By Guest Blogger Pat Neal, fishing guide and friend of The Fund
We know that Our Backyard Rocks! because we have some of the most beautiful, unique and diverse national parks in our country. Pat takes us on a historical tour of Olympic National Park to reveal a few of its amazing treasures.
The story of the preservation and restoration of Rosemary Inn at Lake Crescent in Olympic National Park and its transformation into NatureBridge, an environmental learning center, began shortly after America’s Bi-Centennial in 1976. The Bi-Centennial sparked a renewed interest in documenting our past and preserving our heritage for future generations to appreciate. In 1978 the Washington State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation offered a contract to conduct a cultural resource survey of the Olympic Peninsula and I got the job.
The 1970s represented the golden age of archaeology on the Olympic Peninsula, with spectacular discoveries such as the Ozette Village Archaeological Site. The Ozette village was called the American Pompei because it was buried in a mud slide around 1560. This tragedy preserved 2000 years of Native American cultural remains that were exposed by a storm in 1970. The Ozette dig produced over 55,000 artifacts now housed in the Makah Museum, built in Neah Bay in 1979. Another ancient discovery was found in 1977 when a man digging a pond unearthed mastodon tusks in Sequim. The Manis Mastodon Site contained the remains of a mastodon with a spear point embedded in its rib. This represents the oldest evidence of human activity in the Pacific Northwest and the oldest human/mastodon interaction in America.
I began the survey with the youthful enthusiasm of a treasure hunter. But despite all of the amazing discoveries being unearthed all around the Peninsula at the time, the best I could come up with after months of research was a three-holer outhouse, a leper colony and the largest hotcake griddle in the Olympic Mountains. As significant as these finds may have been, I had to nominate some historic sites to the National Register of Historic Places or I was history.
The Olympic Peninsula was, and remains to this day, a vast wilderness where historic treasures can be swallowed by the underbrush in an amazingly short time. This was one of the last areas in America to be settled by European homesteaders. Back in the 1970s the sons and daughters of these pioneers were still alive, and these folks became my friends. They represented another kind of historic treasure — the people who lived the history of this country. One of these old friends asked if I had seen Rosemary Inn at Lake Crescent. I had not, but I went there immediately.
Native American legends say Lake Crescent was formed by the cannibal giant Seatco who ended a three-day battle between the S’Klallam and the Quileute by burying them in a landslide. The lake was discovered by Europeans in 1849 when two Hudson Bay trappers paddled their canoe across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Victoria. In 1895 Rear Admiral Leslie A. Beardslee of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron caught 350 trout in one day at Lake Crescent! With his ships anchored in the nearby Port Angeles harbor, Admiral Beardslee spent so much time fishing at Lake Crescent they named a trout after him. Two unique species of trout, the Beardslee and Crescenti still live in the lake. They can be found nowhere else. E.B. Webster in his classic book, “Fishing in the Olympics,” describes the Beardslee striking a lure at 25 miles an hour, peeling hundreds of feet of line, while jumping six or seven feet in the air.
Rosemary Inn was one of a dozen or more resorts, fishing lodges and taverns that lined the shores of Lake Crescent before the coming of Highway 101. Visitors would arrive by train and take a ferry across the lake to one of these resorts or continue on to Sol Duc Hot Springs. Rosemary Inn was first called Rosemary Camp, named for Rose Littleton and her lifelong assistant, Mary Daum. John Daum, brother of Mary, was not an architect but he was a natural born builder who designed and constructed the buildings that made up the Rosemary Inn complex in the craftsman style. Daum constructed the main lodge in 1913 and eventually built twelve guest cabins and several outbuildings. Each of these cabins was constructed with a unique design and native materials such as logs, cedar shingles and cedar bark for siding.
The first visitor checked in on June 20, 1914. Rosemary Inn was famous for its cuisine, particularly the Sunday chicken dinners. President Franklin D. Roosevelt stopped by Rosemary Inn for breakfast on his tour of the Peninsula in 1937 where he voiced his support for the creation of Olympic National Park, established in 1938. By 1943 old age and ill health forced Rose Littleton to sell Rosemary Inn to the National Park Service. It was a tough time in the resort business anyway. No one was going on vacation with a war on.
In 1946 the country was getting back to normal. A dedication ceremony celebrating the establishment of Olympic National Park was conducted at Rosemary Inn. The National Park Concessions operated Rosemary Inn as a restaurant until 1951. After that, Rosemary Inn and its surrounding cabins were used as employee housing and for storage. When I first saw Rosemary Inn in 1978 it was abandoned. It hadn’t been buried in a mudslide but it might as well have been. The place looked like a lost village frozen in time. It was amazingly preserved despite the wet climate and lack of maintenance. There was a sign on the wall that said that the structures would be demolished and the site would be turned into a parking lot. A Joni Mitchell song came to mind… I immediately nominated Rosemary Inn to the National Register of Historic Places, with little faith it would be preserved and no expectation it would be restored. But it was. Rosemary Inn is now home to NatureBridge, the largest residential environmental education partner of the National Park Service, where every year students at every level learn how to connect to nature with science to inspire environmental stewardship. NatureBridge is passing our heritage on to future generations to appreciate, so I guess I did my job.
Pat Neal is a fishing guide on the Hoh River in Washington State. He writes a weekly Wilderness Gossip Column on the commentary page of the Peninsula Daily News out of Port Angeles, and has been recognized for his work in promoting historic preservation of the old Rosemary Inn. You can read more stories at http://patnealwildlife.net/.
Cover photo by NPS/Olympic National Park