A 16-pound, three-inch thick guest registration book with about 320 pages filled with hundreds of names of the guests who stayed at the Farrington Hotel in Volga in 1883-84 has been donated to the Brookings County Museum.

The Farrington was one of four hotels in Volga in the early 1880s. It was built in the winter of 1879-80 when Volga was the Chicago North Western Railroad’s track terminus for that long, hard winter of halted rail laying work. The Farrington, a two-story, nearly half-block long woodframe building located about where the old creamery building is now located near the railroad tracks on Main Street, was much in demand in the 1880s and 1890s. It was the premier hotel in Volga. In addition to room rentals and a busy restaurant, it enjoyed a thriving liquor business.

The four hotels provided temporary housing for hundreds of off-work railroad employees waiting for the next construction season, settlers arriving to take up nearby homestead land, and for the influx of salesmen (then known as drummers) who were constantly locating in or passing through town. Hundreds more travelers elected to stay overnight after a jarring ride on the newly-built Chicago and North Western rail line which passed through Volga headed east or west four times daily.

Volga was a busy, thriving place.

The Farrington’s old registration book is something like a twice -iven gift to the curious and to historians. It was first a book of arrivals to Volga, but after its pages were filled with guests checking into the historic hotel it was no longer useful. The book was somehow acquired by the Leeds Importing Company and about half of those huge pages with hotel guest names were used to file away the company’s invoices and salesmen’s expense account reports.

Leeds Importing bought and sold horses and had an army of salesmen who covered the Mid-west, “drumming up” sales and providing related services for its world-wide horse business. Among the many invoices in the book are salesmen’s expense reports that include costs of everything from railway fares throughout the Midwest to hotel prices, including meal prices and the cost of hay, oats and blacksmith charges, among other travel and horse-related costs during the late 1880s and early 1890s.

One expense account report includes “bedding car, hay, etc. 75 cents; rope, 25 cents ; supper @ Grand Island, 40 cents; Railroad fare, $2.20; horse feed, 25cents,” and “meal at Omaha, 50 cents.”

Often the drummers set up offices for doing business in hotels around the sales territory, then advertised in the local newspaper and invited interested buyers to see them at the make-shift hotel “office,” so there is a relationship between the big book of Farrington Hotel guest registrants and its later use as a unique filing system for the Leeds Company and its “Olive Branch Stock Farm” at Adrian, Minnesota.

The invoices and other paper records were “filed” by pasting them over the hotel guest names on about a hundred of the pages, so many hotel guest names are lost forever. But other pages are packed with names of Volga’s “stopper’s by,” during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The most unusual “stopper by” listed in the 1883-84 registry section of the book is the guest who appears to have checked in to the Farrington after arriving in Volga aboard one of the four Chicago and North Western trains that stopped in town daily.

The name “Stephen Grover Cleveland, Albany, N.Y.”, and one other name, unreadable, are the only listings in the record book indicating who stayed at the Farrington on Dec. 30, 1883.

Interestingly, future president Stephen Grover Cleveland was then serving as governor in the state’s capitol, Albany, N. Y. He served as New York’s governor from Jan. 1, 1883 to Jan. 6, 1885, when he resigned to seek the presidency.

Is the listing of a future president the real thing?

It could be, but that will take further and very detailed research.

Possibly the listing is merely a joke dreamed up by some bored post-New Year’s Day clerk at the Farrington Hotel in Volga, Dakota Territory.

Perhaps not.

But since business at the hotel on any day of the year usually amounted to from 10 to 20 guests checking in and registering, the fact that only two listings are mentioned on Dec. 30 adds to the mystery.

And common sense would ask “why” the governor of New York would be traveling with just one aide out in far-off Dakota Territory in the first place? Surely the Farrington Hotel clerk would have indicated the number of all of the governor’s traveling entourage if the listing was legitimate.

It should be noted that years later, as president, Cleveland was instrumental in the preliminary work of forming and signing into law the framework of creating a North and South Dakota, although President Benjamin Harrison later did the actual signing in 1889.

Another Grover Cleveland listing mystery is that after his name in the registration book is the letter “V” printed in the column used to indicate the meal needs of each registrant, with the clerk writing in either a “B” (breakfast), a “D” (dinner) or an “S” (supper). None of those letters are written in the column after Cleveland’s name, but the column mysteriously includes the letter “V”.

What does that stand for?

No one knows, so for now, the Brookings County Museum board is skeptical of the Cleveland signing being the actual signature or an indication that future president Cleveland actually stopped in Volga. More research will be done to try to find answers to the mystery.

Another book mystery is how the tome found its way back to Volga after more than a century.

Well, a message about the book was recently left on the museum phone’s answering machine from a man named Henry Exoo of New Ulm, Minnesota. His message was followed up by museum board officers, Treasurer Darla Strande and Vice-President Phil Wagner, and they learned that now retired Exoo had once worked as a hotel clerk in New Ulm.

A stranger, then the book’s owner, had heard of Exoo’s hotel work and of his brief knowledge of Volga and one day just dropped the book off at Exoo’s home, giving no explanation of where the book had been, how he had acquired it, or anything else about the book.

During discussions with Strande and Wagner, Exoo offered to donate the book to the Brookings County Museum.

At that offer, Phil Wagner sent Exoo a check for $23 to cover the cost of mailing it to the museum, where after more than 14 mysterious decades, it is finally “back home.”

Cecil wrote this piece for The Window, the official newsletter of the Brookings County Historical Society.