Wolf Creek Inn

Before the railroad came through, a traveler from San Francisco to Portland spent some sixteen days on the stagecoach, and Wolf Creek, in the hills between the Rogue and the Umpqua, made a natural overnight stop. Emigrants on the Applegate Trail had come this way since the 1840s, and a plain lodge known as the Six Bit House stood here first. In 1883 a local merchant, Henry Smith, built the Wolf Creek Tavern in its place, a hotel made well enough by local sawyers to last, with sixteen bedrooms, separate parlors for men and women and a large dining room.

It has taken guests ever since and calls itself the oldest continuously operating hotel in the Pacific Northwest. Its register runs from the stage era into Hollywood's. Jack London stayed often and wrote here, and the inn says he finished The Valley of the Moon in his small upstairs room. In the 1930s Clark Gable, a friend of the innkeeper, stopped in on fishing trips; Carole Lombard, Orson Welles and Sinclair Lewis are on the list as well.

The State of Oregon bought the inn in 1975 and restored it by 1979, and it is now the Wolf Creek Inn State Heritage Site, with rooms upstairs, a restaurant open to anyone passing through, and panels out front on the Applegate Trail. It sits just off I-5, which follows much the same route the stages did.