The Adams Hotel Has Been Holding Court In Lavina For Over A Century

We were headed home from a road trip when my husband decided we should skip the highway and take the back roads instead. That's how we ended up rolling into Lavina, population small enough that you could probably name every dog in town, and staring up at a two-story white building with towers on its roofline like it was waiting for a train that stopped coming decades ago.

That building is the Adams Hotel, and once you know its story, you understand exactly why it still stops people in their tracks.

Lavina Montana Rancher Built The Adams Hotel

The Adams Hotel exists because a sheep rancher named Ludwig "Louie" Lehfeldt made a bet on the future. In 1907, Lehfeldt sold 33,000 acres of his ranch land to the Milwaukee Road railroad, a deal that pushed the entire Lavina townsite to relocate closer to the tracks. Lehfeldt saw what was coming next: homesteaders, businessmen, and travelers were going to need somewhere to sleep. So he hired the architectural firm of Link and Haire, the same firm that designed the 1910 additions to the Montana State Capitol, and commissioned a Colonial Revival hotel that had no business looking that grand in a town this small.

It opened on November 6, 1908, cost $20,000 to build, and Lehfeldt named it after his friend John Q. Adams, a vice president of the Milwaukee Road. The hotel was built in a trapezoidal shape, angled to sit parallel to the nearby tracks, with a main entrance facing Main Street and a second door greeting arrivals straight off the depot platform.

Lavina's Adams Hotel Offered Steam Heat And Luxury

For a couple of decades, the Adams was the place in Lavina. Twenty-two rooms offered steam heat and gas lighting at a time when plenty of homestead cabins had neither. Guests slept under down comforters on pure linen sheets and washed up in matching china bowls and pitchers set out in every room. Downstairs, the bar kept a well-stocked shelf of liquor and cigars, the dining room served proper meals, and women had their own withdrawing room on the second floor. The lobby and dining room doubled as Lavina's social hub, hosting dances and gatherings for a town riding high on the homestead boom.

Lavina Montana Hotel Declined With The Homestead Bust

Montana's homestead era didn't end gently anywhere, and Lavina was no exception. Drought, failed crops, and a wave of bank closures hollowed out the region through the 1920s, and the Adams went down with it. By the mid-1920s, the once-opulent hotel had emptied out. Oddly enough, a church saved the building. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the local Lutheran congregation used the old bar area as its chapel, which is probably the only stretch in the hotel's history when drink orders slowed considerably.

The building passed through several owners after that, including Raymond Barry, who moved in without running water or heat and spent years filling the place with Victorian furniture and antiques of his own collection. When Barry passed away in 2015, he left the Adams to the Lehfeldt family descendants, bringing the hotel back to the bloodline that built it.

Adams Hotel Restoration Continues In Lavina Today

Restoration work on the Adams began in 2000 and has continued in pieces ever since, funded largely by grants and led by Catherine Thayer, Lehfeldt's granddaughter, and the volunteer group Friends of the Historic Adams. The hotel earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and the group has hosted open houses over the years so the curious public can finally see what generations of travelers only glimpsed from the sidewalk.

Standing on that same sidewalk with my family, none of us knew any of this history yet. We just knew we'd found something worth stopping for. That's the thing about taking the back roads home. You never know what's waiting around the next bend, and sometimes it's a hotel built in 1908 with a story bigger than the town that built it.