Description of Historic Place

The Jones Hotel is a two and one-half storey Queen Anne style building located between two major thoroughfares in the commercial district of Ladysmith, British Columbia. The historic place is confined to the building footprint.

Heritage Value

The Jones Hotel is significant as a tangible reminder of the social and economic importance of hotels in Ladysmith's history. Like most mining communities, early Ladysmith had a large population of single, often transient, men. As affordable housing alternatives, hotels functioned as living quarters and, in the saloons and restaurants typically located on the ground floor, as social centres.

Built around 1900, the Jones Hotel is a very good and rare example of a vernacular, Queen Anne style building in Ladysmith. Generally asymmetrical in form, the style can have any combination of features including bay windows, towers, turrets, wrapping porches (often on multiple stories), balconies, stained glass decoration, roof finials, wall carvings and/or inset panels of stone or terra-cotta, cantilevered upper stories, decorative trim, patterned shingles, belt courses, elaborate brackets, banisters, spindles, and mixed claddings. The Jones Hotel is a relatively modest version of the style but a rare surviving one in Ladysmith. A substantial renovation in the 1980s was sympathetic to the building's original character.

The Jones Hotel, moved from Wellington in 1900, symbolizes the once-common practice of moving buildings to different locations as new coal mines were developed or as old ones failed. The relocation of buildings underlines the fragile and variable nature of coal mining economies and is a significant symbol of the community's socioeconomic history.

The Jones Hotel is important as part of a grouping of historic residences and commercial buildings near the main commercial district.

Source: Town of Ladysmith, Development Services

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the Jones Hotel include:

- all of the remaining elements of a modest Queen Anne style building including the asymmetrical form, tower, mixed claddings, porches with elaborate post brackets, mixed window types and styles and asymmetrical arrangement of windows and doors

- the building's location within a group of historic buildings in the commercial core of Ladysmith