Long before "historic hotel" meant a downtown high-rise, it meant a strip of cabins by the highway. These are the motor courts and tourist camps that made it onto the National Register of Historic Places. Most of them are still taking reservations.
Every National Register motel we list, mapped coast to coast. Click a pin for the full listing.
The National Register doesn't usually think about motels. It thinks about courthouses, churches, and battlefields, buildings that hold still. But scattered through the register are a few dozen motor courts and tourist camps that made the cut anyway, for the same reason a courthouse does. They were first. First drive-up lodging in the county. First neon sign on that stretch of highway. First place a Black family could stop for the night without wondering if they'd be turned away.
Most didn't survive to tell their own story, bulldozed for a bank branch or just boarded up and abandoned. The ones on this list did. Some barely changed hands, and a few still have the founding family's name on the register. Others got a second life: a motor court in New Mexico became a boutique hotel, a stone-cabin camp in Kentucky is a campground now, and a motel in Wisconsin turned into a small shrine to the architect who built it. What they share is simpler than any of that. Walk up, ask for a room, and you can sleep in a piece of the register tonight.
Ten Worth the Detour
A handful of the register's motels, picked for the stories attached to them as much as the buildings themselves.
Parry Lodge
Kanab calls itself "Little Hollywood," and the Parry Lodge is the reason why. Starting in the 1930s, the Parry brothers put up visiting film crews shooting Westerns in the red-rock country outside town, and for the next four decades half of Hollywood passed through, from John Wayne to Ronald Reagan to Barbara Stanwyck. The lodge runs the same way it always has, low bungalow rooms around a courtyard and a dining room with headshots on the wall instead of history-plaque prose. It's a working motel first, a movie museum second.
National Register · Cave City, Kentucky
Wigwam Village No. 2
Fifteen concrete teepees in a horseshoe off Route 31W, built in 1937 and rented out one to a family at a time. It's the second of only three Wigwam Villages left standing out of the seven originally built. The plumbing and wiring are new. The shape hasn't changed since Truman was president.
National Register · Route 66 · Albuquerque, New Mexico
El Vado Auto Court
Central Avenue's oldest surviving motor court, built in 1937 in Pueblo Revival adobe with a hand-painted sign that's outlasted three attempts to tear the place down. The city bought it and restored it room by room, reopening it as an event space and short-stay lodging.
Usonian Inn
Built in Frank Lloyd Wright's low-slung Usonian style just down the road from Wright's own Taliesin estate. It's the only motel in the country built as a direct architectural tribute to him.
Rock Cabin Camp
Nine hand-built limestone cabins from 1928, a few minutes from Mammoth Cave, rented nightly by a family-run campground that's operated the site for decades.
ARRIVE Albuquerque
The 1965 Downtowner Motor Inn sat vacant for years before a $22 million restoration brought back its mid-century bones and reopened it under a new name. Not every Route 66 motel ends as a parking lot.
Cove Tourist Court
A 1937 motor court on the National Register, now booked as short-term cottage rentals rather than a front-desk motel. Same eleven-acre riverfront property, a different way of staying the night.
Twin Pines Lodge and Cabin Camp
A 1934 tourist camp on the road to Yellowstone, known locally as the Twin Pines Motel, renting log cabins under the lodgepole pines that gave the place its name.
Blue Ridge Tourist Court
A mid-century motor court along the Blue Ridge Parkway corridor, restored with its original stone construction intact and greeting travelers headed into the mountains.
Every Listed Motel, State by State
The complete list of National Register motels currently open. It updates automatically as listings change.