The owners of the Bassett Lodge put the property on the market months ago, waiting for a buyer to give a new future to their historic hotel.
And waiting. And nothing.
Then Gale Simmons and Tony Ford announced in the Journal Star late last month they were done waiting: They were going to close the 30-room lodge, once known as the grandest hotel between Sioux City and Denver and a brick fixture on Bassett’s main street since 1951.
“And then we had a lot of interest,” Simmons said. “We had people from all over the state and Colorado looking at it.”
The brother-sister owners stayed busy, showing the Bassett Lodge and Range Café to at least six potential buyers. They counted three interested parties. In the end, they fielded a pair of offers — one from eastern Nebraska and one from closer to home.
People are also reading…
The lodge will still close Dec. 20, as Simmons and Ford had planned.
But it will reopen in early January, with Dale and Mandy Davis as its new owners.
The rural Bassett couple had wanted to run a business, Dale Davis said. And they’d even joked about buying the lodge when they learned this summer it was for sale.
“About the time we decided we should go look at it was about the time they announced it was going to close,” he said. “It was kind of a coincidence but it also did light a bit of a fire. We didn’t want to see it close. It’s a big part of our community.”
The Bassett Lodge opened in 1951, built to serve the cattle buyers from across the country who were drawn to the town’s sale barn. The Rock County ranchers who put up the money spared little expense, spending $300,000 to bring heated floors, mahogany paneling and 60 rooms -- half of those with private bathrooms -- to the Sandhills.
Two generations of the Lackaff family ran the lodge for decades but it became a time capsule, the beds and bedding and wallpaper and décor relatively unchanged for more than 50 years. Near the end of his ownership, Rich Lackaff was charging just $21 per night and losing $12,000 a year.
A group of business owners took over to keep it from closing, and sold it to Simmons and Ford nearly four years ago. The new owners closed the rooms that didn’t have bathrooms and renovated those that did. They bought new beds and added TVs and coaxed the hotel into the 21st century while keeping it connected to its past.
And they were turning a profit, they said last month. But the time required to run a hotel and restaurant was taking its toll, and they put the business up for sale earlier this year.
They had a few inquiries but none of them serious. They dropped the price, from $159,000 to $145,000. Still nothing.
So they decided to close in December and, if it still hadn’t sold by spring, auction the lodge and café off -- piece by historic piece.
Instead, the lodge won’t change much under its new ownership, at least not for now.
“They’re excited and nervous and I think that’s good, because that’s the way we came in. I think they’re going to keep it as is for a while,” Simmons said. “They like the history and character of the place so I don’t think they’ll try to modernize.”
Ford and Simmons will spend some time teaching the new owners how to run the lodge and café. Dale and Mandy Davis don’t have any experience running a hotel, although her family owns the Sargent Meat Packing Company, two counties to the south.
“I grew up in a family business and as much as I might not have liked it as a kid, we thought it would be really fun, with all of our kids, to have a business we could run,” Mandy Davis said.
And Dale Davis, a state game warden, has a degree in business.
“So we’ll see if I learned anything,” he said.
They’re not originally from Rock County -- she’s from Sargent, he’s from Decatur -- but they were familiar with the business, and what it means to the community. He’s lived in Bassett for nearly 15 years and she moved there three years ago, when they married. They’ve eaten frequently at the café and their relatives have stayed at the lodge.
They toured both before they bought the business, but didn’t want to be caught taking a second look.
“It’s a small town,” Mandy Davis said. “We didn’t want the whole town trying to figure it out before we knew what we were doing.”
Dale Davis will keep his game warden job, with Mandy Davis running the lodge and restaurant’s day-to-day operations when they reopen Jan. 4.
The couple has six kids – four teens, two almost-teens. Plenty of help.
“That’s a lot of our workforce,” she said. “We should be able to keep everyone pretty busy.”