Greetings family, friends and neighbors! In 1898 the Lake Tahoe Railway and Transportation Company was formed beginning the creation of a world class luxury destination that thrived for more than sixty years. Here's more to the story of "Tahoe Tavern".........Bill 

Historical Snippets 

TAHOE TAVERN 

Anticipating the approaching inevitable exhaustion of timber from 

the virgin forests of the Lake Tahoe Basin that supplied Virginia 

City and the Comstock with needed lumber for decades, the Bliss 

family spared a magnificent grove of pine trees near the lake’s 

outlet in Tahoe City, a first step in shifting their personal wealth 

and the region’s economy from timber to tourism. 

In 1898 the family incorporated the Lake Tahoe Railway and Transportation 

Company with little fanfare and began transferring materials and 

rolling stock from their mills at Glenbrook and Bijou to Tahoe’s 

North Shore. Salvaged rails from former lumber operations were 

used to construct a fifteen mile narrow gauge railroad along the 

Truckee river connecting the Central Pacific standard gauge line in 

Truckee with Bliss’s wharf at Tahoe City. A narrow gauge steam 

locomotive with converted passenger flat cars provided eager 

sightseers with direct access to the Bliss pier and classic 

steamer Tahoe for a seventy five mile day long tour of the lake 

before returning to Truckee. 

Completion of the railroad and the securing of funding in 1901 

allowed D.L. Bliss to proceed with the next phase of a grandiose 

plan to construct a luxury lakeside hotel. Predating Yosemite’s 

Ahwahnee Hotel by twenty five years, Bliss’s crews worked 

through the winter to complete his deluxe lodging by the opening 

of the 1902 tourist season. The remote but easily accessible, self 

contained resort “Tahoe Tavern” featured an elegant dining room, 

fresh water delivery system from two nearby reservoirs, heat and 

electricity from steam powered generators, telegraph office and a 

phone line from Truckee. 

In the following five years a sixty room annex and a second story and elevator were added along with a casino, bar, barber shop, ballroom, gift shop and bowling alley. The favored family and business year-round destination for six decades suffered a disastrous fire in 1964 and the once 

internationally famous luxurious Tahoe Tavern is now the location 

of upscale private Tahoe Tavern Condominiums. 

-Bill 3/25