A Stop Along History's Road
by Alison Bender
Today, the calm, rustic interior of Strawberry Lodge, 17 miles west of Lake Tahoe, belies a past that is filled with legend and lore, death and destruction.
Now in its fourth incarnation, the inn was originally built by Irad Berry, a European man who left New York for the West in 1856. He homesteaded the area that is now Strawberry, leasing a portion of the old highway from the government. Berry supplemented the tolls he collected by running a livery stable.
“Rumor has it, he was something of a shyster,” says Michael Hicks, who has owned the current lodge for seven years. “He’d charge travelers for hay and grain for their horses and oxen, then feed them something cheaper, usually straw.”
The name, “Straw Berry,” stuck.
In 1857 and ’58, Berry grew his business by adding an eatery and lodge. The lodge “was huge,” says Hicks. “It expanded out to the highway, and even had a covered building over the road for travelers to stop and pay tolls.”
The great events of California’s early history unfolded in front of Strawberry Lodge: From April 1860 for 18 months—as long as the route ran—the Pony Express faithfully stopped at the inn’s doors. Covered wagons, part of the Great Western Migration, took solace in the shelter of the lodge through the late 1860s, until westbound passengers started traveling by train.
Berry’s original building burned to the ground and was replaced by a second, smaller lodge, which stood for only four years before it, too, was lost to fire. The third lodge was built in 1868 and had between 15 and 20 guest rooms.
In the 1930s, the government completed the local portion of U.S. Highway 50. In the process, the road was moved across the river from the lodge. So in 1939, then-owner Fred Baumhoff built the fourth, and what is now the current, Strawberry Lodge, situating it right beside the new highway. The former inn was used as employee housing until 1955, when an employee went to bed smoking a cigarette—and perished in the resulting fire.
Soon after the current lodge was completed, tragedy struck again. “Some of the rooms have little doors—crawlspaces—where you used to be able to get out to the eaves,” says Hicks. As the story goes, a nine-year-old girl named Alice got into the crawlspace while her parents were at a party downstairs; she froze to death outside.
Though Hicks himself doesn’t believe it, guests have sworn that they’ve seen Alice’s ghost. “Supposedly, she’s not threatening or dangerous,” he says. “She just wants people to play with her.”
The inn’s colorful past is matched only by the personalities who have owned it, over a dozen people in 152 years, by Hicks’ estimate.
Charlie Watson, the lodge’s second owner, was one of the drivers in the great Placerville stagecoach robbery of 1864. After the holdup, he acted as the star witness that sent one of the robbers to a public hanging and another to 20 years of hard labor. Watson purchases Strawberry Lodge in 1865, and it remained in his family until 1939, when it was bought by Baumhoff who, in turn, sold it in 1942 to a man named Otto Schaffer, who used to have “a bit of a following of celebrities,” says Hicks. “This gentleman, Schaffer, used to host poker games,” he says. “One night he was playing with Mr. Harvey of Harveys Casino. As the legend goes, during one of their games, Schaffer owned Harveys Casino for about two hours.”
Strawberry Lodge never gained the prominence of Harveys. Instead it remains much as it’s been for a century and a half: a retreat for those looking to slow down, while time and progress continue marching on outside.