CHARLEMONT — Even as it is shuttered and dusty, with furniture piled up in corners and paint peeling off the doors, the Charlemont Inn maintains an air of elegance. It is easy to imagine people milling about the lobby or whiling away the hours in the sitting room, sipping tea or chatting about the news of the day.
The historic, once-vibrant town inn — which closed in 2011 after operating as a hotel since the 1770s — faces another Franklin County Housing Court hearing July 12, to assess whether owners Charlotte Dewey and Linda Shimandle have roughly $180,000 to bring the building up to code.
The town’s Board of Health first took Dewey and Shimandle to Housing Court in 2015 after condemning the inn for failing to comply with sanitary and building codes. Since, owners have been making repairs on the building while seeking funds to do a more extensive renovation. The town requested three extensions on this court date in the past six or so months, Dewey said, with the hearing originally scheduled late last year.
The owners do not have the money, Dewey said, and over the next two weeks they will attempt to secure an investor to fund repair-work. She said there are two interested parties, but no one has signed on.
“We’re doing our best, we’re doing everything possible,” Dewey said. “But it is not easy.”
If Dewey and Shimandle cannot come up with the money next month, the court may appoint a receiver to purchase the inn. And if there are no takers, Dewey said she heard from her lawyer that the building may be torn down.
Board of Health Co-Chair Doug Telling refuted this idea, saying Friday there were no plans to demolish the inn.
While Shimandle intends to walk away from the inn, Dewey is determined to stay on and run the restaurant and hotel when — or if — it is reopened. Not only has Dewey already spent roughly $300,000 on repairs, she has developed a personal attachment to the building over the years, she said. Her mother and sister lived at the inn as artists in the 1970s, which prompted Dewey to move to town, begin working there the following decade, and eventually buy the property in 1991.
Dewey recalls many fond memories of her time running the inn: hosting live bands a few times a week, serving meals in the sun-soaked dining room, holding weekly “taco nights” in the tavern. Further, she added, the inn frequently took in victims of domestic violence and their children, housing them in upstairs rooms after they’d escaped from abusive partners.
But a vast amount of work still needs to be done, which Dewey estimated will cost $2.4 million in total.
Despite the obstacles ahead, Dewey said she is optimistic she can get the building up and running soon. She said she has already drawn up a business plan with help from the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center. And having worked in the culinary industry for years, she said she knows many people in the food service business and already has a staff lined up and ready to work.
“There are people waiting to work here,” Dewey said. “We have a staff that’s been just waiting.”
Dewey said she has seen a groundswell of support among townspeople for the inn to reopen — though she added that enthusiasm is usually more vocal than financial. Fundraising efforts have been promising but insignificant, with a “Go Fund Me” page created last year raising just over $3,600.
Marcia Tucci, who owned the building with two others in the 1980s, wrote to the Selectboard in May criticizing how the town has handled the matter.
“The sentiment among town folk surrounding the topic of the inn is one of deep depression, sadness, and frustration over the way the issues there have been handled and lack of communication or transparency of the part of town officials letting the town know what is going on,” Tucci wrote.
In Tucci’s view, residents should have an opportunity to “think creatively” about how to “save this important piece of Charlemont.”
While the business did fail, Tucci said, the inn remains “a solid piece of the heart of this town.”
“Sitting here doing nothing while it rots is no longer an option for me,” Tucci wrote.
The historic town hotel closed in 2011 after owners were evicted for neglecting to pay about $40,000 in sewer taxes. At the time, Dewey said, the business was struggling in the wake of the 2008 recession and the death of a business partner who held the mortgage. When Dewey came up with the money for the back taxes, she discovered that the inn’s copper pipes had been vandalized, she said, which would cost another $40,000 to repair. They did not have the additional money, she said, so the inn remained shut.
“We have been working in good faith to reopen the inn since the day it closed,” Dewey said. “And it has not been an easy task.”
Then, in 2015, the building was condemned by the Board of Health for failing a series of building inspections, following complaints by neighbors about mold and mildew, Board of Health Co-Chair Telling said Friday. After a court hearing, the board created a “voluntary agreement” and a timeline for owners to follow to fix the issues, which Telling said included a leaky, unstable roof, rotten walls and mold and mildew.
Today, the building remains condemned aside from two rooms: the kitchen and the basement. The condemnation order on these rooms was lifted in 2017 when the Board of Health gave owners a permit to run a catering business in this part of the building. The permit expired last year, and Dewey said she has not renewed it due to the “unknown outcome of the Board of Health court action,” she said.
While Telling admitted the owners did some work to address these problems, he said these efforts did not bring the inn completely up to code.
“It’s not that she did nothing. I don’t want to say that,” Telling said. “She did some of the work, but there were some major pieces that needed to be fixed.”
Telling continued, saying the Board of Health’s legal action against the inn’s owners “is not personal.”
“I don’t care how the work gets done,” Telling said. “I just want it up to the sanitary code. This is about the inn and the public health of the town.”
But Dewey has a different view of the situation. She said even after they made required repairs — removing ceilings and gutting walls to look for mold that sometimes wasn’t there — the board was seldom satisfied with the results.
“It’s been one thing after another. We’d finish something, and we had to do something else,” Dewey said. “They knew how much money we had to invest, and every time you reached one level, we had another challenge put in front of us.”
Contact Charlotte Dewey at cinn1775@gmail.com for more information about the inn. View the “Go Fund Me” page at https://www.gofundme.com/help-save-the-charlemont-inn.
Reach Grace Bird at gbird@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 280.