Sutter Creek in 1850 was a booming mining settlement in what was then Calaveras County. Two brothers from Ohio, James and Samuel Porterfield, operated a dry goods store at the corner of Fiefield and Main Street. The Porterfield brothers, natives of Hancock County, Ohio, had traveled to California in early 1949 with a company of men organized in Findlay, Ohio for the purpose of crossing the plains and exploring the gold-bearing regions of California.
While they probably made a good amount of money selling supplies to the miners, in January of 1853 the Porterfield brothers sold the lot to Dwight Crandall and Jonathan Jones, who also bought the lot immediately north which bordered on Spanish Street. The original hotel was constructed on the southern corner lot. The building you see today was first constructed in 1867 and has gone through numerous structural modifications since then.
By 1854 the the American House hotel (as it was then known) was a well known hotel under the direction of Dwight Crandall that also served as an office and stage shop for Adams & Company Express, one of the first express companies established in California, preceding Wells, Fargo and Company.
Dwight's older brother Giles arrived in Sutter Creek in 1854 and assisted in operating the American House. Dwight advertised the hotel for sale in June 6, 1857, his ad (picture to the right) saying "The undersigned being about to leave this section of the country." It wasn't until 1860 that it was sold to M.JU. Little and Joseph King for $3000. Little bought King's interest a year later and operated the hotel until September 9, 1865 when a fire swept through Sutter Creek's business district, burning the hotel to the ground.
Lucretia sold the property a few months later to her brother, William E. Fifield, on May 5, 1866, who built a two story structure that stands to this day as the first and second floor of the American Exchange Hotel.
Fiefield completed the building and placed an ad (pictured to the right) in the Amador Dispatch on March 23, 1867, announcing he was open for business as the American Exchange Hotel.
Fair Edition of Amador Ledger
Nixon's work on the Hotel was described by the 1897 Amador Record earned it praise as "elegantly furnished and fitted throughout...It is headquarters for all the stage lines." The paper noted that the Hotel was painted ivory white and had Venetial glass windows done in an alligator pattern.
Nixon also enlarged the office and the dining room to seat 70 people. The hotel remained fairly unchanged until Bellotti bought the building. Nixon operated the old saloon under the name of the Sutter Club.
Bellotti's first move on buying the building was to tear the balcony off the hotel because the supporting framework was collapsing. He built the marquee that remained, emblazened with his name, until current restoration was undertaken in 2006 and the historic balcony was restored.
Bellotti also extensively remodeled the interior, remaking what was a 47-room hotel into a 29-room facility. The present configuration will yield 25 rooms, including two very nicely sized rooms on the second floor looking out over the rebuilt balcony.
The parking area to the rear of the hotel used to be the hitching post area for teams and saddle horses, and the current owner has said he has plans to ride his horse to the hotel from time to time and teather it, just as might have been done 100 years ago
The part of the hotel that now houses the banquet room was originally a theater building known as the Mahoney building, after Ann Mahoney who Malachai Nixon had married. Ann's father Jerry was one of five brothers who owned the Mahoney Mine. While Bellotti bought it at the same time as the hotel, he sold it immediately, only to repurchase it three years later.
John Bellotti never planned to get into the hotel business, rather he got there because of a bad debt. It seems that he accepted the Central Hotel, then across the street from what is now the American Exchange Hotel, as payment for a debt owed him, and operated it for three years before buying and renaming Bellotti's Inn, having discovered he liked innkeeping.
The story of the Bellotti era at the American Exchange Hotel will be added here at a later date.
