floor was adorned with a wrought iron balcony, echoing the wooden one that had adorned the Stine House. The hotel's lobby was lavishly decorated with red carpet, oak furniture, potted plants, polished brass spittoons and a grand piano. The rooms were no less accommodating and even came with a free pitcher of ice water. Other guest services included a larger restaurant, a barber shop, a Turkish Bath and later a first-class bar and a grill room featuring live music. Officially opened for business on November 1, 1899, the revived building once again became Walla Walla's premier hotel and thanks to its proximity to the Keylor Grand Opera House, the regions's main Vaudeville venue, the Dacres would see such notable guests as Louisa May Alcott, John Philip Sousa, Harry Lauder and Al Jolson, among others. The hotel suffered another large interior fire in 1905, caused by a shorting electrical fan, but remained open while repairs were made. In 1907, the hotel's then manager, Art Harris (a previous manager of the Geyser Grand Hotel in Baker City, Oregon), commissioned Portland architects Bennes, Hendricks & Tobey to completely remodel the hotel, with plans calling for a complete interior remodel, adding one or even two floors and an elevator, but this never fully came to pass. With a scaled-back interior remodeling complete, the hotel reopened on 1 April 1908, touting a new European Plan. The hotel was visited by another president when William Howard Taft made his visit to Walla Walla in 1911. By the 1920s, many other larger and more modern hotels were opening in town, and the Dacres settled in as a mid-range traveler's hotel, housing road and railroad crews and itinerant farm workers. The hotel officially left the Dacres family in 1921 when it was sold to E.C. Davis, who had previously run the Revere Hotel in Pomeroy, Washington. In 1924 Eugene Tausick, a leading businessman and the owner of the company in charge of the rival Grand Hotel, purchased the hotel from Davis. While various upgrades were made to the interior and the storefronts over the years, and while several pediments and finials were removed or lost from the top of the building, the Dacres's outward appearance remains much as it had been in 1899, as it was spared the fate of urban renewal which claimed many historic buildings in the surrounding blocks in the 1950s and '60s. The hotel