Resort hotel · Hood River, Oregon · Built 1920–1921
Columbia Gorge Hotel
A yellow stucco Mission-style hotel of 1921 with a square Italianate tower, built by lumberman and roads champion Simon Benson on a bluff where Wah-Gwin-Gwin Falls drops 150 feet to the Columbia River.
History
Simon Benson, a Norwegian-born logger who made a fortune rafting timber down the coast and sold out in 1910, spent his later years promoting good roads. He chaired Oregon's first citizen highway commission and helped pay for the Columbia River Highway, Samuel Lancaster's scenic road through the gorge, completed to Hood River around 1920. Having built roads to bring the world to Oregon's scenery, he said, the state now had to look after visitors once they arrived. With Henry Thiele, the celebrated chef of Benson's Portland hotel, he chose a bluff a mile west of Hood River, bought it in 1920 from Bobby Rand, who had run the Wah-Gwin-Gwin Hotel there for seventeen years, demolished the old building and hired the Portland architect Morris H. Whitehouse. The new hotel opened in May 1921 with Thiele as manager; Benson said he hoped only that it would pay its expenses and inspire other roadside resorts.
Motor parties used it as a base for touring the gorge and the Hood River Valley, and a ballroom, bowling alley, barbershop and beauty parlor filled the lower level. Ownership changed several times after 1925, and in 1952 the hotel was sold to the Neighbors of Woodcraft and turned into a retirement home. New owners bought it in 1978 to restore it as a resort, reopened it in September 1979 after a renovation of about $1 million, and saw it listed on the National Register that year. It closed in a foreclosure in January 2009, was sold that October and renovated again through 2012.
“The Columbia Gorge Hotel is significant to Oregon as one of the state's outstanding resort hotels developed at the outset of the automobile age.”
Architecture
The hotel is an elongated H, 185 feet long, three stories on the highway side and four toward the river, of wood frame with interior steel beams and columns under yellow stucco and low hipped tile roofs. The nomination reads it as Mission in its plain stucco walls and unmolded arches but Italian Villa in its rectilinear massing, bracketed eaves, paired and tripled arched windows and, above all, the square corner tower that rises to a balustrade and an octagonal mirador. A porte-cochere marks the west entrance. Inside, classical pilasters frame the lobby, a lounge with a tiled fireplace, and a 200-seat dining hall with a coffered ceiling; on the river side a cocktail veranda sits above an arcaded porch opening onto the terrace.
What to look for
- The square tower and its octagonal mirador
- Wah-Gwin-Gwin Falls from the rear terrace
- Ashlar bridge with spiral-ended walls and lamp posts
- Arcaded porch below the cocktail veranda
- Low red tile roofs on bracketed eaves
Setting
The hotel stands between the old Columbia River Highway and a cliff above the Columbia, a mile west of Hood River. Phelps Creek runs through the grounds under four bridges, one of ashlar masonry with spiral-ended walls and stone lamp posts, before plunging over Wah-Gwin-Gwin Falls. A stone-walled terrace on the bluff looks across the river to the Washington shore.
Timeline
- 1904Wah-Gwin-Gwin Hotel opens on the site
- 1920Simon Benson buys the site and begins construction
- 1921Columbia Gorge Hotel opens in May
- 1952Converted to a retirement home
- 1979Reopened as a hotel in September; listed on the National Register
- 2009Closed in foreclosure and sold
- 2009–2012Major renovation
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia dates the Wah-Gwin-Gwin Hotel to 1904; the nomination says Bobby Rand had run it for seventeen years before 1920.
- Room counts vary: 48 rooms by 1952 and 42 after the 1979 renovation, per Wikipedia.
