Bruce, Mississippi, native Kay Tyler and her husband Paul joined together with Harry Waller, owner of the Bruce Telephone Company, and the Reid family to help realize Waller’s vision to construct a nine-hole golf course in their town. The Yoda Creek Golf Course, named for a small creek that ran through the property, prominently featured a 7,000-square-foot repurposed barn with a concrete floor that the three families set aside as a charging station for electric golf carts after golfers finished using them.
Waller passed away shortly after the course’s completion and left it to his daughter, Connie Waller Collins. By 2005, Collins shut the golf course down, leaving only a driving range that stayed open for another year. The property’s barn had been in disuse even before that, abandoned after Tyler and the other owners decided to switch to gas-powered golf carts and built a set of lean-tos for them closer to the golf course’s pro shop.
Shortly after the course’s closure, Kay and Paul Tyler walked the property together one day and found themselves in front of the barn, which had become run down and surrounded with weeds. Kay wanted to preserve some part of the late Waller’s vision and asked Paul what they could do with the property. The couple prayed together on the subject for about a week, until Paul asked to return to the barn for another look around. The two walked around the building until Paul lit up with inspiration and proposed turning the abandoned barn into an inn.
“We went right back home, and Paul took out a piece of paper and started drawing out the dream he had for that old barn,” Kay Tyler told the Mississippi Free Press. “He envisioned a rough exterior hiding elegant rooms with luxurious furniture and antiques, something that could be the pride of all of Calhoun County. I loved the idea and came up with a motto we could build on: ‘Luxury and elegance wrapped in a brown paper bag.’”
In realizing that motto, the couple left the barn’s exterior largely unchanged and focused their efforts on renovating the interior over the next seven months. The finished inn contained 10 rooms with six king-size beds and four double queens, along with a kitchen and dining area for guests and an expansive back patio. In honor of its former role as Yoda Creek Golf Course’s cart storage area, the Tyler’s named it the Cart Barn Inn.
‘A Donut or a Diamond Ring’
The Tylers opened the Cart Barn Inn just before the start of the 2007 football season, anticipating that travelers passing through Bruce on their way to an upcoming game between the University of Mississippi and the University of Florida would attract clients looking for a cheaper alternative to hotels in nearby Oxford. At first the inn was only open on weekends and only had its six king rooms available, but Kay Tyler said the rooms themselves and the service she and her husband provided made a powerful first impression on their earliest visitors.
“We went all out from the start making hashbrowns, eggs, biscuits and gravy, sweet potato pie and peach cobbler for everyone,” Tyler said. “People would drive up, and the outside still looked like the old cart barn, and I wanted them to be curious about that ‘brown paper bag’ and what could be inside, whether they might find a donut or a diamond ring. It’s a unique idea you won’t find anywhere else, and I was proud to watch it work and see everyone who came be pleased with what they found.”
Tyler fondly recalls a particular guest from the early days of the Cart Barn Inn, a construction worker from Florida, who was looking for a place to stay for the weekend. Tyler watched as the man pulled his car right up to the edge of the property line, emerged from his car and took in the sight of the Cart Barn’s exterior. The man took out his phone, called his wife and asked if the Cart Barn was really the inn he was looking for. When the man came in and saw the interior, Tyler said, he was pleasantly surprised and quickly changed his tune. Ultimately, the man told Tyler that he now wouldn’t want to stay anywhere else and would recommend the Cart Barn to all of his friends.
Tyler also added a more personal touch to the Cart Barn Inn’s interior by filling it with her own hand-painted artwork. She favors large canvases depicting outdoor scenes of wildlife, rustic homesteads, lakes and waterfalls and old churches. Her paintings adorn the walls of the Cart Barn’s rooms, lobby and dining room, as well as her house near the hotel. Tyler also enjoys taking photos of guests to make personalized thank-you cards to send to them after they stay.
After Tyler’s husband Paul died in a motorcycle accident in 2013, she had to attend to the Cart Barn Inn’s affairs on her own for a number of years. Tyler, already in her 70s by that time, turned to friends and acquaintances for help lightening the burden. One of the people she met during that time was Brett Hamilton, a handyman who eventually went on to become the Cart Barn Inn’s new owner.
