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Overview

The Hotel Monticello occupied a pivotal, central position in the Beaux-Arts plan of the Long-Bell Lumber Company's new town of Longview. As seen from the air, it stood across from a public square at the convergence of four diagonal arterials leading into town, reminiscent of the locations of the White House and Capitol Building in Washington, DC, laid out along French Baroque planning precepts by the artist and engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant (1755-1825) in 1791. At Longview, three of these diagonal streets were fully built out, while the one on the southwest corner remained something of a stunted stub.

Building History

Timber supplies of the Long-Bell Lumber Company, headquartered in Kansas City, MO, were becoming exhausted on its current properties in the South by 1920, so it looked to the Pacific Northwest for new, uncut tracts. Long-Bell's President, Robert A. Long, negotiated a sale of 14,000 acres of timberland with the Weyerhaeuser Company in 1921. Long envisioned a giant lumber mill in Cowlitz County, WA, on the Columbia River, capable of processing 1 million board feet of lumber a day. No town large enough existed to serve his factory, so Long decided to build a planned town capable of housing 50,000. The first building necessary in his town was a hotel, Long thought, and he committed his own funds to make sure that it got built. Fitting in with the general Colonial Revival styling of the whole town of Longview, the hotel was named the "Monticello." (An early settlement called Monticello also had existed in this area from 1854-1867; townspeople abandoned the site in 1867 due to a flood.) The Seattle architecture firm of Schack, Young and Myers worked with another Seattle architect, John R. Nevins, on the design of this 6-story inn, a centerpiece of Longview.

PCAD id: 12004