Hilton Hotel, Early

Marlin helped pay for its Hilton. Accounts of the building, including Wikipedia's, say construction began in 1929 on a nine-story, 110-room hotel that opened on May 27, 1930, at a cost of $375,000, with $50,000 raised by Marlin citizens and businesses. Texas Monthly adds that a tunnel joined it to a bathhouse opposite. The Handbook of Texas says Hilton opened a new Texas hotel every year from 1925 to 1930 and was close to bankruptcy by 1931. The Marlin hotel was later sold to the Moody family and renamed the Falls.

What the plaque says

Hilton Hotel, Early After Conrad Hilton had initiated career that later made him foremost innkeeper in the world, at first venture in boom town of Cisco brought a dream of Texas "wearing a chain of Hilton Hotels." Reality outran dreams. This was his eighth hotel. Marker dedicated to Conrad N. Hilton (born in 1887), one of the great men of America's southwestern frontier. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Armstrong Browning Library — 21 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 22 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 22 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 22 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.

More markers nearby

• Hot Mineral Water — steps away
• Marlin — steps away
• Captain Henry Gray Carter — 0.3 mi
• Rev. Nelson T. Denson and Marlin Missionary Baptist Church — 0.4 mi