Phelps Hotel

Inside, the hotel kept its 1885 plan: office, parlor, dining room, kitchen and a bedroom downstairs and ten bedrooms above, in a two-story frame building 26 by 50 feet. Its 1970 National Register nomination noted an old bathtub with a hinged, padlocked lid that guests paid 25 cents to use, and registers full of early settlers' names. The hotel's own lore puts Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower here on August 6, 1919, the day the Army convoy camped east of town. Its Sam Bass story fails on dates: Bass robbed the train in 1877 and died in 1878.

What the plaque says

Phelps Hotel The Phelps Hotel was built in 1885 by the Edwin A. Phelps family, who were among the first settlers in the Big Springs area. Also known as the "House of Three Chimneys," the hotel was the most important nineteenth-century landmark in Deuel County. It served as a house of worship when church services were held there, and it became the center of com- munity activities and a haven for early land- seekers, travelers, and pioneers. The hotel is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Deuel County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Julesburg — 11 mi
  The town that moved four times: a trading post, a stage stop burned in 1865, the wickedest end-of-track town on the Union Pacific, and finally Denver Junction renamed.
• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 16 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.
• Lake McConaughy and Kingsley Dam — 23 mi
  Nebraska's largest reservoir, 22 miles of North Platte water and white sand beaches behind a 1941 hydraulic-fill dam, built so farms far downstream could water their crops.

More markers nearby

• Waterman Sod House — steps away
• Sam Bass and the Big Springs Robbery — steps away
• Colorado's Northeast Corner — 4.4 mi
• Big Springs — 7.4 mi