Cornwallis Inn

Cornwallis Hotel

The Cornwallis Hotel in Kentville, usually known as the Cornwallis Inn, began as the Aberdeen Hotel, a wooden second empire style hotel built in 1892 behind the Kentville Station. A glacial drumlin hill was leveled to provide a site for the hotel and provide fill for the Windsor and Annapolis Railway's growing railyard. The hotel was purchased and renovated by the DAR in 1919 and renamed the Cornwallis Inn. It was replaced in 1930 by a new and much grander structure at the centre of town built in the CPR "Baronial" style in 1930.(1) A grand year round hotel, it included 90 rooms, 4 luxury suites, a ballroom, dining room, lounge, meeting rooms and sample rooms for travelling salesmen. It was drastically remodelled in 1963 when the gardens, ivy, and front entrance were demlolished to make way for a parking lot and retail arcade. Half the rooms were converted to apartments. The hotel closed in 1976 and all the rooms were converted to apartments.(2) The building survives today as an apartment building, the last surviving building in Kentville connected to the DAR, at least until the notoriously heritage-hostile Town of Kentville demolishes it.

Gallery

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  Excavation at Kentville with Windsor and Annapolis Railway flat car No. 84, probably leveling of the hill which became the Cornwallis Inn, circa 1890.

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  The first Cornwallis Hotel, built as the Aberdeen Hotel, circa 1896, with the Kentville Car Shop and Kentville Station in background.

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  Hotel circa 1930.

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  The Cornwallis Hotel pictured in the 1946 Evangeline Land Brochure.

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  Modern day appearance.

References and Footnotes

(1) Marguerite Woodworth, History of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, page 145, 147-148. (2) Mike Parker, Historic Annapolis Valley: Rural Life Remembered, Nimbus 2006, page 87.