The Chestnut Suite

The second floor's other suite traded the Walnut's grandeur for something rarer in a five-room inn: privacy with a parlor. Archival record; not bookable.

A Suite in Two Rooms

The inn's listing read: "large suite with queen four-poster bed, queen sleeper in adjacent parlor room, detached private bath." In practice that meant a private apartment — bedroom, sitting room, and bath reserved to the suite though reached from the hall, an arrangement entirely ordinary in 1907 and charming a century later. Families took the Chestnut for the sleeper; couples took it for the parlor, which gave a rainy afternoon somewhere to go.

The Name

Like the Walnut, the Chestnut Suite was named for its wood — and the name carries a quiet elegy. American chestnut was a workhorse of turn-of-the-century millwork and furniture, prized for warm color and easy working, until the chestnut blight of the early twentieth century erased the species from the American forest within a generation. A room finished or furnished in chestnut is now, by definition, historical fabric: the material cannot be replaced. The suite's four-poster and trim made it a small museum of a vanished tree.

Street-Side Quiet

Trinidad's south-side residential blocks are quiet in a way travelers off Interstate 25 found hard to believe, and the Chestnut Suite — buffered by its own parlor — was the quietest berth in the house. Guests read by lamplight, played the library's board games carried up a flight, and woke to breakfast at eight like everyone else.

Guests who chose the Chestnut tended to be the inn's longest stays — researchers working the historic district's archives, families pacing themselves through the festival calendar, travelers recovering from the interstate by the simple expedient of not getting back on it. A suite with its own sitting room rewards staying put, and the Chestnut was the house's standing argument for a second night.

Continue to the parlor and the four-poster in detail, or return to all five rooms.