Commercial & Industrial Buildings, Bennett House Hotel, 84 Main Street, Dubuque, Dubuque County, IA

Significance: Born in Ireland in 1828, Richard Bennett emigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen. After landing in New York, he traveled to Boston, where he worked for five years as a butcher. Bennett married Hannah Delebar, also an emigre from Ireland, in 1850, and a year later he moved to Indiana to take up farming. After several years, Bennett moved to Springfield, Kentucky, to operate a retail grocery store, and then to Chicago to open another grocery store, and finally to Dubuque, where he built this small hotel: one of some thirty such establishments then in Dubuque. "It is well conducted and had found favor with the public," a Dubuque gazetteer stated in 1894. Located a few blocks south of the heart of Dubuque's central business district, in a manufacturing and warehousing area, the Bennett House was in reality only a commercial grade lodge. An 1886 account of commercial and industrial facilities in town listed the Lorimier House on the corner of 8th and Bluff streets as the finest among the city's 25 hotels, and then, in order of accommodations, the Julien House, Key City House, Page House and Jefferson House. It did not mention the Bennett House. This building is architecturally important as a typical and relatively well-preserved example of 19th Century Functional design.
Survey number: HABS IA-160-BB
Building/structure dates: 1877 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 1883 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 1958 Subsequent Work