Deer View - Brett Harte Hotel and Deer View Lodge Ruins (photo's Below)
Excerpt from Mtn Democrat - Mosquito, part 9 – A visit to Deer View by Mike Roberts
Early accounts of a trip to Deer View read like a journey into the heart of darkness. The Deer View Lodge and its big sister, the Hotel Brett Harte, once stood six miles past Mosquito, deep in what the eccentric millionaire who built them dubbed the “forest primeval.” A garish promotional package for the Hotel Bret Harte included a theatrical description of the three hour drive from Placerville to Deer View, with its “sharp and hazardous grades” where “death awaits at every turn” on the “Placerville and Soap Weed Road,” which we know today as Mosquito Road.
Just past Mosquito, “the scenery changes from rugged mountainsides to the quiet and solitude of the mighty forest … you climb Slate Mountain … then travel until the solitude brings over you a spell of restfulness and you feel yourself taking a new hold on life. The sight of these giants of the woods seems to set you up good and strong on your legs, and you breathe deep and full.”
Recreational automobile travel in the early part of the last century was a relatively new phenomenon, a delightful novelty in the “age of wonderful nonsense,” the 1920s.
Vehicles of the day had become affordable and reliable, thanks to Henry Ford, but required better roads than their four-legged predecessors.
It’s been argued that Deer View visionary A. T. P. Elder recognized the nation’s budding infatuation with the automobile. The nation’s first coast to coast byway, the Lincoln Highway, was much in the national news at the time, with branches that passed through both Placerville and Auburn.
His decision to locate his hotel between the two, deep in the Eldorado National Forest, reflects Elder’s belief in the rise of the automobile in American culture, and the increase in both time and disposable income that many Americans would experience in the 20th century.
In Mosquito part 8, we explored the history of the “Deer View” site, where Elder first built the lavish Deer View hunting lodge, then a few years later, the 250-room luxury hotel that was nearly complete when he died in 1924.
The hotel never opened, leaving the question of whether the sometimes frightening roads between Placerville and Mosquito that this column has celebrated for eight episodes and counting would have deterred his wealthy clientele.
Early accounts of a trip to Deer View read like a journey into the heart of darkness. The Deer View Lodge and its big sister, the Hotel Brett Harte, once stood six miles past Mosquito, deep in what the eccentric millionaire who built them dubbed the “forest primeval.” A garish promotional package for the Hotel Bret Harte included a theatrical description of the three hour drive from Placerville to Deer View, with its “sharp and hazardous grades” where “death awaits at every turn” on the “Placerville and Soap Weed Road,” which we know today as Mosquito Road.
Just past Mosquito, “the scenery changes from rugged mountainsides to the quiet and solitude of the mighty forest … you climb Slate Mountain … then travel until the solitude brings over you a spell of restfulness and you feel yourself taking a new hold on life. The sight of these giants of the woods seems to set you up good and strong on your legs, and you breathe deep and full.”
Recreational automobile travel in the early part of the last century was a relatively new phenomenon, a delightful novelty in the “age of wonderful nonsense,” the 1920s.
Vehicles of the day had become affordable and reliable, thanks to Henry Ford, but required better roads than their four-legged predecessors.
It’s been argued that Deer View visionary A. T. P. Elder recognized the nation’s budding infatuation with the automobile. The nation’s first coast to coast byway, the Lincoln Highway, was much in the national news at the time, with branches that passed through both Placerville and Auburn.
His decision to locate his hotel between the two, deep in the Eldorado National Forest, reflects Elder’s belief in the rise of the automobile in American culture, and the increase in both time and disposable income that many Americans would experience in the 20th century.
In Mosquito part 8, we explored the history of the “Deer View” site, where Elder first built the lavish Deer View hunting lodge, then a few years later, the 250-room luxury hotel that was nearly complete when he died in 1924.
The hotel never opened, leaving the question of whether the sometimes frightening roads between Placerville and Mosquito that this column has celebrated for eight episodes and counting would have deterred his wealthy clientele.