October 15, 2024

published by the Nebraska Department of Economic Development

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.

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