In March of 1994, Dorotha and Leroy Swopes of Branson celebrated their wedding anniversary at the KATY Railroad Depot in Appleton City. Across the street from the depot was the old Durley Hotel, a three-story brick building, built in 1891, that served as Ellett Hospital from the 1930s to 1974.
“Our son saw it,” Dorotha said. “It was dilapidated, the door was falling in and there were animal tracks clear to the third floor.”
“In a weak moment, we decided to buy it.”
The Swopes admit they would be reticent to take on such a large project today, but are glad they did when they were younger.
“If we hadn’t started on it, it would have been down,” Leroy said of the building, which is now in the National Register of Historic Places.
Dorotha was working for the telephone company in Branson at the time, but decided to retire and focus on renovating the historic building. She and Leroy had help from their children and grandchildren. Leroy, who is 89, was 58 years old.
“We started in 1994 and we aren’t done yet,” he said, referring to the unfinished third floor, which they use for storage. “It’s been a challenge.”
When it opened in 1891, the Durley Hotel was described as having elegant appointments, steam heat and five display rooms for salesmen on the second floor. It was built by Harry W. Grantley, a prominent Appleton City resident who was president of the Durley Investment Company. Grantley also built the Durley Opera House in Appleton City in 1881. The roof of the opera house caved in a few years ago, Leroy said, and it had to be taken down.
The hotel lobby still has its original white marble tile floor, with a wood floor indicating where a counter stood. Thick slabs of marble were used as thresholds, indicating the original doors leading off the lobby.
Along with the drummers, who arrived by train and used the Durley Hotel as a base, William Howard Taft stayed overnight in 1917 after speaking at a political rally in Butler. A Republican, Taft was the 27th president of the United States, serving one term, 1909 to 1913. He also was Chief Justice of the United States —the chief judge of the Supreme Court —from 1921 until just before his death at age 72 in 1930. A professor at Yale University Law School, Taft is the only person in history to lead both the executive and judicial branches of the United States.
After his stay at the Durley Hotel, Taft left Appleton City the next morning on the 5 a.m. Flyer for Oklahoma to continue his tour.
Dr. William Ellett acquired the building in the early 1930s for a hospital to accommodate patients who lived a long way out of town. Ellett had his name engraved in the stone over the doorway, which led to confusion during the Swopes’ renovation.
“When we were working on it, people would come in looking for the hospital,” Leroy said.
The first thing the couple did was install a wood stove to cook on in the large dining room, Dorotha said. They camped out in that room until they created a bedroom.
“We burned a lot of stuff in that wood stove,” she said. “I’m good at tearing out. Somebody else has to put it back.”
They now have a kitchen, a sitting room, utility rooms and a warren of large hallways on the main floor, plus the enormous marble-tiled lobby, with a grand staircase with carved wooden spindles and newel posts leading up to the two upper floors. Behind the lobby is a large dining room. Bedrooms and sleeping rooms are on the second floor. The Swopes also created two apartments, which they lease. Each floor of the building is 5,000 square feet, with 11 and half foot ceilings on the first floor.
The Swopes use the dining room for family parties, Dorotha said — graduation celebrations, wedding receptions, baby showers, birthdays and anniversaries. They have a large family — two daughters, Ellen Durham, who lives in Appleton City, and a daughter who lives in Springfield, a son in Florida, 11 grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren, 1 great-great grandson and another great-grandson on the way.
Dorotha also rents the dining room, which has two of the original hotel tables and eight restored leather-back chairs from the KATY Depot, for events.
The Swopes removed the partitions that created office space for hospital personnel in the hotel lobby, and restored the archway over the front door. Dorotha, with the help of her daughter Ellen and granddaughter, stripped layers of varnish off the carved wood spindles and newel posts of the grand stairway, starting on the third floor and working their way down to the lobby.
“I quit counting the gallons of stripper we used,” she said.
The hospital moved to a modern building on the edge of town — no stairs. The original hospital had an elevator, Leroy said, which has been taken out — it never quite worked right, either stopping short before it reached the level of a floor, or overshooting the floor slightly. The Swopes now use the space as a furnace room. The hospital had installed the wood floors, she said, including the room where the ambulance drove in and parked.
One of the Swopes’ grandsons helped Leroy replace all 89 windows of the building, which overlooks the KATY tracks, including the windows on the curved right-hand corner of the building. They had to hire some of the work done, he said, and had the building rewired and re-plumbed. The Swopes closed off some of the doors and created wall cabinets to display Dorotha’s collections of china and crystal.
The Swopes bought the hotel from Appleton City Landmarks Restoration, Inc., the group of people who saved the KATY Depot and restored it, along with the original town library and the George W. Clark Home and the schoolhouse, both on the museum grounds.
Dorotha, who grew up in the El Dorado area, has connections to the hospital, which served her town — one of her nephews was born there, and she and Leroy remember picking up her father at the hospital, where he was treated after he had a heart attack in the 1960s, she said. Leroy lived in the Roscoe area when he was young —a picture of the house he grew up in hangs over the fireplace in the lobby, as does a picture of the cabin where Dorotha was born.
The building holds a lot of Appleton City history, but their new home isn’t haunted, Leroy said, although he did recall a strange incident about a native American woman who toured the house. The woman said that she saw a nurse sitting his recliner in the room they use as a den, and also saw nurses throughout the building. Dr. Ellett and his family lived on the third floor of the hospital, as did some of the nurses and their families.
The Swopes have also been visited by “real” spirits from the past, people who worked in the hotel, who remember washing the sheets in the laundry room, Dorotha said. She only has one photo of the interior of the building from when it was a hotel, and hopes if photos turn up, people will share copies with her. She also would like to know if Ellett Hospital is the oldest hospital in the area, but thinks that Osceola may have had a hospital that predates it.
Dorotha does have postcards showing the exterior of the building when it was a hotel, and a list of babies born at the Ellett Hospital. Maternity service started in 1936, with a $35 package covered delivery, a three-day stay for mother and baby, and an ambulance ride home.
One of the Swopes’ long-term tenants was Dr. Dailey, who rented an apartment for 16 years to stay in while he worked at the new hospital in Appleton City.
What Dorotha finds remarkable — that the Durley Hotel took less than eight months to build, from the time the last of the four lots was purchased in July of 1891, to the grand opening on February 2, 1892. And back then, the work was done by hand, she said.
In 2004, the Swopes celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary under the covered porch on the north side of the building, and except for two grandchildren, with all of their extended family in attendance. Letter tiles set in the concrete floor spell out the names of the building’s past — Durley, Ellett, Swopes.
The next event at the Appleton City KATY Railroad Depot is a baked potato bar fundraiser lunch in October. For more information, go to the Appleton City, Mo., Landmark Restoration facebook. Appleton City is designated a “Train Town USA” by the Union Pacific Railroad.
