This five-story Georgian Revival hotel, one of downtown's largest buildings, was the pride and joy of early-twentieth-century Martinsburg. The Hockabury System of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a company that assisted small towns throughout the country in building first class hotels, directed the project, but funding was local. According to the city's Evening Journal, a “whirlwind stock-selling campaign” began in April 1924, and the hotel opened on February 2, 1926. The newspaper reported the occasion and carried an advertisement identifying the J. G. White Engineering Corporation of New York as “architects and supervisors of construction.” A local firm, Emmert's, provided “144 lace edge Marquisette Curtains, 144 fast color Mohair draperies [and] 1200 guest size linen towels.”
Typical of downtown hotels of the time, the brick building had shops on its two street frontages whose rentals augmented income provided by the rooms above. The entrance to the hotel was toward the rear of the West Martin Street elevation, leaving the more commercially important Queen Street corner free for a shop. Above the street floor, rhythmic fenestration patterns and window sizes clearly differentiate bedrooms from bathrooms. Although the hotel appears as a solid square bulk, it is actually Lshaped. Currently, the building is mostly empty.