The Quarles House, a boarding house, was operated at the northwest corner of East Avenue and Meadow Street.
Initially referred to as the “Quarles Hotel,” the house began providing boarding options with provisions for stabling horses on site.
An early advertisement in the Fayetteville Weekly Democrat, said:
This house is pleasantly located, being convenient to the public square. The house in the future, as in the past, will be a FIRST CLASS one. The table will be supplied with the best the country offers.
B.M. Matthews was listed as the proprietor of the Quarles House in 1873.
The Quarles House was large enough to host one of the many New Year’s Hops in early 1874.
“Many of Fayetteville’s fair daughters and scrubby sons were there,” the newspaper reported. “All went
merry as a marriage bell until, as Mrs. Partington would’say, ‘the shrill notes of the chandileer’ warned us that it was getting early. Every one present enjoyed shaking their teet to their heart’s content.”
Col. H.M. Couch of Viney Grove leased the Quarles House in November 1874. Couch had several years experience in the hotel business.
He wasted no time lining up “a most sumptuous and elegant supper” for the Mountain Lodge of the International Order of Odd Fellows.
In 1880, W.W. Moore took over lease of the building and continued to take “regular boarders” but would also allow day-boarders.
E.C. Hinde took over the house a year later. He refitted it, refurnished it and “cleaned it up generally.”
Its operations changed hands a couple of more times before Mr. and Mrs. Ed Quarles took over the operation in 1891, and it continued into the early 1900s.