HARPERS FERRY -- Story By Christine Miller Ford
Dale Brechlin says it's only natural that a growing number of people plan to stay at his campground here and take the commuter train into Washington, D.C., for President-elect Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration.
"People are excited to get to see history being made -- our first black president," said Brechlin, general manager of the Harpers Ferry KOA Campground. "Where better to stay than in Harpers Ferry, where John Brown's raid made history and led to the Civil War?"
Actually, most inaugural-goers are being driven by a more practical motivation than a love of history: There are precious few rooms to be had Jan. 19 any closer to D.C.
"Our hotel and all the hotels in this whole area are completely full, quite honestly,'' said Tom Belfield, general manager of the Holiday Inn, a 120-room hotel just off Interstate 81 in Martinsburg, about a 90-minute drive from Washington.
"The fact is, there are practically no rooms anywhere between us and the White House. Maybe a few mom-and-pop places still have rooms, but I don't know if that's even the case anymore."
The Obama overflow didn't begin to affect hotels in the Eastern Panhandle immediately after the Nov. 4 vote.
"There are literally hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms closer to Washington than we are," Belfield said. "As all those hotels started to fill up in the days after the election, then we started getting calls. Now we just say, 'Sorry. We're full.' We don't have any suggestions to offer."
Carolyn Myers, front desk clerk at the Best Western-Berkeley Springs Inn in Morgan County, said the 57-room hotel has no rooms left for Jan. 19 thanks to bus tours from Alabama and Florida.
"It definitely surprised me because we're almost two hours from D.C.," she said. "But people want to be there, so they're willing to stay wherever they have to, I guess."
Maybe it shouldn't have been such a surprise. Hundreds of people commute to jobs in Washington each weekday from the Eastern Panhandle, thanks to two MARC trains that leave Martinsburg in the pre-dawn darkness and arrive back between 6:50 and 9:20 p.m. Hundreds of others commute to D.C. or its closer-in suburbs by car.
MARC may run additional routes from the Panhandle to D.C. on Jan. 20, said Brian S. Bolger, trainmaster for the Brunswick line, which includes stops in Martinsburg, Duffields and Harpers Ferry.
At the campground in Harpers Ferry, Brechlin said Obama supporters from all over -- including New Jersey, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Georgia, Texas and California -- already have booked cabins or rooms in the lodge. Some are coming as early as Jan. 17, and some will stay through the week, he said.
"We're not completely full yet, but we're about halfway there -- and that just doesn't happen in January," he said.
Brechlin noted that 2009 will bring not only Obama's inauguration, but the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves, and the 150th anniversary of Brown's bold attempt to end slavery by taking over the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.
"It's incredible to think about," he said.
Brechlin is looking forward to the campground's atmosphere come mid-January.
"It'll probably be a lot like when we do a pirates weekend or a 'Death by Chocolate' theme," he said, "so many people all interested in the same things."
At the Holiday Inn in Martinsburg, Belfield said he doesn't expect to be caught up in a special Obama-related energy.
"For us, it's kind of like any other night when we're booked up,'' he said. "For them, it'll be exciting to be part of the inauguration. What we'll see is a lot of tired people come in late in the evening and get up and leave early in the morning."
