The Wallkill Central School District’s offices are located on Main Street in the Hamlet of Wallkill, which is part of the Town of Shawangunk in Ulster County. A large, all white stone structure, the building has housed many businesses over the years ranging from a hardware store to a bank- an intact safe is all that remains as a testament to this prior life in the basement. One of its more interesting uses was as an illegal saloon/hotel called the Commercial House and owned by Willett M. Roos.
Willett Roos was originally a farmer who lived in what later became known as the Hamlet of Wallkill. In the late 19th century, Roos decided to give up farming, and he purchased the brick building that had been built earlier to be used as a hardware store. Roos went to work altering the building to better suit it as a hotel-the third hotel in Wallkill. When Roos finally opened for business, he named his hotel The Commercial House. He would run the business with his wife, which as was the case with another Wallkill hotel owned by Hugh O’Donnell. It was only natural that the two hotels would compete when it came to business. This included trying to woo customers away, but how did it come to involve Roos’s wife?
According to the 1880 census, Hugh O’Donnell was married to a woman named Mary. She was listed in the same census as thirty-three years old and a landlady. Mr. and Mrs. O’Donnell also had a young daughter. When the two men met, Roos was also married for a number of years, with two young sons. O’Donnell was described in the newspapers as a “fast liver” yet very common looking. O’Donnell, according to newspapers, became enamored with Mrs. Roos. The two created a scandal by eloping.
Shortly after eloping, O’Donnell was found dead in Mount Ida Cemetery in Troy, New York of an apparent suicide. (It does not appear he was buried there.) There was no mention of his “wife” who had robbed Roos of most of his money before stealing away with O’Donnell in 1882. It also seems to be a turning point in Willett Roos’s life. Willett Roos moved on with his life, marrying in 1889 a woman named Merabah. The two had children and continued to run the boarding house where Roos also sold liquor without a license.
Shawangunk was for a good chunk of its life a dry town. However, it did not deter the boarding houses from selling beer or homemade alcohol. Frank B. Mentz, in Shawangunk Hearths: Recollections of an Old Timer, remembered that the locals called Roos’s concoction “liquid dynamite.”
One such individual who visited the hotel for some drink was none other than Gardiner’s own desperado, Big Bad Bill Monroe. He frequented the Commercial House when he lived with family on “King’s Hill” in Walden, located a short distance away.
Monroe, on at least one occasion, was so drunk that Willet Roos refused to serve him. Monroe and a family member tore the hotel apart before fleeing back to King’s Hill. This seemed like the beginning of troubles for Roos for in September 1906 he was indicted on two counts for selling liquor from his establishment, and also not having a license to do so. His conviction stemmed from selling alcohol to S.R. Craft in April 1906, Charles Boas in August 1906, and W. Courter the following month in 1906.
He was finally arrested in 1907 and bail was set at 2,000 dollars by Judge Betts. A local friend, George B. Mentz, who owned a brick mould factory in Walden, posted the bail. A problem was encountered with the bail because the collateral that Mentz put up already had a lien on it for some 1,500 dollars. Roos was hauled back to Kingston when another individual, W.D. Brinnier from Newburgh, stepped up to bail a sixty-three-year old Roos out of jail once again.
Willett Roos’s hotel business came to an end in 1910 when he passed away at age sixty-six. His wife ran the hotel for one more year; according to Mentz the building was used as a bank from 1912 until the 1950s when the bank moved to the center of town. Once this bank moved the old building was sold to the Wallkill Central School District.
History Made Seamless 
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