170-year-old hotel for sale: One of five oldest buildings in Whiteside once housed bandits, settlers

COMO – Murderous horse bandits hid out in this old hotel, and it later became a jail. Prohibitionists met here, then it became a tavern. Prostitutes worked upstairs. Abraham Lincoln may have stayed there. So, too, might have runaway slaves.

The "Old Hotel," as local residents call it, has held the same ground on Como's sleepy Front Street as the area transformed from an outpost for marauding horse thieves to command central for Wal-Mart shipping.

Now the 170-year-old red-brick relic is for sale. Again. Price: $24,900, about what owner Jack Green put into it over the 3 years he's had it.

Green, 58, a software developer, bought the hotel across the street with the idea that he'd make a hobby of fixing it up. Now, $25,000 later, the hotel has a new roof, gutter and overhang, but Green concedes he still has "a long way to go."

Green replaced the broken window panes. He addressed the raccoon and cat infestation that had filled the limestone cellar with feces and shredded nesting material. He cleared the vines that once suffocated the building. He hauled away truckloads of junk.

What he left behind is potential. The original French doors and windows are all intact, save for a few broken panes. Massive joists support the ceilings. The hickory staircase is worn but sturdy.

"I always wanted to fix it up," Green said. "Every year I didn't have it I kept thinking, 'I gotta get a hold of it.'"

Green spent years researching the building's history, while he worked on the previous owner to sell.

A small folder contains photographs of the building's first owner, Capt. Henry Briggs Sampson, one of Como's original settlers and operator of Whiteside County's first ferry across the Rock River.

"Where else can you go around here and find a 170-year-old building still standing?"

Not too many places, said Terry Buckaloo, curator of the Sterling-Rock Falls Historical Society.

He pegs the Como Hotel as one of the five oldest standing buildings in Whiteside County.

When it was built in 1839, Whiteside County "was the Wild West," and Como and Sterling were about the same size, Buckaloo said.

The area was so wild that the hotel was a hideout for a band of ruffians known as the Banditti of the Prairie on the night some members tortured then murdered, Col. George Davenport, founder of Davenport, Iowa, and the city's wealthiest resident.

The hotel became the first stop on a now-famous manhunt that led an undercover agent from Davenport to Como, and eventually into New York and Ohio, to unravel the loosely organized gang in a script fit for Hollywood, Buckaloo said.

"It's cool to look around – think about what this building looked like 170 years ago," Green said. "I wish I could afford to fix it up. ... I get excited thinking about it."

Green's research turned up suspicions that Lincoln stayed there several times, during debates in Freeport and while practicing law in the area.

He believes the hotel was a staging area for area temperance meetings in the early 20th century, and he has reason to believe the building was once a brothel.

Much of the research is impossible to substantiate, but Green is having fun with the chase.

"I bought it because I want to be in control of what's across the street," Green said.

"I hope somebody will come along and say, 'Hey, I want to restore it to its original greatness.'"