Isham Hotel

“It was built around 1870 by Henry S. Isham who resided there until his death. When the train came through it stopped at the platform in back of the hotel, giving passengers the choice of either eating dinner, then continuing on their way, or staying overnight for a little dancing on the wonderful spring dance floor which was made of boards put in on edge. When silent movies arrived, they were shown in this hall. Zoa Mitchell played the piano to accompany them. The Isham House also had a livery stable in back. On January 23, 1923 this hotel burned.”

— Fairfield Reminiscences, p. 152

The hotel’s guest register — spanning four volumes and over 18,000 entries from 1881 to 1915 — has been transcribed by the Fairfield Historical Society (with the help of Claude AI) and is fully searchable using the tabs above.

The Most Frequent Visitors

The single most frequent guest in the entire register was Owen McGinn of Fairfield, who appears 104 times between 1883 and 1895. A newspaper account from 1895 identifies Owen as a judge in Fairfield — a detail that lends weight to his prominent and persistent presence in the register. He was usually accompanied by his brother, Peter, who served as a constable, and together they formed the core of a tight-knit Fairfield contingent that included Charles King (32 visits, 1882–1895), R. Sturtevant, F. F. Minor, Wayne D. Wright, and Silas H. Soule. These men appear together repeatedly on the same dates, suggesting a regular pattern of local commerce, farm business, or lodge meetings that brought them to the hotel. Mondays were a recurring day for these regular guests.

From the St. Albans area, George C. Storey (76 visits, 1881–1894) was among the most dedicated early regulars, as was A. A. Rushford (33 visits). From Sheldon, the Draper family was among the most loyal patrons of the hotel. The name Draper — appearing under various first names and initials including John, J. H., J. F., and J. T., all from Sheldon — accounts for well over a hundred visits between 1881 and 1892, making the Drapers collectively one of the most consistent presences in the early register. Whether these represent one well-travelled individual signing his name in different ways, or several members of the same Sheldon family, the Drapers were clearly fixtures of the hotel throughout the 1880s. G. H. Northrop and W. M. Warlow of Sheldon were also regular visitors.

From Enosburg, George W. Young (34 visits) and John Bolac (34 visits) were the most consistent visitors, joined by H. C. Sheldon, H. L. Hart, A. E. Mitigny, and S. J. Lawrence. The Fletcher area was represented above all by J. H. Patch (61 visits, 1886–1895) and John Sherman (17 visits). From Morrisville, L. W. Tinker was especially active in the early years (57 visits, 1881–1886), and D. W. Rodgers and W. E. Tyrrill were also frequent callers. Hyde Park’s H. C. Noyes visited 33 times, while Bakersfield sent A. L. Hall (30 visits), F. S. Tupper, and Guy H. Start.

The Burlington Travellers

Burlington guests made up the largest single group of repeat visitors from outside Franklin County. In the 1880s the dominant Burlington names were C. E. Townsend (running total of 44 visits spanning both decades), A. E. Hall, O. C. Taylor, and George W. Atkins. By the 1890s, George E. Melvin (25 visits), C. A. Weston, and P. H. Cassidy rose to prominence. After a relatively quiet period in the early 1900s, the Burlington contingent surged dramatically in the 1910s, when the register records over 1,200 Burlington visits in just five years — driven by a core group that included B. A. Stone (85 total visits, the most of any Burlington guest), A. McKenzie (50 visits), F. E. Gaines (41 visits), J. J. Barton (40 visits), J. A. Waterman, S. L. Reynolds, and J. R. Reed. These guests frequently appear together on the same dates, suggesting they travelled as a group — quite possibly connected to the railroad, as several Burlington guests are listed with railroad organizations.

Groups Staying on the Same Nights

One of the most striking patterns in the register is the appearance of large groups from a single town on the same night. The single largest such event was November 30, 1893, when 30 guests from Fairfield signed in on the same page — including McGinn, Soule, Sturtevant, Rooney, Tague, and many others. Similarly large gatherings from Fairfield occurred on November 29, 1894 (24 guests) and October 19, 1894 (17 guests). These November gatherings may reflect annual agricultural or fraternal events in the community.

