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Eileen Stout has owned the Rogue's Harbor Inn for 14 years. "I was running the jewelry store next store, and the person that was here went bankrupt, and I thought, 'what a beautiful building, and it's been treated very badly.' So I bought it, a little bit naively, of course, and started working on it. It took a few years to get it where it is now, and I'm still always fixing little things. I love it."
This year she is celebrating the 175th anniversary of the inn with a year-long celebration. The celebration is running the whole year "since we don't know exactly when they started." Events have included wine tastings from all the Cayuga vineyards, in June there were half priced steamed mussels and clams, and there are specials for each month listed on their web site. The celebration will culminate on New Year's eve with food specials, entertainments and possibly some give-aways.
Ms Stout owned and ran the jewelry store in the building next door that currently houses a coffee shop, then bought the inn in 1991. She rented out the restaurant for a couple of years, and then decided to open it herself in 1996. The upstairs was rented out as apartments and still needed quite a bit of work. In 1999 Ms. Stout began renovating, and opened a bed & breakfast in 2000.
After buying the inn Ms. Stout didn't have time to continue running the jewelry store, so she thought about what should go into the building. What she came up with was a coffee shop where you could "get a cappuchino and a New York Times. It's doing well," she reports.
The inn is four stories tall with the restaurant and bar on the ground floor, bed and breakfast rooms on the second and third, and one big attic space on the fourth. A private dining room on the second floor is used for guests, rehearsal dinners and private parties. The ballroom is on the third floor with the ceiling vaulting into the fourth.
"We've had some really really nice people." (as guests) "All different kinds of people. People come to look at the university, for alumni weekend, tourists going to vineyards... It's really incredible how many people visit this area. When I was a student I had no idea."
It takes about 30 staff to run the restaurant, bar and bed & breakfast. There is a manager on duty to check people in and answer the phone. There is someone to clean the rooms, and plenty of kitchen and wait staff. Some of the staff also helped with the renovation upstairs. "I did it over the winter and that's our slow season, so they were happy to get some extra hours painting and getting everything ready." There were also two full time carpenters working for three months.
"When I got here there was a bar being run in one side, this (the restaurant area) was all in shambles. Broken windows, mud on the floor, pigeons... a wreck. All the rooms upstairs were run as a boarding house. They pretty much had to be gutted."
Asked whether she found any treasures in the inn, Ms. Stout said, "Not too many things, and I really looked hard, too, because it's rumored that there's treasure here. I ripped up every floor and looked in many walls, and I never found anything."
Ms. Stout lives in the third floor ballroom. "The ballroom was the nicest room in the whole place, and that's because it was never used. It just sat closed up, intact. There's a vaulted ceiling which is intact that's plaster. The rest of the moldings are all wood." The vaulted ceiling goes into the fourth floor. The ballroom famously has a spring floor to literally put a spring in dancers' steps. Town Historian Louise Bement reports the floor " has been erroneously reported to have coil springs under the floor. This is really a sprung dance floor made by wooden springs. The wood springs are actually the joists, cut into a most interesting and effective shape. There is an oblong oval cut in the center of each joist." "You really can't feel it," says Ms. Stout. "I've had quite a few people in there and I still couldn't feel it."
The inn is thought to have been part of the Underground Railroad which was used in the 1800s to bring escaped slaves to freedom in the North. A tunnel is rumored to go from Cayuga Lake to the Inn, though it has been closed off for years. "There's a big concrete cooler over where, allegedly, the tunnel was, so I've never seen it."
A few years ago Ms. Stout heard the government was trying to register properties for Underground Railroad historic status, so she called their historians and told them what she knew. They said it was very unlikely and wouldn't even consider an application. "They said it was too conspicuous, and that they thought that the tunnel was probably used for gas lines. But I had some elderly customers who said that when they were children they played in the entrance to the tunnel in the basement, and that's how I know where it is."
"I had a miner stay here once, who worked for Cargill, and he started out in the gold mining business, so he knows a lot of historical things about mining. He said it was technologically possible for a tunnel large enough for people to be built from the lake to the inn."
The inn was a country club at one time. Ms. Stout wasn't sure exactly when, but thought it must be just when cars were invented. "Very few people had cars, so it was an elite thing to drive out here and stay. It wasn't like a modern country club, but there was a vast lawn. It owned Dr. Brown's it owned the market, most of the houses across the street... it was a very large piece of property," she said.
Ms. Stout loves the trees, and she replaced the elms in front of the inn that died of Dutch elm disease with Chinese lace bark elms, which she has been told are disease resistant.
The most popular meals in the restaurant are Prime Rib and Chicken Riggies, with salmon being a close third. Wild berry cobbler and peanutbutter pie are also big sellers. The inn makes all the desserts. They sell a lot of beer and wine. The wine is all local. The anti-smoking laws helped the business. "I was worried about that, but there are a lot more people dining in the bar now."
Ms. Stout has put her own stamp on the inn, designing each of the renovated guest rooms, choosing the furniture and decorations. "I think it shows that I love the place, and I think that's the most important thing with a historic property."
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