There’s something about the air on Monte Sano. For generations, people have gone to the “mountain of health” overlooking Huntsville and the Great Bend region of the Tennessee River.
In the 19th century, people sought it out as a kind of curative for diseases like tuberculosis and as an escape from the scourge of yellow fever or malaria. For a brief time beginning in the late 1880s, a hotel atop the mountain beckoned some of the wealthiest American families to that high Alabama locale. The hotel’s boosters called it a “Southern Parnassus,” a reference to the palatial domain of the Muses in Greek mythology. The Hotel Monte Sano was a symbol of the finery and excesses of the fleeting Gilded Age.
Boosters in the region had long clamored for a resort atop Monte Sano. The clean, crisp air, panoramic views and bubbling mineral springs made an enticing place for such an effort. The North Alabama Improvement Co. was born out of the growing desire among area businessmen to reap the benefits (financial and homeopathic) of the mountain. Nearly a dozen regional leaders were joined in the endeavor by New York financiers Michael and James O’Shaughnessy. The investment company purchased hundreds of acres on the mountain and made plans to connect it to Huntsville with a better system of roads and rails. In 1886, they announced plans for a 200-room hotel, built in the Queen Anne style. The initial cost of the hotel’s main building was $27,000, tantamount to nearly $1 million today.
The work began immediately. Sixteen teams of horses were required to cart lumber and construction supplies to the site. A steam-powered pump pulled water from Big Spring up the mountain to an 8,000-gallon tank for hotel guests to use.
“Everything is NEW and NICE,” read an advertisement from the hotel’s manager, S. E. Bates, on the eve of its June 1, 1887, opening day. Guests would have had no quarrel with the description. Every room was arranged to face outward, with large windows to let in the mountain air. Entertainment options included billiards, a bowling alley and among the largest ballrooms in the region. Around the property were some 20 miles of new trails for walking and horseback riding. There was a salon and barber shop. Meals at the Hotel Monte Sano were prepared by Jessup Whitehead, an author of five acclaimed cookbooks.
Weekly rates began at $12.50 for adults and $7.00 for children plus the cost of meals. By mid-summer, the hotel had seen more than 1,000 guests, among them Helen Keller and her family. Over the next few years, Birmingham industrialists Henry DeBardeleben and Truman Aldrich brought their families. The hotel hosted members of the Astor, Vanderbilt and Gould families as well. So popular was the hotel that an expansion soon followed, with a 50-room addition called “Memphis Row,” an acknowledgement of the number of residents from that Tennessee city who frequented the establishment.
Getting guests to the hotel proved to be the greatest challenge. The mid-1880s road that had made constructing the hotel possible provided a bumpy ride. Engineers labored long to craft a railroad line connecting the Huntsville Depot and the hotel with a route up the steep, rocky terrain. Some 300 people worked to build the line. Weekly expenditures soared to $10,000. The costly railway proved to be an unreliable means of getting to the hotel, however. Many of Monte Sano’s more affluent guests found their own way from the city below or relied on the hotel’s “Tally Ho” stagecoach.
Mark Twain, who coined the term Gilded Age to describe the era from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great War, characterized it as a time of “unlimited reliance upon human promises.” There were promises in abundance about the ways to conquer the trek to Hotel Monte Sano.
The high-end clientele felt keenly the global financial panic of 1893-94. In response, Monte Sano’s manager announced “reduced rates to suit the times.” As a seasonal business, the hotel’s fortunes were tied to a great many external factors, which were sometimes insurmountable. In the early spring of 1895, Huntsville newspapers carried a simple, declarative sentence: “Hotel Monte Sano will not open this season.” When the hotel opened in subsequent years, occupancy was lower.
The music then began to fade from the mountaintop resort. Its demise was slow. New promises of revival peppered the pages of Alabama newspapers for almost a decade. Supposed saviors expressed interest in buying the property. There was yet the promise of another means of transportation up the mountain, this time an electric railway. None of it happened.
In 1909, Horace Garth purchased the hotel and grounds for the sum of $20,000. In poor health, Garth used the hotel as a private summer convalescent home. He was attended to by his daughter, Lena, and a number of housekeepers. His death in 1911 brought renewed calls for reopening the hotel to the public. A Birmingham real estate firm leased the property in 1916 and began improvements. Again, however, the meddlesome mountain road proved the project’s undoing. Unable to raise $25,000 for the completion of an improved route, the project failed. Raising funds for a resort proved difficult as war roiled in Europe. An era of excess was replaced by one of uncertainty and trauma.
Though its ballroom was occasionally used thereafter for charitable events, the Hotel Monte Sano never reopened. In the early 1940s, the aged buildings were demolished for salvage. Wood from the hotel was sold at a mere $5 a load. “Come and Get It,” read one ignominious newspaper ad. And so, like the Gilded Age itself, the glamorous Hotel Monte Sano met a mournful end. Furnishings from the hotel are today scattered in museums and antique stores. All that remains of the hotel property is one of its chimneys. An adjacent historical marker includes an illustration of “the Southern Parnassus” at the height of its popularity.
Historian Scotty E. Kirkland is a freelance contributor to Business Alabama. He lives in Wetumpka.
This article appears in the August 2024 issue of Business Alabama.