On May 1, 1894, a remarkable group of 26 guests arrived from St. Albans — many with recognizably Irish surnames such as Clancey, Connors, Duffy, Kernan, McGrath, and Murphy — suggesting a community gathering, perhaps connected to a Catholic parish event or an Irish fraternal organization. A similar large St. Albans group (23 guests) appeared on February 16, 1893, and 14 guests from St. Albans checked in together on June 9, 1884.

The Burlington groups became particularly notable in the 1910s. On January 16, 1911, 20 Burlington guests arrived together, including Stone, Gaines, Barton, McKenzie, and Waterman — names that recur in nearly every large Burlington group of that era. A group of 13 Burlington guests returned on February 15, 1911, and further large visits followed in 1912 and 1915. On January 28, 1915, guests arrived simultaneously from both Burlington (12) and Fairfield (21), making it one of the busiest single days in the register.

How the Guest Profile Changed Over Time

The register divides fairly clearly into two eras. In the 1880s and early 1890s, the hotel was dominated by local Franklin County faces: the Drapers from Sheldon, Tinker from Morrisville, Storey from St. Albans, Patch from Fletcher, and the McGinn-King-Soule circle from Fairfield itself. These were working men — farmers, tradesmen, and local merchants — making regular short trips for business or commerce.

By the mid-1890s and into the 1900s, the character began to shift. The earlier local regulars largely disappear from the register, replaced by a new wave of commercial travellers, railroad men, and visiting professionals. The St. Johnsbury contingent becomes more prominent — led by J. E. Cook (102 visits, 1893–1915) and R. N. Baldwin (96 visits, 1909–1916) — suggesting growing commercial ties along the St. Johnsbury & Lake Champlain Railroad line. The number of guests recorded with organizational affiliations also increases, reflecting the arrival of travelling theatre troupes, medicine shows, and variety companies.

By the 1910s the Burlington contingent had become the dominant force in the register, arriving in large coordinated groups with increasing regularity right up to the hotel’s final recorded entries in 1915–1916.

The Age of the Horse

When the first guests signed their names in the Isham Hotel register on August 23, 1881, every one of them arrived the same way their grandparents would have: by horse. The notes column of the register reads like a stable ledger — “1 horse,” “2 horses,” “Room D; 1 horse” — entries that appear on nearly every page from the first volume onward. The livery stable behind the hotel was not an afterthought; it was an essential part of the business, and for the first three decades of the register, the number of horses a guest brought was recorded as routinely as his room number.

The railroad changed that rhythm, but only partially. When the train line came through Fairfield, the platform behind the hotel became a stop, and a new kind of traveller arrived: the commercial salesman, the theatre troupe, the medicine show company. These guests came without horses. They came in groups, stayed a night or two, and moved on. The register reflects this clearly — guests affiliated with the Burlington and Lamoille Railroad (36 entries) and the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad (19 entries) appear throughout the 1880s and into the early 1890s, and many of the large group arrivals from Burlington, St. Johnsbury, and beyond were made possible by the rail connection. Yet even as the train brought a wider world to Fairfield’s doorstep, the local farmer still arrived with his horse, and the last horse recorded in the register did not disappear until March 30, 1914 — thirty-three years after the first.

The First Automobile

On a summer morning — August 17, 1909 — a man named Horace Cross of Highgate, Vermont pulled up to the Isham Hotel in something the register had never seen before. Beside his name, the clerk wrote a single word: Auto.

It was, as far as the register records, the first automobile ever to arrive at the Isham House. Horace Cross could hardly have known it, but that quiet notation marked the beginning of the end of one era and the opening of another. The horse and the train had shaped the hotel’s first twenty-eight years. The automobile would reshape its last six.

For a year or so, automobile arrivals remained a novelty — a few entries in 1909, a handful more in 1910. But by 1911, the cars were arriving in earnest, and by 1912 the clerk had begun recording licence plate numbers alongside the word “Auto” as a matter of course: Auto No. 376, Auto No. 2839, Auto No. 3656. The Isham Hotel, which had once kept careful note of how many horses a man brought, was now keeping note of his registration number instead.

Geography Transformed

The guest register tells the story of Vermont’s opening world in numbers. In the 1880s, the hotel drew from 26 states, but the reach was uneven: Massachusetts (642 visits) and Maine (456 visits) dominated the out-of-state trade, with New York a distant third. These were largely commercial travellers and salesmen moving along established railroad routes — men who came to Fairfield because the train brought them there, and left the same way.

