In early 2025, Red Cloud will welcome the first guests to the charming, 27-room Hotel Garber. The new hotel—located downtown within the refurbished Potter-Wright Building—will feature a finely appointed, lower-level creative hub. The space is being equipped to host culinary classes, literary lectures, and hands-on arts engagement experiences.
With the opening of the hotel and creative hub less than six months away, local leaders are excited to see the city’s tourism industry reach new heights. They’ve been working toward this moment for more than a decade. Along the way, the coronavirus pandemic and high inflation caused delay—threatening the project’s viability altogether. The story of how Hotel Garber came to fruition is one of strategic planning, persistence, and partnership.
In 2012, the Red Cloud Community Fund engaged a consultant to study the town’s best opportunity to grow its economy. The consultant reported that Red Cloud’s most promising path forward would be 1) to develop its pre-existing heritage tourism assets and 2) to add lodging, dining, and shopping options that would appeal to visitors. Guided by these insights, local leaders created a five-year action plan, recruited a tourism development director, and studied the feasibility of creating more lodging in town.
The community established the Willa Cather Center in 2017 as the centerpiece of its ongoing efforts to develop tourism assets. Red Cloud is the acclaimed author’s childhood hometown, and Cather’s novels were inspired by her experiences growing up in Webster County. The connection to Cather has long drawn visitors to explore Red Cloud. Yet tourists have typically visited for the day, not for a weekend or weeklong stay. To grow its local economy, the community needed a way to convince visitors to spend more time exploring local cultural sites and enjoying the town’s serene surroundings.
As a practical matter, Red Cloud needed more hotel rooms to achieve its goal of tourism growth. Initially, leaders considered building a freestanding hotel outside of town to add lodging. Yet, they decided to go different route after the local community fund acquired the Potter-Wright Building to save it from being demolished. The building was in disrepair; the third floor had been destroyed by fire in 1961 and hadn’t been rebuilt. Yet with its prime location at a downtown crossroads, leaders saw potential to renovate the building and repurpose it as a hotel. “We committed to rebuilding that third floor and taking the building back to what it looked like in its heyday,” said Ashley Olson, Executive Director for the National Willa Cather Center. “It was part of our commitment to historic renovation and downtown revitalization.”
As work began to develop the downtown hotel, the community’s vision for the project grew. “We started out thinking about filling a need for lodging, but we realized an opportunity to make the project part of our arts scene,” said Olson. “The shift happened when we received designation as a Creative Arts District from the Nebraska Arts Council. As part of our strategic planning at the community level, we started to think about how to grow hands-on participation in the arts. We recognized that we needed a space for that to happen. We saw an opportunity in the lower level of the hotel to build out a creative hub that would become home to workshops, lectures, presentations, and other events.” Additionally, a spacious dining and lounge area on the first floor will provide a space for unique culinary experiences to complement events such as gallery exhibits or programs at the nearby Red Cloud Opera House.
As the scope of the project expanded, the costs of executing it escalated due to the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent inflation. “We overcame those obstacles by being innovative and creative about how to make the project work—accessing funding streams from a variety of sources,” said Jarrod McCartney, Director of Red Cloud Heritage Tourism Development. Two awards from the Nebraska Department of Economic Development (DED) provided vital support. In June 2022, DED announced a Shovel-Ready Grant of $2.3 million to assist with development of the hotel. This summer, DED awarded a $430,000 Tourism Development Initiative grant, through the Community Development Block Grant Program, to aid construction of the creative hub.
“Honestly, without DED’s help with the Shovel-Ready Grant, and now this Tourism Development Initiative Grant, I don’t know that we would have gotten to the vision that we originally had for having this event space,” McCartney reflected. “I don’t know that we would have even been able to have the hotel.”
In addition to the DED grants, Red Cloud has been able to fund the $8.8-million hotel and creative hub project through grants from private foundations, donations from individuals, and support from the Community Development Assistance Act (CDAA) Program. The CDAA Program allows DED to provide a state tax credit to individuals and businesses that contribute to community betterment initiatives. The Hotel Garber project also benefited from an allocation of Nebraska State Historic Tax Credits, which Red Cloud was able to obtain through its commitment to preserve the character of its historic downtown buildings.
“The number one lesson we’ve learned throughout this process is to be persistent and not to give up,” said McCartney. “You might have initial momentum with a project and then hit some obstacles, but you can find a way to get around them.” “The second most important thing—and a part of getting around obstacles—is figuring out who your partners are going to be,” he attested. Among the project’s key partners, McCartney credited the Willa Cather Center, Red Cloud Community Foundation Fund, Red Cloud Area Chamber of Commerce, and City of Red Cloud for their willingness to engage with the project and their work to move it forward.
Beyond Willa Cather’s childhood home and associated sites, the Red Cloud area boasts numerous other attractions to explore. These include the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie (600+ acres of pristine, never-plowed prairie), Republican River recreational opportunities, and the Webster County Historical Museum—housed in a 30-room brick mansion built in 1909. A portion of the Pike Trail passes through Webster County to the southeast of town. The trail traces the route taken by Zebulon Pike as part of an 1806-1807 expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase, during which he located Pike’s Peak. A landmark east of Red Cloud marks the site where Pike met with leaders of the largest settlement of the Kitkehahki band of the Pawnee tribe on his voyage. Webster County is also home to Starke Round Barn—the world’s largest round barn still used for agricultural purposes.
McCartney believes the Hotel Garber project will allow visitors to relish in Red Cloud’s cultural experiences and relaxingly explore the world of Willa Cather on their own time schedule. “This hotel is going to allow you to luxuriate in that immersive process. It’s an escape from the hustle and bustle of modern life.”
While poised to attract tourists, construction of the Hotel Garber has already drawn local residents downtown. For example, Dennis and Sally Hansen—a fourth-generation farm family from Red Cloud—have bought and fixed up a building north of the hotel. The couple recently retired, and instead of spending retirement at their farmstead, they redid the top level of the downtown building as a beautiful apartment. There are multiple other renovations underway downtown to create upper-level residences. “This private development has happened because of the community investment we’re making,” said McCartney. “We’ve gone from having virtually no activity in the second levels [of downtown buildings] to having nearly half of them occupied.”
“We’ve been working to realize this vision since the day Jarrod joined our team as tourism director,” said Olson. “It’s been really exciting to be a part of, and I think it will have an impact on the community for many, many years to come.”
To learn more about the Hotel Garber and creative hub, and to discover all there is to see and do in Red Cloud, go to visitredcloud.com.