I am currently completing my twelfth book.

It will be titled Boards & Bricks and will detail the history of significant Chatham buildings, particularly those in the core area with a special chapter devoted to the history of the hotels and taverns.

The best known and most popular of Chatham’s early hotels would be, no doubt, the Royal Exchange Hotel, which was located at the southwest junction of King and Fifth streets. Being three floors in height, it contained approximately 24 bedrooms and a fourth-floor attic ballroom where celebration of events made this primitive facility the entertainment and unofficial meeting room of the town. That function could also have been said to have been shared with the military barracks house at what is now Tecumseh Park.

The Royal Exchange was an all wood structure commenced in the mid-1830s by Joe Northwood (Conservative) who would eventually become one of only two men to represent Chatham (West Kent) in the Canadian Senate, the other man being Archibald Blake McCoig (Liberal).

For reasons not known to me, probably financial, Northwood sold the uncompleted hotel to the Eberts Brothers who finished construction and employed the hotel in conjunction with their passenger boat and stagecoach activities. The hotel would have been a perfect fit.

Eventually, the Eberts brothers relinquished operation of the hotel and one of the earliest proprietors I could link to the management of the inn was David Walker.

© Sarnia Observer