself became the new Terre Haute House's manager.

During the old hotel's long existence and the new hotel's early years, the country's rich, famous and infamous were frequent guests. Rumored to be among the infamous to take advantage of the city's finest in hotels was a Chicago resident by the name of Al Capone. With a thriving red light district during those years (though modest compared to the activity which existed in the first two decades of the 20th century), Terre Haute had gambling and prostitution operations that were attractive to visitors of Capone's “caliber.” A biography of Benjamin “Scatman” Crothers seems to be the source of the story that Capone stayed in Terre Haute, but this can neither be confirmed nor denied.

It has also been said that the infamous bank robber John Dillinger stayed at the Terre Haute House, although there are some who dispute this. Dillinger supposedly had a deal with local police so they would leave him alone, but this, too, cannot be confirmed.

The vice that for so many years had run rampant in Terre Haute was on the way out by the time Terre Haute businessman and Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Tony Hulman purchased the hotel along with the Terre Haute House Garage and Terre Haute Opera House in 1959. Hulman, whose fortune was made in his family's distillery, wholesale grocery and baking powder businesses, radio and TV stations, utility companies, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, wanted to breathe new life into the old hotel. He'd proven time and again that with careful investment, good stewardship, and solid advertising, he could turn a profit from virtually any entity he touched.

But not even the man with the seemingly golden touch could stave off the inevitable for long. Whether Hulman or anyone else knew it or not, the grand old hotel's glory days as the centerpiece of downtown were coming to an end by the early 1960s.

When construction started on Interstate 70 along Terre Haute's south side, more and more stores and other businesses found that part of town to be far more accessible and inviting than downtown. More modern hotels and motels sprang up in that area along U.S. 41, including a large Holiday Inn that opened in 1962. With all of this competition, Terre Haute's downtown area, like so many others across the country, spiraled into a rapid decline.

The Terre Haute House was not spared the indignities of this decline. The old hotel lost much of its business to the newer hotels and motels, and when the traveling public stopped coming with their former regularity, the hotel became unprofitable. “Unprofitable” was not a word Tony Hulman liked to hear, but, according to the late Richard Van Allen, who managed the hotel at the time, Hulman did try to keep the hotel open despite the fact that he lost a great deal of money in doing so. Van Allen told the “Tribune-Star” in 1997 that, toward the end, Hulman sold food at cost and allowed local civic groups to meet in the hotel for free, just to keep people coming in.

But it was all for naught.

On June 18, 1970, Van Allen gathered the hotel staff in the Prairie Room and informed them that the Terre Haute House would close within two weeks. Exactly 42 years and two days after it opened, the Terre Haute House closed to guests on July 4, 1970.

Even though the hotel closed, several businesses remained in the building following its closure, evidently in hopes that the hotel would eventually reopen. When that didn't happen, the tenants simply went out of business or moved elsewhere. The last holdout, World Wide Travel Service, moved out of the hotel to a location on Ohio Street (one block south of the hotel) in the fall of 1980.

In the 35 years between the Terre Haute House's closing and the start of demolition, numerous developers — along with at least two Terre Haute mayors — advanced plans to either renovate and reopen the hotel or demolish it and redevelop the land. Much to the chagrin of local residents, nothing ever got off the ground, and some residents and, most notably, a number of city officials eventually came to see the dilapidated hotel as the ultimate symbol of downtown Terre Haute's stagnation.

In March 1984, then-Terre Haute mayor P. Pete Chalos threatened to condemn the hotel property in an attempt to force the Hulman family into selling it. This didn't work, but it did seem to spur interest among developers, who began working in earnest to put plans together to restore and reopen the old hotel.

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