Did you know that the Central Hotel on Cherry Street, Brackenridge, once served as a country club for a group of wealthy Pittsburghers? The late Daniel B. McConville built it in the mid-1880s for these people, who gave it the name Oregon Hunting and Fishing Club.
The club still exists. Its headquarters are on Brackenridge Avenue, and it maintains a camp at Monroe Station on the Butler Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Butler County.
The club has a limited membership. A new member is admitted only when a vacancy occurs because another has died, resigned, or moved from the community. It may have been the only club in the valley that did not permit a member to take a guest into the clubrooms. Any member who appeared with a guest was subject to disciplinary action. Visitors are now allowed, but only if they live more than ten miles from the club.
McConville came to this area from Follansbee, West Virginia, in the early 1880s, about the time Captain John B. Ford was building his first plate glass plant in Creighton. He was the manager of the Peterson Oil Works in East Deer Township. When the firm went out of business, he returned to his original business: building and plastering contracting. Vie established a tile pipe and supply yard in what is now Third Avenue below Morgan Sheet, Brackenridge.
At this time, he built what was to be called the Central Hotel. He held a half-interest in the hotel. Henry Gonlock had a fourth, and a member of the Conwell family a fourth. Gonlock. A blacksmith lived on Second Avenue in Tarentum and had a shop at the rear of his home.
The entire third floor of the hotel was an ornate ballroom. Billiard arid bowling equipment was added later. There was an imposing cupola on the roof
The building continued to serve as a clubhouse until about 1905. As the Pittsbughers lost interest, local men gradually became majority members.
McCoriville and his son, Daniel Jr., remodeled the building in 1906. They provided lodging on the second and third floors and called it the Oregon Hotel.
A fire happened on Sunday afternoon in the late summer of 1909. It was the fiercest that Pioneer Hose Company of Brackenridge had fought up to that time. Tarentum hose companies assisted in bringing the blaze under control.
Repairs were made, and the McConvilles were back in the hotel business within five months. The son had been permanently injured a few years before while plastering the dome of the New Kensington YMCA building. He credits the late Dr. L. C. Kline, a Tarentum osteopath, with making it possible for him to become active again. Several specialists had previously tried in vain to help him.
Jack Daughety became the proprietor of the hotel in about 1919. It served as headquarters for a detail of state policemen stationed in the Allegheny Valley for a time.
The hotel faded with the advent of prohibition. In 1926, a grandson. Daniel A. McConville sold the property to the heirs of Standard Cigar Company, and the building served as a cigar factory for a time. McConville was a locomotive engineer at the Brackenridge plant of Allegheny Ludlum.
The old hotel building, as stalwart as the days it was completed, later served as an apartment house.
