106 Years Ago Today

Early in the morning of November 11, 1905, David Cassell started his normal daily routine. He got up, started a fire in the kitchen stove of the hotel he owned, ran, and lived in with his family, put on a pot of coffee, and headed down to the barn to feed and water the livestock. The flue apparently caught fire and, despite the efforts of the Cassell family, the railroad workers from the nearby section house, and neighbors who rushed to help, the hotel burned to the ground.

It was the second hotel to be built at Cassells Resort. The original part of it, the east wing (on the left in the photos below), was built in about 1882 to replace the original log structure (likely the building on the far left of the second photo) which had been the original three-room homestead cabin built by William Burt in 1872. The west wing and center portion were added in the years between 1882 and about 1900.





Over the winter, a new even larger and grander hotel was constructed on the same site, opening in May, 1906. This building stood for the next 65 years, serving as the hotel for Cassells until it closed in 1929 and as the dormitory for Camp Santa maria from 1930-1970. It was deemed unsafe and unrepairable in 1970, replaced by several cabins in the grove, and, unfortunately, razed. Below are a couple of views of it (my dad is in the foreground of the second one).