Inn · Estes Park (vicinity), Colorado · Built 1916–1917; wings 1918, 1921, 1935
Seven Keys Lodge (Baldpate Inn)
Listed on the National Register as Baldpate Inn
A board-and-batten mountain inn built by the Mace family from 1916 on a hillside above Estes Park, named for the mystery novel Seven Keys to Baldpate and known for the keys its guests have left behind.
History
The Mace brothers came from Liverpool to Denver with their parents in 1890. In 1911 Charles Mace, a commercial photographer, learned of a 160-acre homestead near Estes Park; with his brother Gordon, a pattern-maker and builder, and Gordon's wife Ethel, he filed on it and put up a one-room cabin in 1914. The land would not farm, but Rocky Mountain National Park had just been created, and the family began renting cabins to visitors. When guests seemed to want meals and beds on the spot, Gordon and Ethel built a lodge themselves in 1916–17 from timber cut on the property, though, as Ethel later admitted, neither had much experience of hotels. Guests came in 1917 and the inn formally opened in 1918.
They named it after Earl Derr Biggers's best-seller Seven Keys to Baldpate, about a mountain inn seven miles from town, as theirs was; Biggers later visited and declared it the real Baldpate. The Maces handed departing guests a metal key until the cost mounted, and in 1921 Clarence Darrow suggested reversing the custom. The key collection that followed, later numbering in the thousands, filled the new west-wing Key Room, and Paramount newsreels featured it in 1933 and 1943. Charles, who photographed for the Army Signal Corps in the First World War, hung his portraits of famous sitters in the dining room. The Mace family ran the inn until Gordon Sr.'s death in 1959; the Smith family bought it in 1986, and after the Powell family bought it at the end of 2020 it was renamed Seven Keys Lodge.
“In keeping with the "key" theme, seven wooden posts marked with a diminishing number of keys were even installed at one-mile intervals between Estes Park and the Inn.”
Architecture
The Main Lodge is a two-story rectangle with a projecting central block, built post-and-beam from timber milled on the site and set on a stone rubble foundation. Vertical board-and-batten siding, log work and a half-timbered front gable combine with overhanging eaves, exposed rafters, knee braces and shed dormers in what the nomination calls a mix of Rustic and Western Stick styles. Peeled-log posts carry the central block: a porte-cochere below, a covered porch with log railing above, reached by twin stairs. Inside are polished hardwood floors, peeled log beams and five native-stone fireplaces, one in the Key Room under a granite keystone. Ten outbuildings, from a bathhouse and ice house to cabins, complete the district.
What to look for
- The Key Room with keys hung from walls and beams
- Porte-cochere and porch carried on peeled logs
- Board-and-batten walls and knee-braced eaves
- Charles Mace's photographs in the dining room
- Stone fireplaces in the lobby and library
Setting
The inn stands at about 9,000 feet on a steep, wooded slope of Twin Sisters Mountain, just east of Colorado Route 7 and Lily Lake, seven miles south of Estes Park, looking north over the Estes valley. The rough old Fish Creek Road, once the route between Allenspark and Estes Park, runs through the property. Rocky Mountain National Park's Lily Lake area lies across the highway.
Timeline
- 1914Mace family builds a homestead cabin
- 1916–1917Gordon and Ethel Mace build the Main Lodge
- 1918Inn formally opens; east wing built
- 1921West wing with the Key Room added; key collection begins
- 1959Gordon Mace Sr. dies; dining room closes
- 1986Bought by the Smith family
- 2020Bought by the Powell family and renamed Seven Keys Lodge
Where sources differ
- The nomination counted more than 12,000 keys in 1995; Wikipedia gives more than 20,000. Famous keys said to be in the collection, such as Hitler's desk key, are described in the nomination only as reported.
- Wikipedia dates the founding to 1917; the nomination says guests came in 1917 and the inn officially opened in 1918.
- The National Register listing date is not stated in the sources (the reference number dates from 1995).
