By the middle of the 18th century the Town of St George was in decline, largely as a result of the island’s merchants shifting their commercial operations to storehouses near their homes ‘up the country’. By 1764 things had reached such a low ebb that the vestry was willing to sacrifice a portion of King’s Square, prime real estate in the very centre of town, in the hopes of luring country merchants back to revitalise the port. They approached Edward Stiles of Southampton, the richest merchant in Bermuda, and offered him the land on the condition that he build a substantial two-storey stone house, at least 56 feet long and 20 feet high. Stiles accepted and within a year had completed Stiles House, which is now the Bank of Butterfield. He donated a further £30 toward building a market house elsewhere on the square, but the money was diverted to repairing the parish church. Much to the dismay of St Georgians, Stiles moved to Philadelphia a few years later and the house became the residence of his brother Copeland.

During the American Revolution, British troops commandeered the building as the mess house for garrison officers stationed on the island. In 1791 Copeland Stiles went bankrupt and his creditors seized his furniture and auctioned it on King’s Square. Captain Thomas Hurd of the Royal Navy lived in the house while he surveyed the island’s reefs and channels in the 1790s. About 1812 the property passed from Edward Stiles to his son-in-law, Scottish merchant John Millar. He in turn rented the building to Walter Stennett, who opened The George, a hotel, tavern and coffee house.

Stennett and his brother had originally come to Bermuda at the start of the War of 1812 as portrait painters but when that venture failed they became hotel proprietors. During the war many British naval officers boarded there but its most noteworthy guest was William Dale, a US Navy midshipman wounded in the last naval battle of the war, who died there in January 1815. Stennett’s hotel flourished until a prize ship he had purchased to supply the hotel with fresh food was captured by the French, plunging Stennett into debt, for which he was put in prison. There, the failed hotelier convinced the gaoler and a fellow prisoner to run off and the three were last seen in an open boat heading for America.

In 1819 John Millar died and his son James inherited the property and mortgaged it to a Stiles cousin to pay his father’s debts. Seven years later he was forced to sell the property at auction to avoid foreclosure. A sketch by Thomas Driver made in 1823 shows this grand Georgian edifice with four large flanking chimneys, a wide hip roof and decorative quoins on the corners and over the main door.

James Musson, of Flatts, who also owned half of Long House (see chapter 4), purchased the building in 1830 and built a number of storehouses in the rear for his shipping business. After several owners, including Musson’s sons, the Stiles House in the 1860s once again became an inn, the St George’s Hotel. Maurice Kennelly, the proprietor, added a long wooden verandah to the front of the building about this time.

Kennelly vied with the Globe Hotel across the street as the town’s top accommodation through 1883 when operations passed to Nestor Escobal. In 1910 Henry A Smith purchased it and reopened it as the Somers Inn, which offered ‘large airy rooms, modern plumbing, electrical light’ and other new features we now take for granted, as well as ‘the most conveniently located restaurant in the town’. Former US President William H Taft stayed there during a visit in 1921. The Bank of NT Butterfield opened its first St George’s branch on the lower floor in 1940. Fourteen years later the bank purchased the building outright. A renovation in the 1960s removed the 19th century wooden verandah and returned the building’s facade to its original appearance.