Oatman Hotel (Clark Gable Honeymoon Suite)

The Oatman Hotel was built in 1902, four years before the formal founding of Oatman as a chartered town and during the earliest prospecting phase of what would become the Tom Reed and surrounding gold mines. The hotel's original name was the Drulin Hotel (after the original owner), and it was specifically built to serve the influx of prospectors, mining engineers, and supporting workforce that was beginning to arrive in the Black Mountains. The building is two stories of adobe-style construction with thick walls — practical for the desert heat and a typical Southwestern commercial building style of the period.

The hotel survived a major Oatman fire in 1921 that destroyed much of the rest of the original Main Street commercial district. Most of the buildings on Main Street today were rebuilt after the 1921 fire; the Oatman Hotel is the only significant pre-1921 commercial structure remaining in the town. This makes it not only the oldest building in Oatman but also one of the oldest continuously-operating hotels in northwest Arizona — over 120 years of essentially continuous hospitality use across the mining boom, the Route 66 era, the post-1953 decline, and the modern Route 66 nostalgia revival.

The building was renamed the Oatman Hotel during the mid-20th century; the exact date of the renaming is debated locally but is generally placed in the 1950s or 1960s. The building has had several ownership changes across the decades; the current owners have operated the hotel since the early 2000s and have invested substantially in preserving the historic character while maintaining the ground-floor restaurant and saloon as a working tourist business. The hotel rooms upstairs are generally no longer rented as overnight lodging — modern fire safety codes and the limited demand make ongoing overnight operation impractical — but the Honeymoon Suite and several other rooms are preserved as a small historic museum.

The Gable-Lombard honeymoon story is the single most-told Oatman narrative beyond the burros and the mining history. Clark Gable was at the peak of his career in 1939 — Gone With the Wind was filming during the spring and would release that December, with Gable in the role that defined his stardom. Carole Lombard was already an established major star known primarily for screwball comedy roles but with substantial dramatic range. The two had been a Hollywood couple for several years and had decided to marry in early 1939 after Gable's divorce from his second wife was finalized.

They drove from Los Angeles to Kingman in late March 1939 specifically to avoid the Hollywood press. The Kingman wedding was on March 29, 1939, at a small civil ceremony with only a few witnesses; immediately after the ceremony the couple drove the 28 miles southwest along the Oatman Highway to spend their first night as a married couple at the Oatman Hotel. The choice of Oatman was deliberate: the hotel was remote, the town was small, and the press was unlikely to track them there. The couple stayed one night in what is now Room 15 before continuing back to California.

Tragically, Lombard died less than three years later — on January 16, 1942, in a TWA airliner crash on Mount Potosi in southern Nevada, returning to Los Angeles after a war-bond fundraising tour. She was 33. Gable was devastated and never fully recovered emotionally; he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II in part as a way of coping with her death. Gable returned to acting after the war and remarried twice more before his own death in 1960, but he asked to be buried next to Lombard, and the two are interred together at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The Oatman Hotel Honeymoon Suite remains as a small but genuinely poignant memorial to a marriage that ended far too quickly.

The dollar-bill ceiling and walls in the Oatman Hotel saloon and restaurant are one of the most visually distinctive interior spaces on all of Route 66. Every horizontal and vertical interior surface — the ceiling, the walls, the support beams, the bar back, the picture frames — is covered with thousands of dollar bills, most signed and dated by the visitor who left them. The total accumulated dollar value is estimated at well over $100,000 and continues to grow daily.

The tradition originated in the 1920s gold-miner era. Local lore is that miners would tack a "lucky" dollar to the saloon ceiling before heading out for a shift in the mines, with the idea that if they returned safely they would have a dollar waiting for a celebratory drink, and if they didn't return, the dollar would be there for the next miner who needed one. The practice continued through the Route 66 era — truckers and travelers would leave a dollar before continuing on their drive — and through the post-1953 decline period when local residents and occasional visitors kept the tradition alive.

Modern visitors are welcome to add their own dollar bill to the ceiling. The standard procedure: write your name and the date on a dollar bill, ask the bar staff for tape or a small thumbtack, and stick the bill to a free section of wall or ceiling. Many visitors stick their dollar next to one with their hometown or with a meaningful date already written on it. The bills are never taken down — the entire accumulated collection is part of the building's character and is one of the things that's protected by the National Register listing. The dollar-bill ceiling is genuinely worth seeing in person; photographs do not adequately convey the density of accumulated bills covering every surface.

The Honeymoon Suite tour is the most distinctive single Oatman Hotel experience beyond the dollar-bill ceiling and the ground-floor restaurant. The suite — Room 15 on the second floor — is preserved essentially as it was on March 29, 1939, with the original 1930s-era furniture, period-appropriate decoration, framed photographs of Gable and Lombard during the late 1930s, copies of newspaper clippings from the wedding period, and various memorabilia. Visitors pay $1 at the ground-floor bar and are then directed upstairs to view the suite at their own pace. The room is small and the visit is brief — typically 5-10 minutes — but is genuinely moving for visitors who care about classic Hollywood history.

Beyond the Honeymoon Suite, the second-floor hallway and several other preserved rooms are accessible during the suite tour. The hallway itself is essentially unchanged from the early 1900s — narrow, with period wallpaper, original wood floors, and small framed photographs of the Oatman gold-mining era. Several other rooms have been preserved as small period displays showing how working miners would have stayed at the hotel during the 1910s and 1920s. The combination of the Honeymoon Suite and the broader second-floor period preservation produces a substantive small historical experience.

The hotel staff (typically the owners or longtime employees) are knowledgeable about the building's history and are generally happy to answer questions, share local lore, and point out specific features visitors might miss on their own. The suite tour is one of the better-value $1 historical experiences on Route 66 — the kind of small-scale, locally-operated preservation effort that gives Oatman its distinctive character.

The Oatman Hotel is the natural anchor for any Oatman visit. The standard plan: arrive in Oatman by late morning after the Kingman drive, walk Main Street and photograph the burros for 30-45 minutes, watch the noon gunfight reenactment on Main Street, then go directly to the Oatman Hotel for lunch at the ground-floor restaurant (cold beer and a burger or hot dog — see the companion Oatman Hotel Restaurant entry), the $1 Honeymoon Suite tour, and time to study the dollar-bill ceiling in detail. The combined hotel experience typically takes 60-90 minutes.

After the hotel, the standard continuation is the 2pm gunfight reenactment on Main Street, additional shop browsing, and either a Tom Reed Mine area tour (typically $12) or the start of the westbound Oatman Highway drive toward Topock and the California border. For Route 66 travelers continuing west, the post-Oatman drive is the dramatic Sitgreaves Pass and Black Mountains descent to the Colorado River — see the companion Oatman Highway entry for the full driving context.

For visitors based in Kingman, the Oatman Hotel is the standard halfway-point destination for a half-day Oatman trip. The drive is 28 miles each way (roughly 50-60 minutes per direction), so a typical itinerary involves leaving Kingman by 10am, arriving Oatman by 11am, spending three to four hours including hotel time, and returning to Kingman by mid-afternoon. The combination of the Oatman drive, the burros, the hotel, and the gunfight reenactment is the standard Kingman-area Route 66 day trip.