Hotel Oneonta: The Largest Hotel on the Largest Lake….in Pennsylvania!

The Hotel Oneonta was built in 1897 on Harvey's Lake just east of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  It was a hotel built on a grand scale unseen for lake houses at the time.

The hotel contained more than seventy rooms, all elegantly appointed in a "rustic ;luxury style."  The hotel contained two restaurants, a bar, a barber shop, a bakery, a billiard parlor,  an indoor bicycle room and a ballroom.  Harvey's Lake is the largest lake in the entire state of Pennsylvania.  The hotel was built two-hundred feet from its shore.

One of the principal stockholders in the hotel was Christian Stegmaier a successful brewer. Former President Teddy Roosevelt was the hotel's most famous guest, in August 1912.

A fire, of unknown causes, swept up from the basement of the huge hotel on the evening opf February 2, 1919.  The massive structure was soon consumed in flames.  Volunteers cut holes in the lake's ice to form bucket brigades, but to no avail.  By morning the twenty-two year run of the Hotel Oneonta was history.  The insurance company paid out $45,000 which was far less than the cost to rebuild so future plans were abandoned.

Isn't it odd that a place named The Hotel Oneonta was located just south of the New York State border at the same time another hotel (albeit a little less grand) was operating in our fair city?

By the way, the Harvey's lake hoteliers named their establishment Oneonta because of the the Indian definition  of the word as a "place of rest."  During the construction of the hotel, an ancient Native American canoe was discovered deep in the ground near the hotel.  It was recovered, cleaned and put on permanent display in the lobby of the Hotel Oneonta!