M-K-T Hotel and Wilson Hotel
The street on the left is Travis. The street in the center is Fannin. The street in front of the furniture store and hotels is Almante. Today, Texas Ave. would run between the furniture store and Meadows Grocery and through lots 11-14 before curving west near the former location of Crown Pumps.
The Wilson Hotel and the M-K-T Hotel were located north of the railroad on Almante St. to the west of what is today Coyote Metal art shop at the northwest corner of Texas Ave. and Almante. But if you look at the above map you may be confused. The streets in that area have changed dramatically since the time of this railroad survey was made in March 1920. At that time, Texas Avenue ended at Almante and both Fannin and Travis extended to Almante. Texas Ave. was later extended and curved first to the east to Travis St. when the Dublin highway weaved through the northeast part of town. Then, the curve became more of a “Y” when Bivar became the Gorman highway. Finally the curve was actually switched to the west directly onto Fannin when the present Gorman-Dublin Highway 6 was built in the early 1950s. Today, the furniture store shown above would face Texas Ave. and Meadows Grocery would be about where the Quonset building housing Stikbows is today.
The M-K-T Hotel was described as a a two story frame ironclad (probably corrugated tin) building with a composite roof on the Sanborn Inurance map prepared in March 1920 only a month prior to the railroad map. According to the railroad survey and was about 75X24′ in width and was not only build in the middle of Fannin Ave. but also extended several feet into Almante. In the August 12, 1927 issue of the Free Press, it was noted that Mrs. C.C. Duval had made numerous improvements to the MKT Hotel and that it was a rooming house.
Its neighbor to the east, the Wilson Hotel was a 30X46 frame two story building with almost half of its west side extending into Fannin and like the M-K-T, it too extended into Almante. The Sanborn map also indicates that the buildings were on city right-of-way. The Wilson was constructed in 1919 during the oil boom and contained 20 rooms. It later operated as the De Leon Hotel before it was acquired by Mrs. Cynthia Duval and operated as the Duval Hotel. The hotel burned on Wednesday June 10, 1935 apparently from a box of matches which caught on fire from nearby sulphur being burned as a disinfectant.
It is probable that both hotels were hurriedly contructed during the oil boom as neither hotel nor the furniture store appear in photos of that area taken as late as 1911. Both really were more boarding houses than hotels and it appears that Mrs. Duval may have owned both at some point.
The M-K-T Hotel is believed to have been used mainly as a domino parlor in the years before it burned in the early 1950s.