Nellie Frost, wife of Berea College president William G. Frost, kept hosting university guests in the couple’s own home until the numbers became unmanageable, reaching 300 visitors in a single summer. Her solution was a college-owned guesthouse, and construction began in 1907 on designs by the New York firm Cady & See, in the Colonial Revival style.
Berea College’s own Woodwork Department built it, using bricks manufactured by students in the college’s brickyard, for a total cost of about $20,000. It opened in 1909 with 25 rooms above a row of Main Street storefronts, named Boone Tavern after frontiersman Daniel Boone, using the historic sense of the word tavern as a traveler’s inn rather than a bar. The hotel still operates on Berea’s tuition-free work-college model, staffed by students, and has hosted guests including Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and the Dalai Lama.