The St. Clair Inn, a 1926 Tudor on the river

In the 1920s the St. Clair River was where the fastest boats in America were built and tested — Chris-Craft and Gar Wood and Hacker turning out gleaming mahogany powerboats just upriver and down. A town at the center of all that, the local boosters decided, needed a hotel to match. So in 1925 a group of St. Clair businessmen pooled their money into a hotel corporation, sold shares to the public, and hired a Port Huron architect named Walter Wyeth to build them something grand right at the water’s edge.

What opened in 1926 was a long, low Tudor Revival inn — English brick and white half-timbered plaster, gabled roofs, sixty rooms looking out at the river traffic. Wyeth modeled it on the country inns of England, and it leaned hard into its setting: overnight steamers still ran the river then, and the inn was built to catch that trade, a comfortable landing for travelers stepping off a boat. For decades it was the place in town — the long riverside porch, the boardwalk out front, the freighters sliding past close enough to read their names.

Then it nearly died. By the 2010s the inn had closed, fallen into disrepair, and become the kind of beautiful old hulk that towns either lose or rescue. St. Clair rescued it. A developer poured roughly forty million dollars into a top-to-bottom restoration — new guest rooms, riverfront cottages, the half-timbering and brick brought back — and the inn reopened in 2019 after years dark.

Stand on the boardwalk in front of it today and the scene rhymes with 1926: the Tudor gables behind you, a thousand-foot freighter out front, the river doing what it has always done. The boats are steel now instead of mahogany, but the inn is still watching them go by.