Wyman Hotel (Wyman Building)

Louis Wyman arrived in San Juan County in 1885 with fifteen burros and by 1900 had over a hundred pack animals, forty-five employees, and the county's largest freighting firm. Every month he bought nineteen boxcars of hay and grain and delivered some 1,500 tons of ore to the D&RG depot. To celebrate his burro-borne empire, he built this two-story corner building, of rosy-purple local sandstone from the Wyman Quarry on South Mineral Creek. The truncated corner entry rises to a parapet framing a bas-relief of a burro—a pet whose portrait Wyman carved himself. After serving as offices, a general store, and a lodge hall, the edifice had become a parking garage before restoration as the Wyman Hotel in the early 1990s by Donald Stott, who found original construction of 3-by-12 beams and 24-inch-thick stone walls, with skylights that could “stand up to the 21 feet of snow we get each winter in Silverton.”