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  2. Feiszli, Barbara West Collection - A color photograph of the building best known as the Maud-Elton Hotel building c. 1990. Once owned by American Legion Post #397 the post was house with their bar and restaurant on the upper floors. Various businesses rented the basement offices. This structure once occupied the southeast corner of Liberty and Division (now Main St.). It was called The Lake House and was built by a contractor named Maurice Diehl of Sandusky in 1876. In 1903 then owner John Krapp sold the establishment to Vermilion entrepreneur and lumberman George Fischer. Mr. Fischer moved the building down the hill, added a basement floor, spruced it up a bit (as seen in several photographs taken by Vermilion photographer and newspaper publisher/editor Pearl Roscoe), and renamed the it after his children Maud and Elton. Although times were changing - Vermilion’s place as a major shipbuilding and a shipping port was fast fading - the hotel continued to do well as a stopping place for persons interested in taking a holiday along the lake shore. The depot for the Lake Shore Electric interurban railway sat just across Exchange Street to the east providing potential vacationers with both attractive and convenient accommodations not to mention easy access to all area recreational facilities. But by the late 1930’s and early 1940’s as the popularity of personal transportation increased and the role of mass transportation such as the interurban electric trains disappeared, so to did the need for the old hotel decline. By the 1950’s the upper floors of the building were no longer in use, and had fallen into a state of total disrepair. And by the 1970’s the upper floor of the building was, for all intents and purposes, eradicated. Today the old hotel - one of the oldest public buildings in the city - is barely recognizable. It is but a shadow of its former self; its glory days confined to a worn out photograph of a yesteryear none can recall, and its future - uncertain. - by Rich Tarrant.

    VA2007.1.60

    Record Type: Photo

    Maud-Elton Inn c. 1985
  3. Cargo Warehouse c. 1990
  4. Fischer Bldg construction

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