🏨 Deer Park Hotel

The Deer Park Hotel was a vacation resort in the Appalachian Mountains of Western Maryland, in the small town of Deer Park, Maryland. Constructed in 1873 on land owned by a former Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) employee and West Virginia Senator Henry Gassaway Davis, the hotel was heavily promoted by the B&O railroad as cool and breeze-filled during otherwise hot city summers and 8 hours by express train from Baltimore and 11 hours by express train from Cincinnati, Ohio. It became a favorite resort for wealthy and prominent citizens of the Baltimore/Washington area. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, and Grover Cleveland were among its guests; William McKinley visited the establishment before he became president. Even President Grover Cleveland spent his five-day honeymoon with his new wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland. The Deer Park Spring, which had produced pure mountain water that was sold commercially, supplied the hotel, its swimming pool, and Victorian Turkish baths. Deer Park's popularity declined after 1900, and the resort finally closed after the Depression began in 1929. The grand hotel itself was razed in 1944 due to a fire, although a few of the opulent cottages remain.