About

About Staying in History

Staying in History is a dedicated resource for travelers who believe where you sleep is as important as where you go. While we use the word “hotel” most often around here, we celebrate all manner of historic hospitality — lodges, motels, inns, and resorts included.

What We’re Here to Do

Three things drive everything on this site:

1. Share information that highlights historical hotels around the world
2. Advocate for the preservation of these irreplaceable places
3. Encourage you to consider a historical hotel for your next trip

We believe anchoring your stay in a place of historical significance is one of the best ways to genuinely connect with a location — to understand its heritage, its people, and the events that shaped it. There’s simply no substitute for sleeping in the rooms where history happened.

What Makes a Hotel “Historical”

We don’t follow a single rigid definition, but the properties featured here generally share at least one of the following: a meaningful connection to a significant local or national event, architecture that reflects the character of its era, recognition by a preservation organization, or a story embedded so deeply in its community that the place itself has become part of the local identity.

Age alone doesn’t qualify a property — relevance does. We’re less interested in how old a building is and more interested in whether staying there teaches you something about where you are.

Our Story

We’re Evan and Shannon Nickel, and our love of historical hotels started entirely by accident.

On a last-minute trip to Charleston, South Carolina, we booked three nights at the John Rutledge House Inn without doing a lick of research. Shortly after arriving, our concierge mentioned almost in passing that our room had been struck by a cannonball during the Civil War — and then produced documentation to prove it.

By checkout we knew our visit to Charleston had been fundamentally shaped by that hotel. Not just the cannonball story, but the way the property was authentically woven into the fabric of the city and its history.

The inn made enough of an impression that a year later, Evan proposed to Shannon on its second floor. A year after that, we spent our honeymoon there.

That experience rewired how we travel. We now seek out historical hotels wherever we go — and this site is our way of helping others do the same. Staying in history doesn’t just give you a window into the past. It gives you a chance to make your own history there.