01/09/2022
Bluff Point Hotel is today's Clinton Community College
Here's today's PHOTO OF THE DAY!!! For Sunday brunch, we're headed to the grand dining room of the Hotel Champlain, pictured here around 1890. You can almost smell the steaming hot coffee, bacon, and other delicious aromas wafting our way. Once regarded as the "Premier resort of the northeast," Hotel Champlain was a breathtaking sight, perched high atop Bluff Point. Construction began in 1889 and the hotel eventually expanded to 500 rooms, offering guests unmatched views of Lake Champlain, and unmatched luxury, with smartly uniformed staff seeing to their every need. The dining room often featured local game, fish from the Lake, and produce supplied by local farms. Even water from the spring on the Hotel grounds was bottled on site and served. The "who's who" of the Gilded Age, from Presidents to Vanderbilts, ate their meals in this room, with the hotel even acting as the "Summer White House" for William McKinley in 1897 and '99. Made entirely of wood, the original hotel burned to the ground in a massive fire in 1910, seen for miles up and down the lake. It was replaced by the present, smaller structure in 1911 which still survives today as Clinton Community College. Since opening as a college in the late '60s, rumors have long persisted that some of the Hotel's former guests have never quite checked out. Eyewitness accounts by staff over the years have included all manner of strange and unexplained phenomenon. Phantom telephones ringing, a piano that often plays by itself, and even sightings of ghostly apparitions dancing in the former ballroom all add to the eerie mystique surrounding the legendary Hotel Champlain.