TRR photo by Tom Kane Proprietor Joe Naughton stands before his hotel on Callicoon’s Main Street. (Click for larger image)

Western Hotel is 150 years old

By TOM KANE

CALLICOON — The Western Hotel has gone through several lives, several owners and even several floods but has never changed its name.

For 150 years, the grand old hotel has stood across from the railroad tracks that dissect Callicoon’s Main Street. In all those years it has never closed for business and continues to do business through floods, storms and even the Prohibition. Joe Naughton, the present owner, has suspicions about what happened during Prohibition but he’s not revealing any details.

Naughton and his wife, Leona, bought the building in 1969, the year of the historic Woodstock Music Festival. The Naughtons have restored a lot of the old finery to the building, maintaining its early American railroad-era mixture of Greek Revival and Victorian architecture.

The railroad, which was then called the New York and Lake Erie, came to Callicoon in 1851. The town wasn’t even a backwater but soon turned into a boomtown.

It set the example of other boomtowns that came with the railroads across the Great Plains states a number of years later in the Old West, Naughton said. “It really exploded when the railroad came.”

It seems the steam engines had to take on water in order to make it up the hills into Port Jervis, Naughton said. “So, when the train stopped here for a time, passengers started to walk around and they liked what they saw, so they started coming back. There’s only one building around here that’s older and that’s the current Narrowsburg Inn,” Naughton said.

Passengers would have to get off the train and stay in the hotel to rest along their way to further locations. “Travel mustn’t have been easy back then so passengers needed a rest,” he said.

One of the proprietors who owned and operated the hotel for many years was Mary Darling, affectionately called “Aunt Mary” by the local denizens.

Aunt Mary was know to sit out on the front porch on her rocking chair and command a view of everything happening in the town.

“Apparently she was something of a character because there are still a lot of stories about her,” Naughton said.

“The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance productions and the Delaware Valley Opera held many of their first productions here about 25 years back,” Naughton said.

Besides the  rooms for rent, fine dining room, a liquor store and a bar, the upstairs of the Western sports a burlesque-style music hall called Harmonie Hall.

Under careful care of the Naughtens, the Western Hotel’s remains rich in history and is still a gem.