Read House (Additional Documentation)

About this property

The Read House Hotel is a historic hotel in Chattanooga, Tennessee, founded in 1872. The 141-room main building dates to 1926, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for Hamilton County. The 100-room rear wing was added in 1962, originally as a motel. The first hotel on the site, the Crutchfield House, opened in 1847. It was constructed by future Chattanooga Mayor Thomas Crutchfield Sr., directly across from the Union Depot. The railways were the main source of business and imports to the town and this constant flow of business allowed the Crutchfield House to prosper. Thomas Crutchfield, Sr. died in 1850, and his son, Thomas Crutchfield, Jr., also a future mayor of Chattanooga, took over the hotel. Jefferson Davis stayed at the Crutchfield House on January 21, 1861, while traveling home to Mississippi after resigning from the United States Senate. Davis delivered a speech in favor of secession in the hotel's dining room, causing future congressman William Crutchfield (Thomas Crutchfield, Jr.'s brother) to deliver a fiery speech of his own, denouncing Davis as a "renegade and a traitor," and saying that Tennessee would not be "hood winked, bamboozled and dragged into your Southern, codfish, aristocratic, tory blooded, South Carolina mobocracy." A duel nearly resulted between the men and the argument at the hotel was widely reported as tensions grew on the eve of the Civil War. In 1862, the hotel served as the headquarters for the local Confederate garrison. That winter, Confederate General Samuel Jones, commander of the Department of East Tennessee, converted the hotel to a military hospital. Chattanooga was occupied by the Union on September 9, 1863, and the 92nd Illinois Infantry Regiment placed its regimental colors atop the hotel to signal their control of the town. The hotel later served as a hospital for Union soldiers wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga. The Crutchfield House survived the war, but caught fire and burned down in 1867. After the fire, the Crutchfield family chose not to rebuild. Civil War surgeon John T. Read had previously owned a hotel with his wife Caroline in their hometown of McMinnville, Tennessee, which had similarly burned down. They moved to Chattanooga in 1871 and purchased a three-story office building that had been built on the site of the Crutchfield House. Read converted that structure to a 45-room hotel, the Read House Hotel, which opened on New Year's Day 1872. In 1879, he sold the hotel to his 19-year-old son, Samuel R. Read, who expanded the hotel to 202 rooms by 1902. In 1925, the majority of the original structure was torn down. It was replaced with the current 10-story Read House Hotel, opened on July 5, 1926. The new hotel was designed by the Chicago firm Holabird & Roche, in the Georgian style and constructed by the George A. Fuller Construction Company of Washington, D.C., at a cost of $2.7 million. The new wing had 280 rooms, while the remaining portion of the old structure had an additional 120 rooms, which were kept in operation until the new wing was completed, so the hotel did not need to fully close during construction. Samuel R. Read died in 1942, and in 1943 the hotel was sold to Albert Noe, Jr. He died four years later, and his son Albert Noe III assumed control of the hotel. In 1962, Noe built a six-story motel wing with an underground garage and an outdoor pool in the rear of the hotel, to appeal to travelers on the newly constructed Interstate Highway System. It is today known as the "Manor" wing. Provident Life and Accident Insurance Company bought the hotel from Noe in 1968 and retained the National Hotel Company to manage it.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Hamilton County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Hamilton County.

More historic places in Tennessee

Browse all historic places in Tennessee.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Tennessee history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.