Terminus to Dillon
In 1880 a 480-acre ranch was purchased from Deacon by a group of businessmen that would later become the city of Dillon. Its first name upon being founded on December 4, 1880 was Terminus and which was changed to Dillon in March of 1881. In 1881, the Union Pacific Railroad extended its Utah and Northern branches into Montana.
Dillon was named after Sidney Dillon, the president of Union Pacific Railroad who directed bringing the railway up through Butte, MT. When deciding on the new name for the town some residents wanted the town to be named Washington City, in honor of Washington Dunn, constructor of the railroad.
During the construction of the Railroad, the Corinne Hotel, a canvas hotel constructed with cloth line partitions, was moved along the railway during the railroad’s construction. It is said to have made it all the way down to Utah before being brought to Dillon (previously known as Terminus) as its final resting place. In 1891 the Corinne Hotel burned down. Six years later Joseph C. Metlen opened the Metlen Hotel in the same exact spot.
This railroad was key to feeding the growing territory's need for transporting people, tools, and distributing ranching and agriculture products. In 1885 Dillon became an incorporated town as a service center for ranching.
In 1897 the Montana State Normal School opened to train teachers for the growing state. It was later renamed Western Montana College before it became part of the Montana University System in 2000, where it received its final renaming as University of Montana Western. Go Bulldogs!
In that same year, Joseph Custer Metlen, known as a pioneer politician and businessman built the Metlen Hotel. The three-story building with sixty rooms cost a whopping $30,000 dollars to build (the monetary equivalent with today's inflation is around $1,071,000). At the time of its opening it was renowned for its luxurious modern conveniences, such as having call bells in each room, electricity throughout the building, hot and cold water, and a steam heating system that was “absolutely free from hammering.”
The New Hotel with Modern Conveniences:
Much of the Metlen Hotel’s rich detail, spanning from its white quarry-faced sandstone brick exterior to its Michigan and Oregon Pine interior finish, has been preserved from its opening. The three-story second empire-style building boasted modern conveniences that would have been otherwise exclusive to the rich at the time. Mr. Metlen spared no expense when it came to designing and furnishing the hotel, spending the equivalent of over a million dollars on the project.
All sixty rooms in the hotel were equipped with call bells meant to call for room service. The call bell indicator box is still visible on the first floor in the front bar which was originally the location of the front desk.
Another impressive modernization was the incorporation of electricity to light the hotel. For comparison, the first home to be lit by electricity was in 1882, and electrical lighting was not installed in the White House till 1891, only six years before the Metlen Hotel’s construction.
Having well heated rooms, and both hot and cold water was another luxury. The plumbing in the hotel was considered very modern at the time, using a 2000 gallon bladder tank on the hotel’s roof to gravity feed water to the whole hotel. The Spokane Washington manufactured boiler was a state of art system that was known for being “absolutely free from hammering,” as it states on the hotel's original plaque. The hotel’s 65 horse-power originally coal run boiler was converted to natural gas in 1968. The boiler was shut down in the 2010s, but is still located in the basement of the hotel.
Due to its size, it is likely the boiler was installed early in the hotel’s construction and the hotel was built around it. The ornate original radiators made by American Radiator Company are still found in some areas along the walls of the first floor bar and in some 2nd and 3rd floor rooms.
While most of the rooms has separate baths, 14 rooms had private baths.
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