Before Beatlemania, George Harrison visited his sister’s family in Benton, Illinois, in September 1963, spending days in the small coal-mining town about 100 miles southeast of St. Louis. Harrison’s trip to the house—now at the center of another effort to secure its future—combined ordinary-seeming stops and music-related moments that later became part of Beatles lore, including time camping, visiting a local record store and buying a guitar.
The property itself is a five-bedroom bungalow built in 1935 with a brick facade and a wide front porch. It is listed for $105,000, according to the Benton resident who has operated the site since it stopped functioning as a Beatles-themed bed-and-breakfast.
After Harrison stayed there during his unassuming visit, local people said they didn’t see him again for years. The next time many Americans saw him was on the “Ed Sullivan Show” as part of the Beatles’ U.S. debut about four months later, with the British Invasion underway.
During Harrison’s Benton trip, the account says he camped in Shawnee National Forest, sat in with a local group when they played at a nearby Veterans of Foreign Wars hall, and went to a drive-in restaurant where carhops wore skates and he drank root beer. At a record store on Benton’s downtown square, Harrison bought a pile of vinyl, including James Ray’s R&B single “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You,” as well as a Rickenbacker 425 guitar like the one bandmate John Lennon owned.
The house’s Beatles connection also includes a local radio appearance recounted by Marcia Schafer Raubach, then 17. Raubach said she met Harrison in Benton and that he gave her a copy of “She Loves You,” telling her it had just hit the top of the British charts; she later described Harrison as “very clean cut,” “personable and mannerly,” and as the “quiet Beatle.”
In the mid-1990s, the house faced a different kind of pressure. The AP account says a state agency bought the property with plans to flatten it for parking, and activists including Harrison’s sister, Louise Harrison Caldwell, stepped in to save it in part because it was seen as an important tie to Harrison’s life before global fame. Local investors eventually repurchased the house from the state.
Those investors reopened the property as the Hard Day’s Nite Bed and Breakfast, featuring Beatles memorabilia such as items loaned by author and documentarian Robert Bartel. The bed-and-breakfast operated until 2010, after which the property shifted to regular bed-and-bath apartments under operator Grady Adams, who now wants to sell.
Whether the next chapter resembles the Beatles-themed era is uncertain. Jim Kirkpatrick, an author who wrote “Before He Was Fab” and said it has been optioned for a movie, told of at least one conversation with someone considering purchase. But Robert Rea, a historian who helped save the house three decades ago, said the intense momentum he associated with the 1995 rescue is no longer present.
Adams said, “Of course, if it doesn’t get demo’d, I would prefer that,” and Benton Mayor Lee Messersmith said the city council has not discussed adopting an ordinance to protect the house from demolition by a new owner, according to the AP account.