A Change in Ownership
Brett Hamilton had years of experience working as an electrician and subcontractor in various fields around Mississippi, including plumbing, painting, landscaping and carpentry, before learning of the Cart Barn Inn. He also had 10 years of experience as a home healthcare professional from caring for a cousin with cerebral palsy in their home. After his cousin’s death from COVID-19 in 2022, Hamilton returned to subcontracting but quickly found himself souring on the experience.
“I found myself doing some nasty work with a friend of mine, like hanging off a three-story scaffolding in the rain replacing panels on top of a potato shed,” Hamilton said. “After that there was a particularly demanding job for a man in Calhoun City that left me with sciatic nerve pain in my back.I walked away from that line of work later that year when my uncle Jerry Swanson, who’d raised me along with my uncle Jim Swanson since I was 16, also died from COVID.”
He traveled to Bruce, Mississippi, to attend his uncle’s funeral and received a call from his cousin Dane Swanson after the service telling him that the family was staying at the Cart Barn Inn and wanted him to visit. With his back still hurting from the job in Calhoun City, Hamilton pulled his truck around behind the Cart Barn and went to a gazebo there to rest.
Hamilton, who had heard of the Cart Barn but never been, looked around the grounds and at the hotel’s rough wood and galvanized tin exterior and found himself unsure what the big deal was with it. Much like the Florida construction worker before him, he took out his phone and called his cousin to ask why the family would stay at such a place, only to hear the response that he should walk in, pick a room and look inside.
“I tried looking in through the patio door first and just saw a hallway with more rough wood like outside,” Hamilton said. “I finally went in and opened up an unlocked room expecting more of the same, only to be blown away by how huge, spacious and elegant the room I saw was. I talked to Dane and heard about some of the trouble Miss Kay was having running the place on her own and decided right then that if she decided to put it up for sale I’d take it. I knew I could do anything she was paying folks to do to maintain the place on my own, that I could run everything and be my own maintenance man rather than doing jobs for other people.”
Hamilton got his chance scarcely a week later when his wife Dana called to tell him that Tyler had put a “For Sale” sign out in front of the Cart Barn. He called and later met with Tyler and agreed to purchase the inn from her. Hamilton closed on the purchase and became the new proprietor of the Cart Barn Inn in June 2022.
Sticking With the Motto
After taking over the Cart Barn Inn Hamilton put his handyman skill to work making improvements and small renovations to the building while remaining committed to Tyler’s “brown paper bag” philosophy. He laid new stonework out in front of the inn, built a new outdoor seating area, installed new greenery, replaced the faucets and toilets in the bathrooms and installed new ceiling fans and lighting in all the rooms.
In the spirit of Tyler’s motto, Dana Hamilton came up with a new tradition to show appreciation for guests at the Cart Barn. She bakes 10 loaves of bread at a time using an old Amish recipe, wraps each loaf in cellophane and puts it inside a brown paper bag tied with a silk ribbon and affixed with the inn’s business card, then hangs the bag of “Friendship Bread” on the doorknob outside every guest’s room on the last morning of their stay as a thank-you gift.
“Everyone says that it’s such a unique experience to find the bread hanging on their door in the morning, and that it goes great with our coffee,” Hamilton said. “I want it to be one part of everyone leaving here thinking this was the coolest, cleanest, quietest, quirkiest place they’ve ever stayed. I want everyone who comes here to be as impressed as when you go to Disney World and see how immaculate everything is there. Most importantly, I want anyone who comes in and stays to know that they’re definitely going to come back.”
While Tyler no longer runs the Cart Barn Inn, she still lives nearby and often visits. Her love for meeting and interacting with the inn’s guests has remained alive along with her “brown paper bag” philosophy for the inn she and her husband established.
“For me breakfast with guests in the morning was almost the most fun part and is probably what I miss most about running the inn myself full time—talking and laughing and sharing stories with guests, getting to know them in the time that they’re there and making new friends in the bargain,” Tyler said. “Even if I couldn’t always remember the names of everyone who came, I could remember their faces, the stories they shared and how friendly all of them were.”
Rooms at the Cart Barn Inn are $130 per night for king size bed rooms and $150 per night for double queen rooms, with rates increasing by $70 per night during the inn’s especially busy football season. The inn’s backyard patio is also available to rent for $500 per night for special events such as weddings and reunions. For more information on the Cart Barn Inn, call 662-983-7829 or visit cartbarninn.com.