by Lisa Robinson
With the re-opening of the Brookdale Lodge let us take a moment to discard the made up tales and examine the wonderful true history of the property – along with potential candidates for ghost stories. In this three part series I will tell you the facts and present some pretty awful stories of death in the waters near the Brookdale Lodge. None of them however, involve a Logan relative so hang in there! No Sarah (she is made up) and no Gladys (she died in 2006 in San Diego).
In May 1903, it was reported that the “famous summer home of the L[afayette] F. Grovers, is being enlarged and added to, and will be converted into a boarding house.” Lafayette Grover was the son of lumber baron Stephen Frealon Grover, reputed to be one of the first white men to enter the Yosemite Valley. The Grovers had had a lumber mill just north of Brookdale at the end of what is now Camp Joy road. In Stephen’s 1907 obituary, it reports that the Minnehaha summer cottage was the first in Brookdale. Enlarged, the cottage, then called the Minnehaha Hotel, could accommodate around forty guests and had a “well lighted wing for a dining room.”
Its new owner, Judge James Harvey Logan, was to increase the hotel’s accommodations by building cottages on the grounds. The boarding house was to be run by Miss “Gussie” Heubeling. From 1904 to 1905 an advertisement ran in the Oakland tribune touting Brookdale’s virtues. “No business, no trade, no liquors. White sulphur springs; Electric lights; sanitary sewerage; 3 trains a day each way.” Hotel rates were between just $9 and $12 per week and cottage sites were available with building restrictions for “selected people of the better class only.” Actually the sewer outlet was just a rocky barren spot on the east of the San Lorenzo River a short distance south of the town. Clear Creek was the source of the electric power; water from the creek being drawn by an eight inch pipeline to a large Pelton water wheel and dynamo.
In 1905, the hotel changed its name to the Brookdale Hotel (later to be the Brookdale Lodge) and in 1911 it was purchased by Judge William Mack Aydelotte, a Santa Cruz lawyer and president of the Santa Cruz Emporium, who leased the hotel to Mrs. D. S. Fairlee. In 1913, Mrs. Fairlee applied for a liquor license – Brookdale was changing!
Judge Logan’s wife Catherine had died in 1909. Although they had no children, a niece and nephew, Josie and Herbert Turcot had resided with them. Judge Logan remarried in 1910 to Mary Couson who bore daughter Gladys in 1911.
In 1921, William and Mary Shier of Stockton bought the Brookdale Hotel. Mary Shier was close friend of Sheehan family, Logan’s niece Josie and her husband. The Sheehan’s daughter, Alice “Logan Berry Jam” Sheehan as she was affectionately called, owned the parcel across the street from the Brookdale Hotel that would become the site of the Brookdale Inn – more to come on that story another time!
Mary Shier ran the hotel for a couple of years until it was sold in 1923 to Pasadena capitalist Foster K. Camp. Camp would create “A Mountain Lodge with Nature Brought Inside,” – The Brookdale Lodge. The Shiers signed a five year agreement with Camp to stay out of the resort business. Ah intriguing.
So by the time Camp had built his famous dining room, Logan’s daughter Gladys was 12 years old and they were living in Oakland. Next time we will back track to 1912 for a horrific tale with the makings of a ghost story.
