Harker Tourist Home. Click to enlarge.
In the mid-1960’s, my family departed from the usual vacation to Florida, and instead, traveled to Myrtle Beach, SC. We entered the city limits after dark, and in a driving storm. Little did we know that all motels would be displaying “no vacancy” signs due to a live appearance by TV’s “Daniel Boone” portrayer, Fess Parker. So, we drove into the night, through the rain, and underneath the Spanish moss, down the coast to Georgetown. There, the only room available was at a tourist home. We were so glad to find lodging, and enjoyed our stay, with singing tree frogs serving as our alarm clock the next morning.
Tourist homes were once common sights of roadside America. In Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain’s tourist trade blossomed during the 1930’s. People traveled by car to see the new Rock City Gardens and Ruby Falls attractions. A few enterprising residents of St. Elmo must have seen the traffic headed up the mountain, and had visions of guests paying to spend the night in their homes. Thus, the St. Elmo tourist home businesses began.
One of the tourist homes was on a section of St. Elmo Avenue that may be unfamiliar to Chattanooga residents today. Before the railroad relocation and new Chattanooga Creek projects of the 1960’s, St. Elmo Avenue intersected at an angle with Broad Street behind Southern Saddlery. Today, it dead-ends there. Along this portion of the route to St. Elmo, there were several homes that were within easy walking distance of nearby factories. Mrs. Blanche G. Wolfe lived at 3624 St. Elmo Avenue, with Lookout Mountain towering over her. She left her position as a tailoress with the Rae Shoppe downtown, and opened the Mountain View Tourist Home as a home-based business. Mrs. Wolfe operated her business there until the 1950’s, when the property was cleared for development.
Farther south on St. Elmo Avenue, near its intersection with Ochs Highway, a brother and sister opened tourist homes within a block of each other. The Orrell Tourist Home greeted guests at 4024 St. Elmo Avenue, and Harker’s Tourist Home was a competitor at 4106 St. Elmo Avenue. Robert T. and Mamie Orrell and Pierre and Minnie Harker were the two couples who hosted tourists in their homes. Mr. Orrell and Mrs. Harker were children of a pioneer family of St. Elmo. In addition to helping with their tourist homes, Mr. Orrell ran a printing shop at the rear of his home while Mr. Pierre was a shipping clerk with Chattanooga Medicine Company.
The Orrell and Harker homes were representative of those built in St. Elmo around 1900. They were two-story wood-frame, with covered porches. Large stairwells led to upstairs bedrooms. A small gable called a “dormer,” is shown in the picture of Harker’s Tourist Home that accompanies this article.
The two-story houses were built at a time when large families were common. As children left home to seek their fortunes, the parents frequently rented the extra rooms as apartments, or in this case, as tourist quarters. In order to ensure that customers knew that those rooms were now available, Orrell’s Tourist Home had a small neon sign on a post near the sidewalk.
Shaded from the late afternoon summer sun by Lookout Mountain, the homes were a cool spot for travelers to rest. Eventually, large motel chains outpaced tourist homes like these, and both were out of business by the early 1980’s. However, tourist homes are an important part of the history of tourism, and have been brought back to a degree in today’s bed-and-breakfast inns.
If you have memories of the tourist homes or innkeepers mentioned in this article, or of tourist homes in general, please send me an e-mail at jolleyh@signaldata.net.