Hotel Sheldon

Hotel Sheldon

Postcard, c1890This massive hotel once occupied the southeast corner of Goundry and Main. A general description from Lumber City (1891):

Nothing is more needed for the general prosperity of a city than a first-class hotel, and in this particular the Lumber City is especially fortunate, as outside of metropolitan places it would be difficult to find a house more complete in all its appointments than the Sheldon. It is fitted in attractive and elegant style throughout and contains all the modern improvements and appurtenances of a first-class hotel. It is an imposing four-story brick, with eighty rooms.

An Internet search rears up this pithy account of one of the hotel's managers:

Hope said that he (William Truman Godard, 1870-1937) earned his living in Altoona, Penn as a Pillsbury flour representative and she wrote that he earned his living in as the manager of the Hotel Sheldon in North Tonawanda, New York where Hope was born in 1905.

She said he had very black hair and never seemed to have a well day. He went back East to his people after his wife died.

The hotel is destroyed by fire in 1940.