The Place Bess and Ole Melby Bought when they Sold the Ranch

This is a mini-history of what the parents of Marion, Helen, Bill and Tip did when they sold their ranch and left for the Black Hills to enter the tourist business.

The Battle Mountain Auto Camp (BMAC) sat on the north side of Hot Springs, on the curve where Highway 85 came down into town from the north. That curve was the whole business. A family driving south out of the Black Hills at the end of a long day met the camp before they met the town, at the moment they were starting to think about where to sleep. There was no need for a street address. The camp advertised itself by highway number, and the highway delivered.

What stood there was an early motel, built before anyone used the word. The office faced the road: a small shingled cottage with a gabled entrance porch, a brick chimney, and vines climbing the siding. Gasoline was sold at the front door. In the Melbys’ time there were three pumps — one for high-test Ethyl, one for regular, and a third that was an antique and hand-operated. A driver could fill the tank, take a room, and never leave the lot.

On a personal note, I can remember back in 1956 when my now brother-in-law (John Davies) and I used to stop at the BMAC and buy a dollar’s worth of regular gas. That, at the time was a little over three gallons. 

Behind the office, low rows of cabins stood around an open gravel court. No paved parking, no curbs. A car turned in off the highway, swung around in the dirt, and stopped beside its own room. The cabins were finished in a heavily flecked stucco, with shingled roofs and brick chimneys, which meant each room had its own heat. The doors were glazed and multi-paned; striped canvas awnings hung over the windows, and under the windows were flower boxes. Rubble-stone pillars marked the entrance. Someone had planted young trees along the cabin rows and staked them.

The detail worth noticing is what sat between the rooms. Every pair of cabins shared an open bay, roofed under the same roof as the rooms, deep enough to pull a car into. Guests did not park in a lot; they parked in the building. That arrangement is the exact hinge between the old tourist cabin and the motel that came after — and it is what a guest at Battle Mountain got in the 1930s and 1940s, years before the long motel block with its row of numbered doors became the standard.

It was not a bare place to stop, either. Cabins with kitchenettes were available for people staying more than a night. Advertising from shortly after the Melby years counted twenty-two roomy cabins and two cottages across the highway from the main office, promoted the camp year-round, and gave the telephone number as 150. Two digits that you had to tell to the operator who politely asked, “Number please?” when you picked up the phone to make a call. That was the whole number in Hot Springs then.

The setting helped as much as the highway did. Hot Springs was a destination in its own right, with the mineral water and Evans Plunge a short distance away, and the Battle Mountain Sanitarium — the veterans’ facility that gave the mountain and the camp their name — bringing a steady stream of families into town. Travelers headed for Wind Cave, Custer State Park and the rest of the Hills came through. A cabin court on the north curve caught them all.

Hot Springs was a popular and bustling town then – over 5,000 people, about 26 “motels,” three hotels, and five medical facilities: the Veteran’s Administration, the state Soldier’s Home, the Lutheran Hospital, Sisters Hospital, and the West River Crippled Children’s Hospital.

Ole died in 1951. Bess sold the camp to John and Calma Woodsend in the early 1950s, and under them it went on as the Battle Mountain Court. In time it became what it had always been headed toward: a card from its later years advertised twenty-nine motel units and two cottages, color television, telephones, and air conditioning controlled from the room. The name never changed to say “motel.” It did not have to.

The property is still identifiable. The business became the Battle Mountain Inn and later the Dollar Inn, at 402 Battle Mountain Avenue, carrying the same telephone number forward through both. But the buildings in these photographs are gone. County records date the main structure at that address to 1969, which is almost certainly when the little stucco cabins, the garage bays, the staked saplings and the office with the three pumps came down.

What Bess and Ole owned lasted about one human generation, on a curve in the road, at the exact moment America was learning to travel by car.

*   *   *   *   *

PS – Here is what stands there today.

The photographs of the camp were made by Herman B. Stevens of the former Stevens Studio in Hot Springs, who captioned four of them on the negative. Cranston family collection.