BENNINGTON — More than 200 people came out on Sunday to hear Avis Hayden tell the story of the Kelley Hotel and Kelley Stand Road.
Hayden is a genealogist and a descendent of the Kelley family.
“I come from the state of Wisconsin. I have Kelleys in my family,” Hayden said to the overflow crowd at the Bennington Museum. “I knew a lot of Kelleys growing up. They are all from Hancock, Wisconsin.”
So when Hayden did her family genealogy, she started from Wisconsin and worked backwards. She traced her ancestry back to Richard Kelley, a common ancestor of both her line of the family and of the Kelleys behind the road and the hotel. The family was originally from Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
Richard Kelley's son David was Hayden's ancestor. He had a daughter named Donna who is buried in Wardsboro, Vermont. She did more research and found out that David’s brothers William and Samuel also moved to Wardsboro.
“I started to research them," she said. "And that's when I learned that they are the two Kelleys who are responsible for getting the whole Kelley Stand Road going.”
In 1792, Samuel and William both bought land in Wardsboro and settled there. They became prominent citizens and William Kelley became a Selectman. Around this time, officials of the new state became interested in building a road from the Connecticut River to points west.
The first two attempts were not fully successful. Around 1815 plans for the New Stratton Turnpike were set. In fact, the names of William, Samuel, and another Kelley brother, Russell, were on a petition to the Vermont General Assembly urging it to be built.
This road, generally hewing close to the path of the Roaring Branch, was completed in 1831. It became known as the Kelley Stand Road.
"It completely opened up the Green Mountains in that area to logging, milling and other forms of commerce," she said. "And that is the road you all know today.”
Hayden and audience members discussed what the word "stand" in the name means. Some thought it meant a hotel or way station.
“I always thought some guy named Kelley had a deer stand there,” one man said, to much laughter.
The road had a toll at the Sunderland end and a set of fees. “If you were going to church, no toll," Hayden said. "If you had been in the military, no toll.”
By the time the road was completed, logging had become a busy business in the area. The Emporium Lumber Company was the largest, but there were many others. There were at one time as many as 13 sawmills along the road. A big flood in 1869 wiped out the mills and they had to be rebuilt.
FROM HOME TO HOTEL
The Kelley family built a home along the road in 1837. William Kelley Jr., grandson of Richard Kelley and the son of William Kelley Sr. who bought the land in Wardsboro, owned it with his wife, Hannah. However, he land was always owned by Russell Lawrence, even after the house evolved into a hotel.
Between 1840 and 1850, they expanded the house into an inn or hotel, adding porches to the first and second stories. Eventually, the hotel had 15 bedrooms, glass chandeliers, hand-made oak furniture, a fireplace, bar, ballroom, general store, and even a bowling alley. Rooms were appointed with lace doilies and quilts.
The 1850 census listed William and Hannah Kelley as innkeepers. The 1860 census shows four boarders. John William Kelley, their son, in the lumber business, is listed as head of household. John was married to Lucy Grout, of Stratton. He became the innkeeper after his parents died in 1861.
“But truth be known, he never really liked being the innkeeper, and he would abandon that post in 1866,” Hayden said.
Around this time, the Kelley hotel had become a destination for events, not just a place to stay if you were in the lumber business. There were New Year's Eve parties, trout dinners, and yearly commemorations of Bennington Battle Day. In a notice on July 25, 1866, Kelley announced that he would be retiring into private life and thanked his customers. He invited everyone to a big bash at the hotel to commemorate Bennington Battle Day that August 16.
Between 1866 and 1883 the hotel had various owners. One of them was Frank Lawrence, who called it the Lawrence Hotel. He continued the tradition of sleigh rides, dinners and events. He outfitted the rooms with Victorian pictures, bowls and chamber pots.
"He tried to make it a little nicer up there," Hayden aid. "That's one thing I learned about him."
Rob Lawlor, a road builder and lumberman originally from Quebec, owned the hotel from 1883 to 1917 and called it The Summit House. He threw a grand opening ball when they took over.
"He continued with social events. He was there also in the years of logging and milling. There was a lot going on," Hayden continues. "And Bob Lawlor was really the person responsible for getting a community up there."
Lawlor made the place a little more hospitable to families. Hayden displayed a photo from around 1915 showing men, women and children as some type of community meeting.
"[It was] definitely a community by this time. There were 300 residents and 25 family homes. That's in addition to all the businesses that were built there," Hayden said. "There were shops. There was transportation. There was a livery stable, a post office, a church and a blacksmith shop, and maybe other things because it was a thriving community at this point in time."
But logging in the area declined between 1910 and 1920. "And then his family left, the logging business was fading, everything up there was fading," she said. "[So] then I'm calling it Lawlor's Lodge."
Between 1917 and 1930, Lawlor was on site for most of the rest of his life keeping the building going so people could stay there for hunting and fishing.
By the 1950s, however, the old hotel was a pile of wreckage according to audience members who remember it. Today, there's no longer any sign of where it stood next to the road. Kelley Stand Road these days is mostly used to access recreational activities in the forests and ponds that surround the road.
SOME POEMS
A few years ago, someone came forward with a ledger book found in a barn in Sunderland. It dated from the J.W. Kelley years of the Kelley Stand Hotel. It contained hotel registrations, some notes on finances, and 43 hand-written poems by John William Kelley, who died in 1890. Hayden had the book bound to preserve it, and she's been working on transcribing the poems. Several of them are to his wife on the occasion of their anniversary, others are about family, prominent Vermont landmarks, tributes to community members, history, politics, and science and religion. Two are humorous.
One is titled "The Home of our Fathers": "The home of our fathers we visit again/When fond recollections so vivid and plain/Goes back to the time its measure to fill/When our fathers were boys on Wardsboro Hill."