Battle Ground Hotel

Battle Ground Hotel. . Adam Fralick, a descendent of a United Empire Loyalist family, watched as the tourist industry grew around the War of 18 12 battlefield at Lundy’s Lane. In 1836, he purchased this property and built the Battle Ground Hotel. Later, in 1850, Fralick built a wooden frame observation tower enclosed with latticework to the east of his hotel. Guest registers still in existence bear thousands of signatures as silent witness to the tower’s popularity as a tourist attraction., By the late 1860’s the number of visitors to Lundy’s Lane Battlefield dwindled drastically. In the late 1870’s Fralick’s wooden tower was dismantled and the hotel converted to a private residence. Adam Fralick died in 1877 and was buried in the adjacent Drummond Hill Cemetery. The property was acquired by Ruth Redmond in the mid-1950’s and donated to the City of Niagara Falls in 1996. Restored to its original appearance, the Battle Ground Hotel opened as a public museum in 2002. , Ruth Redmond , 1902-1999. Friends will remember the retired school teacher as a “unique Canadian Patriot”, a quiet, gentle woman who surrounded herself with hundreds of geraniums. At the same time, she spent much of her life aggressively acquiring as many portions of the historic Lundy’s Lane Battlefield as she could afford. She was determined that one day there would be a tribute to “Her Boys” as she called them – those soldiers who died during one of the most significant battles in Canadian History.