About Us
Quaint and redolent in the ambience of small-town Americana like the town it is located in, The General Lew Wallace Inn has 34 spacious rooms featuring single and double beds and all amenities. The rooms are decorated with Williamsburg style furnishings. The inn offers all modern conveniences. Mini refrigerators, microwave ovens, conventional ovens, etc., are available for visits lasting more than a few nights.
The inn offers a variety of rooms and parlors with adjoining sitting rooms to create a suite.
The bar and lounge is open to all guests at no extra charge for special events or entertainment evenings.
The evening entertainment features open-stage songs and music, karaoke, live bands and live music. The Lew Lounge is the lifeline of Crawfordsville nightlife, being the most popular night club in the area.
The 58-year-old General Lew Wallace Inn is an integral part of the cultural history of Crawfordsville, being associated with General Lew Wallace who carved a niche for himself in the popular American imagination with his historical fiction. “Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ” which appeared first in 1880, was made into a blockbuster Hollywood film that continues to draw audiences even today.
The exterior walls of the Lew Wallace Inn are faced with over 125-year-old brick, saved from the demolition of a pre-Civil War factory. The interior partition walls are old ceiling beams taken from the razed factory building. Each of the huge planks is sawed from a single tree, about the same time when Ben-Hur was being written.
“We have guests coming in almost every six months over the last 30+ years with family,” the Inn’s manager says. “The Lew has been a great weekend joint for the local residents and a place for the young newly wedded couple to enjoy the honeymoon period.”
It certainly feels like a cozier world, far from the homogenous anonymity of America’s huge metropolises, where people seem to actually know each other.