New Century Hotel site
Romney, Hampshire County, West Virginia
Marker Inscription
New Century Hotel
The Story
In Romney, one of West Virginia's oldest towns and the county seat of Hampshire County, the New Century Hotel once stood as a place of lodging near the main east-west road through the Potomac Highlands. Its name captures the optimism of the turn of the twentieth century, when a fresh century seemed to promise growth and prosperity for small county towns. Hotels like this one served travelers passing through and visitors drawn to town on court days and market days, offering a bed, a meal, and a gathering place at the center of local life.
Why it matters
Turn-of-the-century hotels anchored the social and commercial life of small American towns, welcoming the travelers and business the local economy depended on. This site marks where that everyday hospitality once shaped a Potomac Highlands community.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, Romney — one of West Virginia's oldest towns and the seat of Hampshire County — sat along the main east-west travel through the Potomac Highlands. The county seat was the natural hub of the surrounding countryside: the place people came for the courts, for business, and for the commerce that a rural region funneled into its central town.
The very name of the New Century Hotel captures the mood of the moment. As the 1800s gave way to the 1900s, a fresh century felt like a promise, and small county towns across America shared in that optimism — the sense that growth, connection, and prosperity were arriving.
A hotel was a natural expression of that hope. It signaled that a town expected visitors, business, and movement, and that it meant to welcome them at its center.
People & events
Picture the everyday life a hotel like this once held. Travelers passing along the region's main road needed a bed and a hot meal; visitors came into town on court days and market days, when the county seat filled with people doing the business of the wider community. The hotel met them all at the heart of town.
Such a place was more than lodging. Its dining room and public rooms became a gathering spot — where travelers traded news, where locals met, where the comings and goings of the county passed through. In a small town, the hotel was often one of the liveliest crossroads of daily life.
The individual proprietors and guests who filled these rooms are largely unrecorded now, and it would be wrong to invent them. But the role the building played is clear and typical of its time: a center of hospitality and human traffic in a busy county-seat town.
Its place in the American story
Across turn-of-the-century America, the local hotel was a fixture of small-town life — anchoring the social and commercial world of the places it served. It welcomed the travelers, salesmen, and visitors that a local economy depended on, and it gave a town a public living room at its center.
These hotels tell a broader story about how ordinary American towns worked before the automobile age fully reshaped travel. Commerce, courts, and community all converged on the county seat, and hospitality was the infrastructure that made those gatherings possible. A hotel was, in a real sense, part of a town's transportation and economic life.
That's why the site of a vanished hotel still matters. It marks where the everyday business of welcome and exchange once shaped a community — a small but essential piece of the American small-town story.
If you visit
There's a particular poignancy to visiting a site where a building once stood. Rather than a facade to admire, you get an act of imagination: place the hotel back at the center of town and picture the traffic it drew — travelers arriving off the main road, the bustle of a court day, the lamps of a busy dining room.
Use the surrounding streetscape as your guide. Romney is an old county seat, and the layout of the town center still reflects the era when a hotel like this would have anchored local life. Standing at the site, you can read the geography of a community built around its courthouse square and its main east-west route.
Make it one stop on a walking tour of Romney and Hampshire County history. Bring your imagination and a sense of place, and the empty ground fills with the coming and going it once hosted.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Shanks Store and Post Office
Hampshire County, WV
For generations, the country store was the beating heart of rural crossroads communities across the Appalachian backcountry, and Hampshire County — one of West Virginia's oldest counties — was no exception. A store like this one typically sold everything from flour and farm tools to cloth and coffee, extended credit to neighbors between harvests, and served as the place where people caught up on local news. When such a store also held the community's post office, as this one did, it became the official link between an isolated rural neighborhood and the wider nation, its counter doubling as the window where mail was sorted and letters were sent.
Capon Lake Whipple Truss Bridge
Hampshire County, WV
This wrought-iron span is a rare surviving example of the Whipple truss, the bowstring bridge design that American engineer Squire Whipple patented in the mid-19th century and that helped carry the nation's roads and railroads across its rivers. Prefabricated iron trusses like this one could be shipped in pieces and bolted together on-site, letting even remote crossings replace timber bridges that rotted or burned. Bridges of this type once dotted the countryside, but few remain; this one was preserved and moved to Capon Lake rather than being scrapped, as most were once heavier traffic outgrew them.
Cobbler Shop in 1859
Oakland, MD
Oakland grew up in the mid-19th century as a mountain town in far western Maryland's Allegheny highlands, and this building has watched much of that history pass by. Since 1859 it has worn many hats — a cobbler's workshop, a lodging house known first as the New Glades House and later the Central Hotel, and by 1908 the site of Dr. M.C. Hinebaugh's hospital. As one of the town's oldest surviving structures, it packed trade, travel, and medicine under a single roof.
Highest Point on the Maryland State Roads System
Garrett County, MD
In Maryland's mountainous far west, where the Allegheny highlands roll toward West Virginia, this plaque marks the loftiest spot the state's road network reaches — 3,095 feet above sea level in Garrett County. It dates from the era when the Maryland State Roads Commission was knitting the state together with modern paved highways, a decades-long push that turned rutted wagon roads into an engineered system. The named officials and contractor belonged to that generation of road-builders who carried the nationwide 'Good Roads' movement over some of the state's most rugged terrain.