Bountiful Bed & Breakfasts Ensure a Relaxing Visit to Prattville Area
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Want to avoid that hotel room at the end of the hall, the one next to the ice machine?
If you’re visiting Prattville, lodging isn’t a problem – you can take your pick of unique, locally owned bed and breakfast inns. From historic homes to newer structures, the Prattville B&B community has something to suit everyone.
Take the Rocky Mount Bed & Breakfast. Built in 1891, the facility not only houses guests, but also does a brisk wedding business in its gardens and features the Pumpkin Junction festival in the fall, as well as the holiday-themed ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.
“My husband says I’m like a butterfly, always looking for another flower to pollinate,” says owner Sharron Cobb, explaining how she got into the B&B business in 1999. The home was built by Jim Cobb’s great-grandparents and was restored in 1982. After the Cobbs’ children were grown, they converted the large home into its current incarnation.
“We tease the boys, tell them they have to make reservations before they come home to visit,” Cobb says.
The old has also become new again over at the Plantation House, which was built in 1832. Owners Jessica and Paul Oates bought it about three years ago, and, after a year of general fix-up work, opened the B&B. The couple has embraced the house’s age, filling it with items such as a whisky flask taken from a victim of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as well as a pen set that allegedly once belonged to Ernest Hemingway.
Oh, and there’s the ghost. A former owner, Mr. Davis, apparently likes Plantation House so much that he doesn’t care to leave. He’s hard to spot, but is known to have a great fondness
for women and an equally strong dislike of magnolias.
“We enjoy the company we get, and it’s real enjoyable,” says Jessica Oates, who keeps mum on the subject of Mr. Davis.
If getting out of the city’s more your thing, then ride on out to the Country Hideaway Bed and Breakfast, just north of Prattville in Pine Level. The 68-acre farm offers plenty of chances to commune with nature, as well as a swimming pool and more natural bodies of water for those who choose to fish.
Owners John and Shirley Wachtel sort of backed into the B&B business when their new house turned out to be a little more than they’d bargained for.
“It was too big for us, so we decided to share it,” Shirley Wachtel says. “So we opened as a B&B in October 2003, and it’s been going great.”
Things have been so good that the Wachtels added a commercial kitchen onto the property in December 2006, and now run a catering operation as well as the B&B.
The newest entrant into the Prattville B&B community is the Smith-Byrd House Bed and Breakfast and Tea Room, which is set for a December 2007 opening. Owners David and Beth Melling say that they like B&Bs and they like high tea, so when they saw the historic 1880 home during a visit from California, they couldn’t resist.
“We saw this house a year ago, but it had an offer on it,” David Melling says. “But we’d decided that we wanted to purchase a B&B in the area, so we went back to California, sold our house and came back here. The other one we’d looked at had a change of situation, and this one had come back on the market, so here we are.”
Story by Joe Morris
Photo by Wes Aldridge
