CascAda History #16 - The Ada Hotel & Saloon Traditional Cache

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Hidden : 10/31/2013
Difficulty:
1.5 out of 5
Terrain:
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Size: Size: small (small)

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CascAda History #16 - The Ada Hotel & Saloon
The Cascade & Ada Township History Series


In old photographs of Ada, the big white building on the corner of Main and Thornapple rises high above the street scene. This was the Ada Hotel, and just as it dominates old photos, it dominated village life for a few decades.

Owned from about 1903 to 1934 by Theodore "Pete" Lampert, the hotel was the only saloon in Ada before Prohibition. It was, as someone remembered, a wild place - where women were allowed only in "the back room."

Before 1920, the saloon was patronized by "river rats," the men who floated logs from lumbering outfits near Lowell down the Grand River to sawmills. They were transient men, men who camped out right on the logs at night, walking with their spiked boots back and forth across the river on the backs of fallen Michigan trees. It was a dance down the river, a lonely dance that took several days, even without logjams. But there was always the promise of money and a town, and if payday came just about the time they hit Ada, the river rats hit Ada with money to lay down on the hotel's sixty-foot long bar.

In the photo at the top of the page, notice the sign for "Silver Foam" to the left of the side entrance. This was a famous beer from the Grand Rapids Brewing Company.

Frank Averill said of the River Rats, "Those river rats would get up on that bar and dance and boy, you could see where the hobnails went down in there. They had kerosene lamps with the reflectors in back of them. Pretty soon the bottles were coming and they knocked the lamps all out and down. Just like a Western movie and fight like the devil, them guys. They were all men and all strong and working hard."

Jim Furner observed of Ada at the time, "I have seen eight or nine drunken fights between the saloon at the hotel and the railroad tracks ... Ada was a wild town in those days."

During the peak of the Old Settlers' Picnic, an annual event in Ada, Pete Lampert cashed in with beer sales to thousands of picnickers. With an eight-foot barrier, said to be made of tires, erected around the hotel's entire acre of land, Lampert sold beer from the saloon to "anybody who put two bits on the window and grabbed three bottles. They weren't very fussy about it."

During the 1920s, Pete Lampert hired a man named Aldrich to manage the hotel. Aldrich improved the restaurant and named it "The Rainbow Inn." The big building on Ada's main corner became an elegant dinner destination. On Saturday nights, cars would line Main Street as couples went to the hotel's weekly dances. The band was a banjo, slide trombone, and piano. Parents brought their children, who slept among the coats in empty hotel rooms.

When the mood of the country turned toward temperance and government inflicted a policy of prohibition, Aldrich ran a card room in the back of the saloon. Men played for chips instead of money, and the chips were taken in trade for meals.

In 1935, Pete Lampert sold the Ada Hotel and Saloon to Kurt Lock. Then, on November 2, 1942, a furnace exploded, and the Ada Hotel burned. It marked a turning point in the social life of the village, returning Ada to the sleepy character it possessed in its more rural days. And it was the second time fire had changed the community.

Information provided by “A Snug Little Place - Memories of Ada, Michigan, 1821 - 1930” by Jane Siegel, published in 1993 by the Ada Historical Society

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Gung qbjarq ybt ybbxf engure fhfcvpvbhf!

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)


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