Jerusalem Hotel

The group purchased a small plot of land to the North of Jaffa and built several wooden structures with pre-fabricated pieces that they had brought with them from America.

As their finances dwindle and their spirit cracks, the Drisco brothers are forced to sell to a German missionary by the name of Peter Martin Metzler [de] in order to afford travel fare back to Maine.

On 5 March 1869 Metzler sold the hotel and all its property to the leaders of the Temple Society, Christoph Hoffmann and Georg David Hardegg,[1] who had settled in Haifa a year earlier with the wish to redeem the Holy Land by an active and industrious lifestyle.

Their travel agency Thomas Cook accommodated the imperial guests in the "Hôtel du Parc", owned by the German Protestant Plato von Ustinov.

[5] The further imperial entourage stayed at the Jerusalem Hotel (then Seestraße, today's Auerbach Street, at number 6; רחוב אוארבך), owned by the Templer Ernst Hardegg,[5] also US vice-consul seated in Jaffa between 1871 and 1909.

[6] Thus William II, as summus episcopus [de] (Supreme governor of the Evangelical State Church in Prussia's older Provinces) kept the balance between Templers and Protestants at his visit, whose two denominations were quite in trouble with each other at that time.