The Wyoming Hotel sits at the point in Mullens, West Virginia where Slab Fork runs into the Guyandotte River, on 0.2 acres inside a federally mapped floodplain.
The hotel opened in 1918, put a bank in one corner and a beauty salon in the basement, had a human fly climb its outside wall in 1952, and housed Kennedy during the 1960 primary.
It closed in 1978 and was still rated in good condition in 1990. The big one came 83 years after opening. On July 8, 2001, a record-setting flood put roughly seven feet of water through downtown.
Floodwater carried mold and debris through the basement and first floor, and concrete floors in the rear collapsed. Any full reuse plan has the building and the river to deal with at the same time.
The Wyoming Hotel opened in 1918
J.C. Sullivan ran coal mines at Tralee, Meade Poca, and Barker's Creek.
In 1918 he put the money into a five-story brick hotel at 300-304 First Street in Mullens, West Virginia, a railroad town incorporated six years earlier.
Fires and flooding between 1917 and 1919 took out much of the wood-frame business district, and Mullens began requiring brick or stone.
Sullivan hired Alex B. Mahood of Bluefield, trained in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts.
The traffic was already there.
The Virginian Railway had been finished in 1909, the county's first commercial coal mine opened at Mullens in 1908, and the rail yard kept crews and salesmen moving through town.
Fire in 1920, bankruptcy in 1925
On December 23, 1920, a fire tore through downtown Mullens and wrecked the new hotel. It was rebuilt quickly and stayed open.
In 1922 Sullivan moved the Bank of Wyoming out of his company store at Meade Poca and into a front corner of the hotel.
People's Bank of Mullens bought out the Bank of Wyoming in January 1926.
By then Sullivan was finished. He entered bankruptcy in 1925, and Shenandoah Life Insurance Company of Roanoke took the property.
In the 1940s, Beckley Newspaper Company owner M.H. Hodel bought it, then passed it to Sam and Nelva Webster.
68 rooms and one bathroom per floor
Five stories over a basement, laid out in an H so more rooms got an outside wall and a window.
Brick on a stone foundation, five commercial bays at street level, and a glazed oval-arch fanlight over the front door.
The lobby and the dining room took the first floor, and the dining room worked as a ballroom too, seating 250.
Above the second-floor social rooms were 68 guest rooms sharing one bathroom per floor.
All of it sits on 0.2 acre, more than 36,000 square feet of floor space where Slab Fork runs into the Guyandotte River.
The 400-pound neon sign and the human fly
In September 1936 the hotel repainted its guest rooms, replaced the beds, and hung a red neon sign over the main entrance that weighed 400 pounds.
On September 23, 1952, John J. Woods, billed as a human fly, climbed the outside of the roughly 70-foot hotel under Mullens Police Department sponsorship and finished with an inverted balance on the roof ledge.
Part of the money collected from the crowd went to a police uniform fund. He had made the same climb there in 1946.
The sign over the door read "Hotel Wyoming." Everything written down called it the Wyoming Hotel.
Kennedy stopped at the hotel in April 1960
Downstairs, the hotel kept adding other uses. American Legion Post 108 was meeting in the basement by October 1945.
WWYO went on the air on February 5, 1949, and kept an office in the hotel.
In July 1956 John Hall reopened the dining room and joined it to the coffee shop. Ella Neely opened a beauty salon in the basement in October 1960.
On April 26, 1960, John F. Kennedy stayed at the hotel while campaigning in the West Virginia primary.
He spoke in town about the local economy and the polluted Guyandotte.
The same year, Mullens hit its population peak of 3,544.
The last guests checked out in 1978
Then the traffic thinned.
Mechanized mining needed fewer workers, railroad employment shrank with it, and drivers on the West Virginia Turnpike and the I-64 and I-77 corridors could stop at a new motel without entering an old railroad downtown.
The Wyoming Hotel closed in 1978, after six decades of operation.
The building held up better than the town's economy.
In October 1990, 12 years empty, it was still in generally good condition, brick walls and stone foundation intact.
On November 16, 1993, it became a contributing building in the Mullens Historic District on the National Register, the only such status it carries.
Seven feet of water in the business district
On July 8, 2001, record-setting floods put water roughly seven feet deep in parts of downtown Mullens.
The hotel sits where Slab Fork meets the Guyandotte, inside the floodplain, and it took the flood at full strength.
Water and debris went through the basement and the first floor. Mold spread through the lower levels.
Concrete floors in the rear collapsed in the flood. It was another major blow to a hotel rebuilt after the 1920 fire.
A building that had needed a buyer now needed structural repair and mold removal, on a lot still exposed to flooding.
Any full reuse plan now has to solve both at once.
What's left inside the Wyoming Hotel now
Mullens joined the Hatfield-McCoy trail system in 2008, and riders started coming through for fuel, food, and a bed.
The plans call for commercial and residential space.
As of 2021 there were still made beds in some of the 68 rooms, peeling green paint, and fallen ceiling material.
The money has come in pieces: $5,000 in 2019, a 2021 grant to remove a fire escape, and $45,000 from the state for a new roof in 2022.
In May 2024 EPA approved a $500,000 brownfields grant for a program that already had the hotel on its priority list, paying for testing and planning, not construction.
Through August 2026: no reopening, no demolition. Riders still pass a boarded-up hotel with broken neon lettering over the road.
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