The 1890s held a similar pattern, though Maine’s share declined and New York’s grew, reflecting shifting railroad connections. More strikingly, truly distant visitors began to appear with greater regularity: guests from Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and even Colorado and California made their way to this small Vermont hotel — most of them travelling with theatrical or medicine show companies that routed through the region by rail.

The early 1900s were a quiet interlude. The register shows only 480 visits in the entire decade, drawn from just 10 states — a contraction that likely reflects both changing railroad patterns and the awkward years before the automobile had fully established itself as a reliable means of travel.

Then came the 1910s, and the automobile changed everything. The final years of the register record over 6,400 visits from 31 states — the most geographically diverse period in the hotel’s history. New Hampshire visits more than doubled. Connecticut, which had sent only scattered visitors before, suddenly became a significant source of guests. And entirely new states appeared for the first time: Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming. These were not travellers following a rail line. They were people who had pointed an automobile north into Vermont and gone where the road took them — stopping wherever a hotel sign caught their eye.

The licence plates recorded in the register tell the same story in miniature. Early automobile guests in 1909 and 1910 were almost entirely Vermont and Massachusetts plates. By 1912 and 1913, numbers from New York, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and beyond appear regularly. The automobile had turned the Isham Hotel from a destination on a rail line into a stop on an open road — and the road, it turned out, led from a great deal further away than the train ever had.

Artwork by the Hotel Staff

Tucked among the earliest pages of the register are small pencil and ink sketches drawn by someone at the hotel — a reminder that the person keeping the ledger was not merely a clerk but a human being with an idle hand and an eye for the world outside the window. Three pages from the first two volumes preserve these drawings: a sketch on page 4 of Volume 1, another on page 7 of Volume 1, and a third on page 3 of Volume 2. They are small, unassuming things — but they are the only personal mark anyone left in four volumes of otherwise strictly business.

The National Advertising Hotel Register

The pre-printed register books used by the Isham Hotel were not plain ledgers. They came from the National Advertising Hotel Register, a company that supplied guest books to hotels across the country and paid for them by selling advertising space on the pages — a clever arrangement that put commercial messages directly in front of a travelling public. The advertisements range from patent medicines and tobacco to clothing and business services, and they offer a vivid window into the commercial world of the 1880s and 1890s. Representative pages can be seen in Volume 1, page 136, Volume 1, page 137, Volume 2, page 122, Volume 2, page 129, and Volume 2, page 271.

The American Hotel Guide

A later volume of the register used a book supplied by the American Hotel Guide, a rival concern with its own roster of advertisers. The ads here have a slightly different character — more national in scope, more polished in design — and they reflect the changing commercial landscape of the early twentieth century. Two pages from this volume survive in good condition: Volume 3, page 13 and Volume 3, page 14.

Railroad Tickets

Tucked into the pages of Volume 1 was a railroad ticket — the kind of ephemera that accumulated in the pockets of travelling men and found its way into whatever flat surface was at hand. That it survived at all is a small miracle of neglect. The ticket can be seen on page 5 of Volume 1.

Home Remedies

Several pages of the register were used to jot down home remedy recipes — cures and treatments of the kind that circulated freely in rural Vermont before the age of the pharmacy. Whether these were copied from a neighbor, a newspaper, or a travelling salesman’s pamphlet is unknown, but they were clearly considered worth keeping. Two pages of remedies survive in Volume 3: page 109 and page 78. Also preserved is a printed advertisement for Brown’s Bronchial Troches, a popular throat lozenge of the era that straddled the line between remedy and confection.

Durham Cross-Cut Cigarettes

Among the loose items that survived with the register is a striking period advertisement for Durham Cross-Cut Cigarettes — bold, illustrated, and unmistakably of its era. In the 1880s and 1890s cigarette advertising was vivid and unapologetic, and this piece is a fine example of the graphic style that tobacco companies pioneered in the period before regulations of any kind were contemplated.

Dance at the Portland House, Sheldon

A ticket to a dance at the Portland House in Sheldon was found among the register’s pages. The Portland House was another of Franklin County’s village hotels, and the survival of this ticket in the Isham’s register is a small testament to the social world these establishments shared — the same faces, the same fiddles, the same roads between them.

