With the ceremonial turning of the dirt last week, Downtown Thomasville is inching closer toward a hotel.

Most of the hurdles for the Courtyard by Marriott’s construction, and even its existence, have been cleared.

In a little more than a year, the ribbon cutting for the Courtyard by Marriott, on the site of the former Rose’s store at Dawson Street and Remington Avenue will be held. 

There will be construction jobs affiliated with building the hotel and afterward, there is projected to be 50 jobs in running the hotel on a day-to-day basis. 

The push for a downtown hotel started several years ago and now, the talk is becoming an actual facility that will be four stories high and have 105 rooms. Work on building the Courtyard, expected to be a $14 million project, is projected to start within a couple of weeks.

The city bought the property but eventually turned it over to the Thomasville Payroll Development Authority.

“Quite frankly, it was a unique project for us,” said Stephen Cheney of the Thomas County-Thomasville Payroll Development Authority. “We’re used to dealing with industrial projects.”

Cheney said the PDA’s mission is to create jobs and promote economic activity. “So we began to talk about a hotel,” he said.

The PDA spent four months looking at potential developers and eventually chose Southern Lodging, which wanted to put in a Courtyard by Marriott. 

There was a concern among many residents about what the hotel would look like. The developers met with a committee of residents and interested parties and they worked to put together an edifice that matched the tenor and spirit of Downtown Thomasville.

“They would not build one thing that would not be an asset to Thomasville,” Cheney said at last week’s groundbreaking. “They have done exactly what we hoped they would do.”

The developers also will help put in a class at Southern Regional Technical College for training in the hospitality field. 

We trust the developers have done a due diligence for the marketplace. Hotel owners don’t like having empty rooms, and with all that takes place in Downtown Thomasville, there should be plenty of opportunities for the Courtyard to be filled with guests. Given the number of people who visit Downtown Thomasville on the weekend, perhaps a hotel closer to downtown could convince them to stay overnight.

We look forward to the Courtyard by Marriott joining the downtown backdrop and hope it fulfills the wishes of the developers and committee who have helped steer it to this point.