Delaware Hotels

Delaware once conducted much of its public life in rooms that also rented beds. Kent County's government met in a tavern for nine years. Travelers ate at tables where justices held court, while neighbors gathered to trade news, bargain, and drink.

Delaware Hotels follows more than three centuries of hospitality, from colonial taverns and stagecoach inns through railroad hotels and seaside resorts to the Hotel du Pont, roadside motels, and casino hotels. Dave Tabler traces how changes in travel, wealth, and social expectations reshaped the places where people stopped and the communities around them.

The story reaches behind the reception desk. Tavern keepers depended on reputation and neighborhood trust. Cooks, chambermaids, laundresses, and hostlers supplied the labor that made a welcome possible. Race, class, and gender shaped who could enter, who received service, and who worked out of sight. A public room still had its boundaries.

Hotels also offered a stage for ambition. Wilmington's Hotel du Pont hosted the exhibition that helped launch the Delaware Art Museum. Political gatherings and social occasions brought communities together, while private rooms offered anonymity that could shelter an affair or conceal a crime. Tabler follows both the public performance and the private lives behind the doors.

Ownership changed the relationship between host, guest, and town. The keeper who lived upstairs gradually gave way to businesses that divided ownership, management, and branding among separate organizations. Highways drew travelers away from old gathering places. Casinos sought to keep visitors inside. Digital booking and entry made a stay possible without meeting a host.

Historical photographs and illustrations accompany this account of the people who built, staffed, and frequented Delaware's hotels. Tabler connects familiar landmarks and vanished establishments to a larger American story of work, status, commerce, and belonging. Delaware Hotels asks readers to look again at the room along the road and consider what a community gains, and what it loses, when hospitality changes hands.