Brick Hotel

The north side of Main Street was not divided into lots until 1822. Merchant William Polk built this five-bay Federal-style hotel, which was soon bought by J. F. Mansfield of Middletown. A newspaper advertisement for “Cantwell's Bridge Hotel” said that the latter had “taken and furnished that large and commodious New Brick House, lately erected by the Messrs. Polk . . . where he is prepared to accommodate travellers and others, with the best the country affords.” The hotel operated into the twentieth century. Sharp lived on the second floor front when he became schoolmaster in Odessa in 1900, and decades later (1960s) he restored it. To the rear stands Janvier Stable (1791 appears in a brick), brought here from across town, with fencing re-created from a 1798 watercolor of its original lot. East of the hotel is the brick, gambrel-roofed Leftovers House (1955), built by Sharp as a guesthouse with leftover historic materials. Across 2nd Street stands the bracketed Italianate town bank by famous Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan (1855), who had designed the Greco-Egyptian St. Paul's Methodist Church at the west end of High Street (1851). As late as 1945, the bank's cashier slept upstairs above the bank vault with a shotgun he could point through a hole in the floor.