KINGWOOD — It was a moment a dozen years in the making Thursday as the Peddicord family broke ground for a new hotel, steakhouse restaurant and saloon.
Robby Peddicord, a fourth generation Preston County entrepreneur, said he didn’t do it alone. And the new business will usher in another generation of Peddicords to business with his son, Hunter, managing the facility.
The 27-room hotel called The Appalachian and steakhouse restaurant and saloon called The Hitching Post, comprise a $3.1 million investment, Peddicord said. It will include a meeting room that will accommodate 100 people and an arcade.
They have been in the works for years. Peddicord commissioned a study several years ago that showed the Kingwood area could support such a development.
He bought land across from the Kingwood Walmart, along W.Va. 7 west of town. Then came more than a year of negotiations with the State Division of Highways to get an entrance onto route 7.
Ultimately he had to buy another acre of land to get the required lines of sight, and the DOH lowered the speed limit to 45 mph along that stretch of highway. Patrons will now be able to turn directly into and out of the lot, traveling from either direction.
Site preparation is being done by Jennings Excavating and construction by Jennings Legacy Builders.
“We hope to be done and ready probably by next spring,” Buck Jennings said. “And that all depends on the weather. … And West Virginia’s probably the hardest place there is to build. You’ve got a short season to build and you never know what you’re going to encounter under the ground for sure.”
Peddicord said he fought through obstacles because, “I had a dream to build a hotel because I think our community needs a nice hotel and a nice steakhouse.”
When he got discouraged by a slumping economy, he found encouragement in President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech.
“He said every American should have a dream and if you quit your dream, your dream will never come true, and I thought, ‘well, I’m going to build that hotel.’ It’s good advice for anybody,” Peddicord said.
Jennings, who Peddicord credits with being a great help getting to this point, said this is only the beginning.
“We feel that Kingwood’s getting ready to come alive,” Jennings said. “And we feel that just a small investment like this is going to be the catalyst that’s going to make stuff start happening, where people can say ‘Yeah, we’ve got a hotel, come on down and stay.’ ”
Peddicord agreed.
“We have a lot of tourism, but no place for people to stay,” he said.
Trout fishers, rafters and others will have a place to stay now, he said.
Jennings said there’s nothing similar in Kingwood. Peddicord said he patterned the development after The Virginian hotel and The Gun Barrel Saloon in Jackson Hole, Wy. The Kingwood development will have a West Virginia theme though.
Pam Wean of Pickering Associates is the architect on the project. Potesta & Associates did site engineering, and Clear Mountain Bank is financing the project. Peddicord also thanked Jim Hall of Country Roads Digital Media.
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