Schaeffer’s Novelty Concert Company

One of the more remarkable survivals is a multi-page promotional flyer for Schaeffer’s Novelty Concert Company, a travelling entertainment troupe of the kind that passed through rural Vermont hotels in the 1880s and 1890s. The flyer is illustrated, exuberant, and wonderfully typical of the era’s promotional excess. It survives in four sections: page one, page two, page three, and page four. Schaeffer’s company appears in the guest register itself, confirming that they did indeed stay at the Isham on at least one of their Vermont circuits.

Chester A. Arthur and the Shadow of Assassination

On September 19, 1881, President James A. Garfield died from wounds inflicted by an assassin’s bullet two months earlier, and Chester Alan Arthur — born on October 5, 1829, in the small Franklin County village of Fairfield, Vermont — became the twenty-first President of the United States. The Isham Hotel had been open for barely a month when Garfield was shot. By the time Arthur took the oath of office, the register was already filling with the names of farmers, travellers, and tradesmen who passed through Fairfield without any particular awareness that their village had just produced a president.

A Curious Entry on an Advertisement Page

Among the pre-printed advertisement pages of Volume 1 is a page that appears to carry a handwritten guest entry — someone used the margin or blank space of an ad page in the same manner as the regular register pages. This entry can be seen on page 42 of Volume 1. The surrounding pages of the register date to roughly six months after Garfield’s assassination in the autumn of 1881, placing them squarely in the first months of the Arthur presidency. The register pages were not always completed in strict date order — entries were sometimes made on whatever page was at hand — so the precise date of this entry cannot be fixed with certainty. Chester Arthur was known to make private journeys back to Vermont during his presidency, and whether this solitary entry on an advertisement page could be the handwriting of a sitting United States president is something we can only wonder at.

The Guiteau Entry

On page 112 of Volume 1 there appears an entry for Charles Guiteau — the man who shot President Garfield. Near the top of the page someone appears to have written his middle name, Julius, and further down is an entry for Charles Guiteau dated July 2, 1882. This date makes the entry impossible as a genuine guest record: Charles Julius Guiteau was hanged in Washington, D.C. on June 30, 1882, two days before the date written in the register.

The entries read less like a record of a guest and more like a notation of a news event — a clerk or bystander writing down the name and the date of the execution in the nearest available book, the way people of that era might clip a newspaper account or mark a date in a Bible. Guiteau’s trial had been a national sensation, his execution widely reported, and the Isham Hotel register happened to be open on the desk when the news arrived. Whatever the reason, the entry stands as one of the stranger footnotes in a book full of ordinary names.

William A. Wheeler, Former Vice President

The register also records a visit from William A. Wheeler, who had served as Vice President of the United States under Rutherford B. Hayes from 1877 to 1881 — immediately preceding Chester Arthur in that office. Wheeler was a native of Malone, New York, just across the border from Franklin County, and was well known in the region. His entry is dated September 1, 1882, and can be seen on page 148 of Volume 1. By the time of his visit, Arthur had been president for nearly a year and Wheeler had returned to private life. It’s certainly possible that Wheeler came to Fairfield to visit Chester A. Arthur, but we can only speculate.

Royal Guests at the Isham House

Among the eighteen thousand names in the Isham Hotel register, a handful stand out not for their frequency or their local colour but for their sheer improbability. None quite matches the entry from 1910 in which King George III and Queen Mary V are recorded as guests at the hotel, their home address listed as Stovepipe Castle, London.

The entry does not survive close scrutiny. King George III died on January 29, 1820 — ninety years before his supposed overnight stay in Fairfield, Vermont. Queen Mary, for her part, would not be crowned until the following year, 1911, and her king was George V, not George III.

Whether this was the work of a guest with a sense of mischief, a bored clerk on a slow afternoon, or some local wit who could not resist the open page is impossible to say. It is worth noting, however, that 1910 was a year of considerable newspaper coverage of the British royal family: King Edward VII died in May of that year, George V acceded to the throne, and the forthcoming coronation was widely anticipated and discussed in the American press throughout the months that followed. Someone in Fairfield had clearly been reading the papers, and may have found the guest register a convenient place to record their editorial opinion of the whole affair.

The entry can be seen on page 64 of Volume 4.