Fort Cumberland Hotel Photograph by Kathleen McKenney, courtesy of the City of Cumberland

The six-story brick Fort Cumberland Hotel was a typical small city hotel. Among its significant features are the classically inspired stone ornamentation and the belt courses between the fifth and sixth floors. The design also included a dentilled stone cornice, as well as a carved panel frieze and triglyphs. On these triglyphs are clusters of flowers which appear above the upper story windows. Generally, hotels from this period provided a lobby, dining room, and a ballroom or smaller gathering rooms on the first floor. These first floor spaces were often used by local organizations, which hotel owners encouraged to create greater ties between their business and the community. The upper floors contained the guest rooms. By the 1920s most guest rooms in small city hotels had their own bathrooms, while just three decades earlier individual bathrooms would have been quite rare.

The Fort Cumberland Hotel is located at the corner of Baltimore and Liberty Sts., and is a contributing building to the Downtown Cumberland Historic District. Now the Cumberland Arms, it is not open to the public.

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