Historic Lone Rock records from 1883 tell the history of the Commercial House, as the hotel was now called. One of three hotels in Lone Rock at that time, it was one of two imported from elsewhere, brought in and reconstructed.
On June 2, 1837, Robert and Mary Wakely and their two young sons–Chauncey and Robert–arrived at Point Basse on a keelboat that had been poled up the Wisconsin River from Portage City (now Portage). Two years before, they had left their home in New York. The Wakelys found a wilderness
The residence you see at Point Basse today is not the original “Wakely Tavern” or Wakely Inn, because that building was dismantled in 1873, the boards made into a raft, and floated down the Wisconsin River all the way to Lone Rock, Wisconsin, where it was rebuilt as a hotel.