Day Five of the Ouachita Trial

I’m taking a Zero today and, as I often do, I’d like to delve into local history. And a peculiar history it is.

I am staying in the third Queen Wilhelmina Lodge atop Rich Mountain, Arkansas’ second highest peak. So what does Rich Mountain have to do with the late Queen of the Netherlands and what happened to the first two lodges? To answer these questions we have to talk about railroad tycoons, and in particular one Arthur Stilwell of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Gulf Railroad (KCP&G)

A 6 year old Arthur had met Commodore Vanderbilt and decided he wanted to “go west and build a railroad.” In 1892, at the age of 33, he oversaw the start of construction on the KCP&G Railroad. One of the early north-south lines. The financial Panic of 1893 forced Stilwell to go abroad for funding and he was able to secure $3 million from Dutch investors. Foreseeing the disastrous Galveston flood of 1900 “in a dream,” he established the town of Port Arthur as the terminus of his rail line. (Stilwell said he was given to “hunches” that came to him from the spirit world in dreams.)

Along the route, surveyors for the railroad were taken with the scenic beauty of Rich Mountain and proposed that the railroad build a resort on its summit. Stilwell agreed and named it the Queen Wilhelmina Inn in honor of his Dutch investors. The Inn opened in 1898, the same year the young Queen was coronated . (Only 18, Queen Wilhelmina was young and bold and eventually saw her people through two world wars. Winston Churchill once said, “ I fear no man in the world, but Queen Wilhelmina.”)

The Inn was a splendid Victorian hotel with 35 guest rooms, four water closets, third floor quarters for staff, and a dining room that could seat 300 guests. Illuminated at night by hundreds of carbide lamps, it must have been quite a sight. This heyday only lasted two years and by the turn of the century Stillwell’s railroad folded due to financial trouble. The Inn was sold and faltered for another 10 years until it was abandoned.

Unoccupied, the building fell into disrepair. For a time it was used to stable animals. Finally, in the early 1940s, after some repairs, a music school was established in what remained of the old Inn, but then World War II broke out and the project was abandoned.

After the war, in the late 1950s, the state of Arkansas took an interest in the property. It subsequently acquired the land creating a state park and started work on building a new Queen Wilhelmina Lodge on the site of the old Inn. This was completed in 1963 and was built on some of the same rock work as the original structure. With 17 guest rooms and a restaurant it was open for business. For the next decade, it enjoyed modest success as a vacation retreat. But in 1973 a kitchen fire burned it to the ground. There was no loss of life, but there was nothing left of the second hotel either.

Arkansas State Parks, however, immediately got started on plans to build a new lodge on the site. The third Queen Wilhelmina Lodge was opened in 1975, 50 years ago this year. In 2015 it was extensively, remodeled and modernized to its present upscale and (IMHO unfortunately) square line condition. With 40 rooms, restaurant, conference center, 24 hour front desk, and gift shop, the latest lodge is a worthy descendant of its Victorian grandparent.

Tomorrow I continue east on the Ouachita Trail. I picked up my resupply box at the front desk here so I have food for the next segment. I am headed to the little town of Story, AR where I will pick up my next resupply box. My right shoulder and rib are much better, although I am still aware of them. However, they’re more of a minor annoyance than a cause for concern at this time. So I am well fed, rested, and ready to hit the trail tomorrow.

Until tomorrow, happy trails…