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THE HISTORIAN OF HANCOCK COUNTY
and in 1925 he bought a parcel adjacent to the hotel. Mr. Hopkins was now ready to try again to make the hotel a success. He was already a successful developer in Virginia and had developed areas of New Orleans and Waveland. In the Virginia enterprises, Hopkins had employed Mr. Hugh Turner Carr, a construction superintendent Hopkins trusted. Carr in his little book entitled, My First Eighty Years Aboard the Planet Earth, tells us in September 1925, Hopkins came to Carr’s house with train tickets, and a key to a house in Clermont for which a year’s rent had been paid. Hopkins asked Carr to go and rebuild the hotel that had been nearly demolished by the 1915 hurricane. Carr fell in love with the area and spent the rest of his life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The reconstruction lasted from the fall of 1925 to mid- 1926. Although many people visited the hotel, Carr says in his book, “this hotel was never a financial success.”
Hopkins borrowed heavily using the hotel and “ all furniture, tableware, linen, and all equipment used in connection with the operation of said property as a hotel.” Hopkins also agreed to maintain $15, 000 insurance on the buildings, which apparently included the dancing pavilion.
In February 1931, Hopkins sold the hotel to the Harbor Inn, Inc. The buyer assumed 19 promissoiy notes totaling $15,300. The president of Harbor Inn was R. Bland Logan; however, on July 30,1942, it sold again to a Mr. M. Bernhard, Sr.
On April 25,1944, Bernhard entered into a complex agreement with Jeanette C. Carmichael and ended up selling to the Clermont Harbor Hotel Corporation, of which Wilfred L. Guerin was president, owning 51 % of
the stock.
Russsel Guerin can recall his father working “extremely hard in the months preceding the June 1st opening date. Even though he commuted each day from New Orleans, Russell says his father “must have felt the money and time invested in the restoration were worthwhile. It was after all, the accomplishment of a longed-for-dream: an ambition of my father’s for many years had been to own the hotel.”
Russell and his brother, Wilfred Jr., can still recall certain details : the arc-shaped drive leading up to the front steps beneath the four Greek columns of the portico: the large oleander plants flanking the steps, the brand new kitchen equipment, the stacks of new mattresses ....stuffed with Spanish moss. One of Russell’s most vivid images is of the interior of the attic and the enormous cypress beams.
The forty-room, twenty-bathroom Clermont Harbor Hotel, built of virgin cypress, survived
hurricanes, financial disaster and vandals; however, its destiny seemed to be doomed. In the early morning hours after the grand opening, a fire starting in the basement destroyed the newly renovated hotel. The forty over- night guests escaped with only the night clothes they were wearing. All that would remain of the glorious hotel would be “its foundations, a spacious verandah, and four stark Greek columns, reaching towards the sky.”
By Dale St. Amant
SOURCES: Hancock County Vertical Files: The Clermont Hotel, Some Facts, Some Faint Memories, Russell Guerin, 1996.