FREE. Pre-registration is required.

URL: https://marinersmuseum.org/hampton-roads-history-lectures/

Join us for a virtual lecture with author and historian John V. Quarstein, director emeritus of the USS Monitor Center when he presents on Hilton Village - a planned, English-village-style neighborhood in Newport News and the United States' first federally-funded war-housing project.

Viewers are welcome to send Quarstein any comments or questions during the presentation, and he will answer them following his talk.

About the presentation: The Washington Naval Treaty’s impact on the Newport News Shipyard caused projects like Hilton Village to falter. Henry Edwards “Eddie” Huntington refused to see this model ‘Garden City’ community suffer. So, in 1924, Eddie funded the construction of the Colony Inn at the intersection of Warwick Road and Main Street. The Colony Inn’s charming Tudor Revival architecture and English-styled interior decorations made it virtually an equal to The Chamberlin Hotel on Old Point Comfort. Promoted as “An English Inn on the American Plan,” its old English spirit gave the Colony Inn a delightful atmosphere. When coupled with “typical Southern hospitality” the Inn never lacked patronage. Luminaries like President Herbert Hoover and his wife, Robert Frost, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Archer Milton Huntington stayed in this posh establishment during the 1930s. Yet, this Hilton landmark began to fade in the late 1950s and was demolished to make way for modern buildings.

Image credit: Exterior view of the Colony Inn in Hilton Village, after 1901. Courtesy of Newport News Public Library.