Jackson $4 million ‘Fixer-Upper’ Tied To Iconic Wort Hotel And Lynyrd Skynyrd

The cute little Gingerbread house at 165 Gros Ventre in Jackson, Wyoming, turns out to be something special after all.

The two-bedroom, two-bath home listed for $4 million and was described as something of a fixer-upper in one of Jackson’s pricy and most exclusive neighborhoods, the Gill Addition.

A broker with Keller Williams Jackson Hole had told Cowboy State Daily most of the value in the property was in the two lots the home straddles.

Many developers have bought such homes in Jackson and torn them down, replacing the one older home with two new ones.

But it would be something of an architectural tragedy if that happens with this house, said a former resident of the home, Kim Harpster. That’s because the house in question used to be the home of Jess and Lillian Wort, who built Jackson’s legendary The Wort Hotel.

“It was actually built before the Wort Hotel was built,” Harpster told Cowboy State Daily. “It was built in 1939 and The Wort Hotel was built in 1941. And it was built by the same architect, who was from Idaho Falls.”

The Wort Hotel’s architect was John L. “Ren” Grimmett. To design the Worts’ small stone house, Grimmett used stone from the Gros Ventre valley and the same distinctive English Tudor lines and angles that he later echoed in The Wort Hotel.

A photo of the home in the book “Meet Me at the Wort” notes the similarity of design between the home and the hotel.

‘Moved It Down The Street That Way’

The Worts’ home used to be located on Pearl Street, Harpster told Cowboy State Daily. It was moved in the 1950s, by her dad, Dennis Lundahl. He had bought the home with the idea of building a new motel on the parcel, but the family lived in the home a couple of years first before moving it.

After that, they moved the home to its present location. Harpster remembers the home getting jacked up, foundation and all.

“They just put it up on stilts and moved it down the street that way,” she said.

That caused a few cracks, but no major structural damage. Harpster’s father also dug up several pine trees from the original location to transplant at the new one.

Growing Up In The Wort Home

Harpster was about 9 years old when the Wort home was moved, and she remembers it as a very cool place to grow up.

The Wort house was the kind of place that fires a young child’s imagination.

At the original location, there was an old coal bin that opened with the most terrible of noises.

“Ka-ching, Kka-ching, ka-ching,” Harpster said, mimicking it.

She never went into the coal bin by herself to hide or hang out, partly because it made so much noise when it opened, but also because it could not be opened from the inside if the door closed.

But the dirt floor wine cellar at the Pearl Street location was another matter. That space was full of interesting wine bottles, and it kept an even, cool temperature year-round. It was a fun space to hide out in.

Both the coal bin and wine cellar were eventually filled in after Harpster’s dad moved the home to the Gill Addition, making room for his Pony Express Motel.

At the time, the motel boasted that it was Jackson’s first motel with a swimming pool.

It was Harpster’s job to mind that pool as a teenager. That meant cleaning it early every morning — and sometimes again if a storm blew dirt into the pool during the day.

She also closed it up each day and made sure everything would be in order for it to re-open the next day.

The pool has since been filled in and turned into a parking lot, Harpster said.

The Gill Addition Years

There were still cool places in the Wort home once it was moved to the Gill Addition.

“There was this little cubby in between the fireplace and the front of the house,” she recalled. “You’d go through a dark closet to get to it. You could hide in there, and we used to play in there all the time.”

The downstairs was also pretty cool, Harpster added.

“Where the furnace used to be — the chimney that’s in the middle of the house — Dad turned that flue into a fireplace that you could barbecue on in the winter,” she said. “He liked to barbecue, and of course it’s eight months of winter in Jackson.”

Growing up, the family often had moose and deer in the backyard.

“We had one particular moose that would come back with her babies ever year,” Harpster said. “And they would lay down in the backyard.”

The rabbits Harpster and her family kept eventually had to be moved because of the moose, so that the family could get to the rabbits to feed them.

“It wasn’t uncommon to wake up and find 20 deer had appeared in our backyard overnight,” Harpster said. “And my daughter ended up feeding one particular deer they called Spotty because she had a little scar on her nose.”

Harpster and her husband eventually bought the home she and her sister grew up in from her dad, and she and her husband owned it until about 1996. She said they had decided to move to Pennsylvania to be closer to her husband’s family.

Harpster is saddened to realize that she and her husband likely could never have afforded to keep the Wort home if they had decided to stay in Jackson.

“I understand the taxes on that home are now $23,000 a year,” she said.

Harpster said that her father was among those warning early on back in the 1970s that Jackson needed to get a handle on affordable housing for workers.

“He was president of the motel-hotel association for about three years,” Harpster said. “And he was telling them then, if we don’t start building places for our hired help we’re going to end up like Aspen.”

A Lynyrd Skynyrd Connection

Harpster recalls at one time that her dad rented the home to Gary Rossington, a founding guitarist with the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“He lived in that house for two years while (Rossington and his wife) were building their home out (by) the Elk Refuge,” Harpster said. “And my neighbor tells me that a couple of years later he came back and bought it. So, Gary owned that house for a little while.”

There’s a funny story about that, Harpster said.

“My dad didn’t even know who (Rossington) was at the time,” she said. “He came back and told me he’d rented the house to this guy who had hair down the middle of his back and my dad, you know, by then had kind of softened up toward the hippie movement, and he says, ‘I really like him because he can pay his rent six months in advance.’”

When Harpster asked for a few more details her dad told her, “Well, he’s some member of some famous rock and roll band.”

That’s when Harpster figured out that it was Rossington, the last surviving member of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Rossington’s bandmates were killed in a 1977 plane crash. Rossington emerged with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a punctured stomach and liver, but survived.

Rossginton died last year of unknown causes, and his widow sold off their Jackson holdings not long after.

Harpster hopes someone buys the former Wort home who will care about its ties to Jackson history enough to save it instead of tearing it down to build new.

“The house was beautifully built at the time,” she said. “It’s a little English Tudor, it’s not a cottage. It’s a little English Tudor home, and we had lots of good memories there in that house.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.