| Burnet House | |
| Coordinates: | 39.0986°N -84.5123°W |
| Start Date: | October 11, 1848 |
| Opened Date: | May 3, 1850 |
| Demolition Date: | 1926 |
| Architect: | Isaiah Rogers |
Burnet House was a grand hotel that stood at the corner of Third and Vine in Cincinnati, Ohio in the United States from 1850 to 1926. In its day the Burnet hosted a multitude of dignitaries, including Abraham Lincoln (twice), Edward VII of the United Kingdom (when he was still Prince of Wales), and Jenny Lind.
The hotel was named for Jacob Burnet, a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court, who was an investor in the project and on whose land the hotel was constructed.[1] [2] After it was Burnet's charming farm, the site later became an "amusement park" called Shires' Garden.[3]
The developer was Abraham Coleman, a Cincinnati civic booster, who raised $2.5 million from 170 investors.[4] Isaiah Rogers, nationally acclaimed as a designer of elite hotels, was hired for $150,000. The interior design was done by Francis Pedretti. Cincinnati was the sixth-largest city in the country when Burnet House opened in 1850; the hotel became nationally acclaimed and was the state's premiere hotel well into the 1870s. Burnet House was one of a handful of American hotels with a gilded dome.[5] Circa 1879 it had 240 guest rooms, as well as parlors, reading rooms, smoking rooms, billiard rooms, bath rooms, a bar and a restaurant.[6] According to one 20th-century history of American hotels the Burnet "out-gadgeted the hotels of New York and was as sumptuously furnished and had as great a layout of public rooms as any hotel of its day. It was, besides, the most distinguished hotel architecturally."
When Abraham Lincoln campaigned in Cincinnati in 1860, he spoke at the Burnet, "speaking from a balcony to a large crowd gathered below him on Third Street. He was telling his listeners what he thought about slavery. He talked in a loud voice, and said he wanted it to be loud enough to carry across the river. 'I want Kentuckians to hear me,' he declared."[7] The Burnet House was considered the city's leading Union hotel during the American Civil War, whereas the Spencer House (opened 1853) "was known as a 'Copperhead hotel'." Some accounts have it that Sherman and Grant planned the former's March to the Sea in Parlor A of the Burnet House, but similar claims have made about Galt House in Louisville (debunked), and locations in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Washington, D.C.[8] [9] In later years a library at the hotel was home to "the library and portrait collection of the Loyal Legion, whose membership consisted of officers who served in the Union Army during the Civil War."