Sepia Saturday 290: 2015 August 1: The White Pelican Hotel, Kamath Falls, Oregon

When I first looked at the prompt for this 290th Sepia Saturday, I knew immediately that I wanted to highlight the White Pelican Hotel in Klamath Falls, which was under construction when my grandparents, Frank and Agnes Laura Sigford had moved to the town.    The grand opening was held on December  2, 1911 with a formal banquet, which drew not only Klamath county notables, but people from San Francisco, California, to Portland, Oregon.

The grand hotel burned to the ground just seventeen years later, but it has lived on in the memories of my mother, and now me.  Not because we ever saw or experienced it's elegance, but because my grandmother, Agnes Laura Sigford did.

The Sigfords were of modest means in 1911, and certainly weren't on the guest list for the dedication banquet, but my grandmother did have a meal in the hotel.  She  would tell my mother and my Aunt Gail about the hotel and how magnificent it was -- and later she would also hold me enthralled with her memories of the White Pelican Hotel.  She had a treasured wine glass engraved with a pelican.  This treasure she kept in her trunk and was one of the few things that she saved from a fire that destroyed the only home they would ever own.  The wine glass survived move after move, and even the grinding poverty of the Great Depression.  Later, when I was a child,  we would go visit her every summer. I remember her bringing that precious wine glass from the glass-fronted book case, where she kept her treasures. After her death that the pelican engraved wine glass graced my Aunt Joyce's china hutch, always bringing back those memories of Grandmother and me.  Her precious wine glass from White Pelican Hotel hauntingly disappeared after the death of my Aunt Joyce.

Even without the wine glass, the White Pelican Hotel lives on in my memories, imprinted by my grandmother's rapturous memories of going into the the grandest hotel between San Francisco and Portland, sitting down to a fine meal and being presented with  - or perhaps purchased -  a pelican engraved wine glass.

In 2004, I put together a book for my mother, A Saturday In October, Memories of the Sigfords and Their Homes in Klamath County, in which I described the White Pelican Hotel.  Because a variety of computer problems over the years, I have lost the original photographs that I purchased from the Klamath County Museum.  So as a fall back position, I have had to photocopy the pages from the book that I wrote for my mother.  The quality does not do justice to that grand hotel of my grandmother's memories, and for that I am sorry.

A Saturday In October, p.v,  by Joan G. Hill
Courtesy of the Archives of JGHill and Roots'n'Leaves
and
The Klamath County Museum

A Saturday In October, p.v,  by Joan G. Hill
Courtesy of the Archives of JGHill and Roots'n'Leaves
and
The Klamath County Museum

 Now stroll on over to see the wondrous places found by our fellow Sepians

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 © Joan G. Hill, Roots'n'Leaves Publications

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