The Desert Beacon Goes Dark
Motor lodges, a highway and a dark hotel, 1936–1947
A. K. Bennett had run the 650-room Grand Hotel in Yokohama until the 1923 earthquake flattened it, then a hotel in Santa Barbara until the Depression flattened him, or so he told a Death Valley Junction doctor over lunch in December 1939. Stovepipe Wells was a third start, with other men’s money; the legal owner from 1936 was the General Hotel Company of Pasadena, and for the first time the people running the place did not own it. The Bennetts opened the “New Stovepipe Wells Hotel and Motor Lodges” on November 7, 1936, with the cabins enlarged and repainted and “a rustic cocktail lounge added,” the first bar documented at the resort, three years after Repeal. Three hundred people came to the turkey dinner, or a hundred and fifty, depending on which correspondent you believe.
The highway came the next year. On October 31, 1937, the state dedicated the Darwin cutoff and the rest of Highway 190 at the junction with the old Eichbaum road, with a three-day pageant invented by Father John J. Crowley, the “Desert Padre” of Lone Pine, whose parish ran from the top of Mount Whitney to the bottom of Death Valley. Water from Lake Tulainyo, near Whitney’s summit, came down by runner, pony express, burro, covered wagon, twenty-mule team, stagecoach, railway, automobile and airplane, Governor Merriam spoke, and the crowd drove over Towne Pass to a free barbecue at Stovepipe Wells before the “Wedding of the Waters” at Badwater. The month after, the hotel reported “the heaviest business in their history” and turned twenty parties away. There is no record that Crowley ever met Bob Eichbaum; his years in Inyo County appear not to have overlapped Eichbaum’s. He was killed in a car crash before dawn in March 1940, driving back from a funeral to say Mass at the Furnace Creek CCC camp.
The Bennetts advertised. From October 1938 Desert Magazine carried a drawn billboard in the dunes, read by a bearded prospector, offering a free booklet called “Lure of Death Valley” from a Los Angeles office on Spring Street, and the county paper credited their “effective advertising and publicity campaigns.” The old flying field still worked: forty members of the Aviation Country Club flew in for a weekend in April 1940. The hotel’s mail came off the borax railroad on the borax company’s station wagon, which is why its address was Death Valley Junction. In 1937 the company bought Eichbaum’s Hell’s Gate acreage from Helene and announced a $100,000 resort there, with the old hotel to become “a low cost guest unit.” It drilled for water. Nothing shows the resort was built.
Mr. Bennett died in January 1940, and Agnes Bennett ran the house alone through its busiest Easter nine weeks later, with every room full and hundreds sleeping in their cars. She was the second widow to carry the place, after Helene, and not the last. The Easter service was now the Park Service’s, sung by a CCC chorus of eighty on the dunes at 5:15 in the morning, with 800 people attending; the county paper still credited “the late Mr. Eichbaum” with starting it. In January 1941 Warner Bros. brought James Cagney and Bette Davis to the dunes for The Bride Came C.O.D. Davis’s famous fall into a cactus, and the forty-five thorns a doctor pulled out, were doubted the same week by a local who found the cactus bed was made of rubber.
Congress, meanwhile, discovered that the resort stood on the wrong eighty acres. Eichbaum’s 1928 state patent covered a parcel in the next section, nearly a mile from the buildings; the legend says he mistook an old telephone pole for a survey corner. An act of October 17, 1940, authorized the exchange, and the deeds were finally signed in 1945 and 1946. The hotel had been on somebody else’s land for twenty years.
Five weeks after Pearl Harbor the Inyo Independent was denying rumors that the Army would take the hotel for its landing field. It stayed open through April 1942, then closed “for the duration” when gasoline rationing began in December. Desert Magazine noted the closing of “one of the oldest establishments in Death Valley,” built “by a man who constructed the toll road originally connecting Lone Pine with Death Valley.” Eleven years after his death the magazine did not use his name. The hotel reopened on November 1, 1945, under Owen Montgomery and his daughter, on an arrangement with the owner that ran two seasons. One name spans the gap: Louis Rohr, a caretaker who was there in the summer of 1941 and still “in charge of summer operations” in 1947.
Sources
Inyo Independent, Aug 14, Nov 6, Nov 13 and Nov 20, 1936, Sep 24 and Nov 5, 1937, Feb 10, 1939, Mar 22, Mar 29 and Apr 12, 1940, Jan 16 and Feb 27, 1942, Nov 9, 1945, and Aug 1, 1947; Inyo Register, Oct 8, 1936, Sep 30 and Dec 2, 1937, May 12, 1938, Dec 28, 1939, Jan 23, 1941, May 8, 1941, and Dec 4, 1942; Desert Magazine, Dec 1937, Oct 1938, May 1940, Feb 1943 and May 1940 (Crowley); Pasadena Star-News, Jan 23, 1940; Act of Congress, Oct 17, 1940, and BLM land records, 1945–46; Randall Henderson, Desert Magazine, Aug 1952, on the telephone pole.
