Cottage Hotel

The hotel opened in a town only a few years old. Marion Armstrong had built a half-dugout stage stand near Red Deer Creek in 1879 on the mail route from Mobeetie and Fort Elliott to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and B. H. Eldridge platted Miami in 1887 on the Southern Kansas line, supplied by daily stages from Mobeetie while the track was laid. By 1888 Miami had 250 people, three hotels, three grocery stores, two saloons, a cafe, two livery stables and a tin shop. The town had about 700 people by 1915.

What the plaque says

The prominent Lard family helped Lizzie Lard build the Cottage Hotel to support her two daughters after she was widowed 1893; it was completed in 1895. As Miami became the county seat and a regional trade center, the hotel prospered. Its parlor was popular as a meeting site for local businessmen and a social gathering place for young people. Dr. Pryor Lee Shelton bought the property in 1906, renaming it the Commercial Hotel. In 1914, Tom Graham, manager of the competing Fitch Hotel, bought the Commercial Hotel and called it the Survant for his wife, Eva Survant. They operated the establishment for fifty years, holding banquets, reunions and other social events in the dining room until 1964. From 1973 to 1993 the building served as a residence, but in the early 1990s it was restored to its original function as an inn. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Roberts County Museum — steps away
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Old Mobeetie Jail Museum — 17 mi
  The 1886 stone jail of the Panhandle's first county seat, the buffalo hunters' Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek that ran the courts for fifteen counties before losing its fort, railroad hopes and county seat.
• The Citadelle Art Museum — 21 mi
  A 1910 Baptist church saved from demolition in 1977, made into a family home filled with art, and given to Canadian in 2009 as one of the Panhandle's few art museums.
• River Valley Pioneer Museum — 21 mi
  The Hemphill County museum in Canadian, a Santa Fe division town of 1887 on the river breaks that held one of the first commercial rodeos in Texas and voted itself dry in 1903.

More markers nearby

• Miami Railroad Depot — steps away
• County Named for Prominent Confederate Colonel O. M. Roberts — 0.2 mi
• Roberts County — 4.6 mi
• Fossil Beds — 5.7 mi