New bed and breakfast at Dennison Depot takes guests back to 1920s

DENNISON — Beginning next year, visitors to the Dennison Railroad Depot Museum will be able to experience what it was like to spend the night in a 1920s-era Pullman sleeping car.

That's when the new Pullman Bed & Breakfast will open to customers.

Depot officials held at open house Wednesday to show off the project, completed at a cost of nearly $1 million.

The bed and breakfast will have three suites and two compartments which are just bedrooms, said Depot Executive Director Wendy Zucal. It could potentially sleep as many as 16 adults at one time.

"But it is not like staying at your typical hotel," she noted. "It is a specific experience, smaller compartments, smaller beds. It is what it used to be. This is from the 1920s, but I think they will have a really fun time experiencing and immersing themselves in what it was like riding on a Pullman in the '20s."

The project was funded with grants from the Ohio Department of Transportation, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Harold C. and Marjorie Q. Rosenberry Foundation, the Tuscarawas County Community Foundation and the Depot's Emerging Professionals.

Gor-Con Construction was the general contractor for the project and Joe Sekely was architect. 

Dennison Mayor Greg DiDonato applauded everyone who contributed to the project and said the depot complex is important to the village.

"This depot complex as a whole is what's kept Dennison from not looking like a four-block deserted town," he said. "Many small towns in America are struggling. If you don't really have something that anchors you, gives it purpose for people to come to visit, eat, whatever, it is really hard to not have an empty storefront downtown."

The Pullman car was obtained from the Ohio Railway Museum in Worthington in 2007. Known as the "Times Square," the car ran on the Broadway Limited circa 1925. 

When the depot got the car, officials didn't know what they were going to do with it. Zucal said the museum was desperate for space, but it had had success in adapting cars to new uses.

"When we began to seriously look at that car and what we could do with it, we realized it was a treasure trove," she said. "It was a time capsule. It had all the compartments in it, a lot of the original lights and fixtures."

So plans were developed to turn it into a bed and breakfast.

Zucal noted that it took 14 years for the project to come to completion. The actual work took about two years, but the COVID-19 pandemic occurred during that time, as well as supply issues. 

But she said the contractors and ODOT were great to work with.

"There were a lot of challenges in restoring an old car into something like this," she said. "Every meeting was another hurdle to overcome, but everyone worked together and pulled it off. We just love it."

Depot officials are still working on pricing for the rooms.

Although the bed and breakfast will not be open in time for this year's Polar Express excursion, it will be available for next year's event. The Dennison Railroad Depot Museum now operates the only Polar Express in the state, Zucal noted.

"We want places where people stay overnight, spend more money in our restaurants, create more jobs, and that's what this is all about," she said.