It’s Like ‘Going Back to Grandma’s House’ : To Devotees of This Purr-Fect Hotel, Happiness Is a Room With a Cat

The Anderson House is one Victorian hotel where the biggest hit isn’t the four-poster bed or the four-legged tub but the four-pawed creatures that curl up beneath them.

If you’re crazy for cats, this hotel is purr-fect for you.

The 130-year-old inn, the oldest operating hotel in Minnesota, offers a free cat companion service to guests who stop over in this quaint Mississippi River town.

“It just makes people feel it’s more than a home,” said owner John Hall. “It’s one more step to going back to Grandma’s house.”

Other Creature Comforts

Other creature comforts of yesteryear are also provided at the red-brick inn--oven-warmed bricks in the beds to toast the toes and mustard plasters to soothe the chest.

But the cats on call are in much greater demand. The 10 cats, Hall said, are booked by guests about 99% of the time, some months in advance. Morris, a 10-year inn veteran who weighs a hulking 32 pounds and is a dead ringer for his TV namesake, has the longest booking list.

“He’s the most requested,” Hall said. “He does nothing but purr. He’s just a big bowl of jelly.”

Not just any cat can join Morris, Tiger, Fred and Ginger and other members of the inn’s animal house. A cat’s got to have credentials.

“We have to know who their parents are, who they are, if they’re halfway stable. We’re a little particular,” said Hall, 41, the fourth generation in his family to own the inn.

“Only one came off the street,” Hall said. “He (Tiger) hung around the back kitchen door for two or three months. We’d feed him and feed him. We took him in, sent him to the vet and had him checked out.”

The cats share living quarters in a back room when off-duty. When “working,” they come with food and litter boxes and are available for a few hours or an entire weekend.

The cat idea originated 10 years ago when a guest who checked in after visiting the Mayo Clinic about 25 miles away said he was lonely and needed companionship. “The best we could offer was a cat,” Hall recalled.

“When he checked out, he said he’d stayed in hotels for 20 years and this was his most memorable visit,” Hall added.

Today, whether singles, couples or families with kiddies, all Anderson House guests seem to enjoy the kitties.

Alice Desai, a Chicago resident, brought her two daughters to Anderson House and requested a cat with a playful personality. Tiger was sent to visit.

It was a treat the girls couldn’t get elsewhere. “When you have a child, you can’t go to a Holiday Inn and ask for a cat,” Desai said.

But Anderson House, whose 51 rooms range from $28.50 to $65 a night, is known for more than its part-time pets. It has played host to the famous and infamous.

Harry and Bess Truman visited, as did gangster John Dillinger, Hall said. Dillinger and his henchmen picked two rooms with the best view.

“They came in and paid my grandfather a week in advance,” Hall said. “They had a bulletproof Packard. They parked it in the back of the hotel. One night in the middle of the week, they disappeared and left the car here.”

Hall claims that his grandfather drove it for 10 years, then gave it to his father, who traded it for a Cadillac.

Although Dillinger is but a memory, the inn still pays tribute to two local boys who made good--the Mayo brothers, Charles and William, who often spent summers in the area and docked their boat in the marina. One of the inn’s finest rooms is called the Mayo Suite.

Black Walnut Beds

The inn also has a Pennsylvania Dutch-style kitchen and antique black walnut beds with quilts and matching curtains, a decor that rates it a mention in the National Register of Historic Places.

The inn prides itself on its atmosphere. The rooms have no phones, and metal rings still hang on the walls, recalling the days when bags with ropes hung readily at hand to be used as fire escapes.

No changes are planned for now--except, possibly, more cats.

“We want to keep the old radiators, the crooked floors,” Hall said. “We want people to know it’s the oldest hotel in the state. That’s what it was. That’s the way we plan to keep it.”