Inns & B&Bs / Detroit
Steamboat Hotel
Closed – archive entry · 1819–1848 · demolished 1848
Detroit's steamboat-era hotel at Woodbridge and Randolph (1819–1848): the base for boat passengers and the office of the stage lines.
Quick facts
- Opened
- 1819
03 / The story of this place
What was here?
Benjamin “Uncle Ben” Woodworth, a carpenter who came to Detroit with Governor William Hull in 1805 and the brother of “The Old Oaken Bucket” poet Samuel Woodworth, was already keeping a hotel at Woodbridge and Randolph by May 1812; an earlier Woodworth house hosted a ball for President James Monroe in 1817. He built a new house on the site in 1818 and opened it in March 1819 as the Steamboat Hotel, headquarters for steamboat and schooner passengers and the office of the stage lines. Its “long room” held fairs and public meetings, and for years no public dinner counted unless it was held there. Milton Barney bought it in 1844, and it burned on May 9, 1848, in the same fire that took the neighboring Wales Hotel.
- Opened in March 1819
- Hub for steamboats and stage lines
- Burned on May 9, 1848
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