After a restoration, the Dominion Hotel is ready for guests again

According to most sources, the first hotel chain in North America was Quality Courts, a group of seven Florida hotels that banded together in 1939. It became Quality Inns International in 1972.

And, according to this writer, 1939 marks the beginning of the end for quirky, independent, interesting hotels that said something about their location. Well, for about a half-century, in any case. Today, those of us who enjoy quirk have the boutique hotel, but that doesn’t stop one from wondering about what a hotel stay would’ve been like in the 19th-century, when inns were “nodal points of the transport system.” That is, places where coaches or streetcars stopped, or where farmers came to arrange for the sale of goods. They were also, continues Susanne Schmid in her book Inns, places for “locals, travellers, tradesmen, and politicians to socialize.” Sounds fun, no?