Greetings family, friends and neighbors, I hope that your 2025 is off to a great start. Today's snippet is inspired by a rare vintage postcard of a little known Yosemite attraction. Here is the back-story to James Hutchings "Big Tree Room".....Bill
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YOSEMITE’S BIG TREE ROOM
Lodging for the first intrepid visitors to Yosemite in the mid 1800’s
was extremely limited and the few options were typically barn like
structures with rooms resembling stalls and muslin hanging from the ceiling providing privacy. Comforts were at a bare minimum with glassless windows, dirt floors often covered with pine boughs, and springless beds with mattresses stuffed with hay. Wash pans and directions to a path into the woods was usually the extent of sanitary facilities. Lower Hotel, Yosemite’s first Inn, was built in 1856 near the base of Sentinel Rock and operated for two seasons
before being crushed by snow. Three years later the more substantial two story Upper Hotel opened for business on the south side of the valley in the location later to be known as the “Old Village”.
James Hutchings, leader of the second tourist party to enter the valley in 1855, publisher of Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine, tireless Yosemite promoter, and one of the valleys first pioneer settlers took possession of the Upper Hotel in 1864 with his wife Elvira and mother-in-law and renamed the lodge Hutchings House. Prepared to accommodate twenty eight overnight guests, but often faced with double the number, he made the decision to expand the hotel. Unfortunately a 175 foot tall incense cedar tree stood where the new room was planned. “ I had not the heart to cut it down, so I fenced it in, or rather, built around it. The base of the tree, eight feet in diameter, is an ever present guest in that sitting room” Hutchings added a sitting room to the canvas roofed lean-to structure that was inevitably dubbed the the Big Tree Room, and the lodge, Cedar Cottage. He wrangled, unsuccessfully, with the State of California for more than a decade over the interpretation of the Yosemite Grant and was ultimately bought out, banished from the park, and became innkeeper at the Calaveras Big Tree’s Grove Hotel. Cedar Cottage was merged with five other guest units plus the main riverside building to collectively be known as the Sentinel Hotel. The cedar tree is gone and two small bronze plaques commemorate where Hutchings Big Tree Room once
stood.
-Bill 1/25
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