Rutherford Hotel
Hotel in Nelson, New Zealand
The Rutherford Hotel (named after Sir Ernest Rutherford) is a luxury accommodation hotel in Nelson, New Zealand. It is the biggest hotel in Nelson and the city's tallest building. It is part of the chain company Heritage Hotels, which have hotels based in many locations around New Zealand.
History
The Freemasons' Arms on the corner of Trafalgar and Bridge Streets received one of the first eight liquor licenses issued in the Nelson area in 1842. The hotel had various names during its history and was last called the Central Hotel. Its last owner, DB Breweries, closed it in December 1972 and transferred the liquor license to its new hotel, the DB Rutherford Hotel, which was officially opened on 18 December 1972 by Prime Minister Norman Kirk. It was named after Ernest Rutherford, who was born in nearby Brightwater (then called Spring Grove).
The land that the hotel is built on previously housed Nelson Breweries, which stemmed from the merger of two of Nelson's larger breweries. Previous Mayors of Nelson involved in the companies include Joseph Dodson and Joseph Auty Harley; the latter lived in Fifeshire House next door to Rutherford Hotel. Nelson Breweries were purchased by DB Breweries in 1969, and that provided the land on which the hotel was to be built.
“Rutherford Hotel” enters the record as hotel in Nelson, New Zealand. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rutherford, Hotel and Nelson can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 26, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7383342. Authority coordinates are -41.276, 173.284. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1842, 1972 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rutherford Hotel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.