- November 15, 2024
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Ormond Beach’s most iconic landmark, the Ormond Hotel, was built in 1887 by John Anderson and Joseph Price and opened for business on Jan. 1, 1888.
It was located at 15 E. Granada Blvd. in Ormond Beach. The well-known industrialist Henry Flagler purchased the hotel in 1890 and over the following 15 years expanded and improved it into a world class resort. Flagler added three new wings, elevators, a saltwater pool, and constructed a railroad bridge that allowed guests the convenience of disembarking and boarding passenger trains near the entrance of the hotel.
By the early 1900s, it was one of the largest wooden structures in the United States and featured 11 miles of corridors and breezeways and included 400 hotel rooms. The hotel’s property once occupied 80 acres, which ran from the Halifax River to the Atlantic Ocean. During the hotel’s heyday many affluent and famous people including John D. Rockefeller Sr. were frequent guests.
In the 1950s, the hotel was converted into a retirement home. On Nov. 24, 1980, the Ormond Hotel was added onto the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural and engineering significance. In the mid-1980s, the city of Ormond Beach ordered the structure to be evacuated as it was deemed hazardous.
Over the next several years, multiple attempts to save and restore the historic structure failed and it eventually met the wrecking ball in 1992. A small piece of the original hotel, its cupola, was saved from demolition and is now housed in Ormond Beach’s Fortunato Park.
Along with the memories of many people there are numerous newspaper and magazine articles, brochures, pictures and postcards that exist which keep the once marvelous Ormond Hotel alive in local folklore.
In 1995, Dr. Wayne Lowell built an impressive small scale model of the Ormond Hotel. The model was later refurbished by Don Bostrom. It was housed and displayed in a local Lohman funeral home for many years. It was then moved to the Ormond Heritage Condominiums (which were built on the former site of the Ormond Hotel, and supposedly designed to look like the historic structure).
In 2023, after being housed and displayed at the Ormond Heritage Condominiums for several years, the model was donated to the Ormond Beach Historical Society, and moved to the MacDonald House in Ormond Beach.
The model was showing its age, now approaching 30 years old, and was suffering from paint loss, and had many missing pieces and broken parts. The model went through an extensive and meticulous four-month restoration project by local hobbyist and model builder Mark Bigelow.
The restoration project included the repainting of most of the model, repairing multiple broken pieces including all of the delicate hand railings, recreating and matching some missing sections of the buildings, and identifying various missing parts and purchasing replacements from several online sources. Some of the missing parts were very hard to find as they are no longer being manufactured, and Bigelow spent quite a bit of time searching for them. Bigelow also built a children’s playground, which added a nice refreshing feature to the model.
The impressive and recently restored Ormond Hotel model is now on display at the MacDonald House, 38 E. Granada Blvd., Ormond Beach, which is open to the public free of charge on Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
If you never saw the Ormond Hotel in person, this model will surely give you an idea of how marvelous the one-of-a-kind historic landmark really was.
