Frontier House (Fairbanks Restaurant)

The story

Benjamin Barton, Samuel Barton and Joshua Fairbanks put the Frontier House up in 1824 — eighteen workers, eighteen months, stone brought from the Bay of Quinte at the northeast end of Lake Ontario. What they got was a four-story Federal pile with 30-inch solid walls, fifteen fireplaces, oval windows and a full-width porch, raised in a village the British had burned barely a decade earlier. It was called the best hotel west of Albany, and the register backs it: DeWitt Clinton, Charles Dickens, Samuel Clemens, Jenny Lind, William McKinley.

Then, 1826. William Morgan, a Batavia man about to publish Illustrations of Masonry, was arrested on manufactured charges, taken from jail on the night of September 12, and put in a carriage that reached Fort Niagara two days later. He was never seen again. Lewiston sits on that road, six miles from the fort, and local accounts put him in this building on the way. Convictions followed — Sheriff Eli Bruce served 28 months — and the case launched the Anti-Masonic Party, the first American third party to take electoral votes. The attic-Masons and basement-burial stories are folklore, not court record.

It was listed on the National Register on July 8, 1974, which did not stop McDonald's from leasing it in 1977 and selling Quarter Pounders under 1824 stonework for 27 years. It closed in 2004 and sat empty long enough for ghost hunters to film the outside. The village bought it in July 2013 and sold it in 2019; Ellicott Development spent nearly six years on the rehab. On June 27, 2025 Fairbanks opened on the ground floor, co-owned by Jake Strawser and Dan Hagen — the surname over the door belongs to one of the three men who built the place. Upstairs are six short-term rentals and five leased apartments. People live in it again.