Sloop skipper Erik Sjursen secured a royal license from King Christian VII of Denmark on December 13, 1794, to run a trading post and guesthouse on land leased from his family’s farm along the Vefsna River, making it one of over two hundred licensed trading sites established along Norway’s northern coast. His clerk Peter Heitmann took over the business in 1823, and when Heitmann died in 1827 on a Lofoten fishing trip, likely poisoned by arsenic in a food container prepared by his wife Anne Christine Clausdotter, she promptly remarried her lover, skipper O.H. Schrøder, who inherited the trading post.
Merchant Ellen Haugan bought the property in 1885, and it has carried her name and stayed under the management of her female descendants ever since, through her daughter Eli Haugan Jenssen-Hals and later Eli Marie Jürgensen. The hotel now anchors Sjøgata, Northern Norway’s oldest surviving row of adjoining wooden buildings, and remains the region’s oldest continuously operating hotel.