Riverside Inn Resort history

Anthony also served as the chief agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1856.

It was vacant land fronting an obscure ford of the Truckee River until late 1859, when a bankrupt California storekeeper and muleskinner named Charles William Fuller built a bridge across the ford, claiming the land on both sides.

The inn burned down on December 4, 1868, just a few months after the Central Pacific Railroad began selling lots in the new Reno town site, just north of the river.

Through his “Southern California Colony Association,” North actively began recruiting people from across the world to settle his new community in the early spring on 1870.

In 1874, civil engineer C.C. Miller arrived in Riverside, began work on a water system, and with his family, began a small boarding house in the center of town.

Historical Image of President Herbert Hoover at The Mission Inn at The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa, 1875, Member of Historic Hotels of America, in Riverside, California.

1876: An engineer named Christopher Columbus Miller decided to open a small boarding house called “Glenwood Cottage” in Riverside, California.

In 1880, his son Frank Augustus Miller, bought the property and gradually improved and enlarged it.

Riverside’s new residents even founded the first ever golf course and polos grounds in all of Southern California! By 1883, the community had grown large enough that the state government formally incorporated it as a city.

After Stanton stepped down as the leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Organization in 1890, Anthony took over with Carrie Chapman Catt acting as her direct lieutenant.

Starting with Benjamin Harrison in 1891, ten United States presidents have visited the hotel at one point or another.

In 1896 he homesteaded on Dempsey Creek, just west of Lava Hot Springs, where he developed a large cattle ranch.

Unfortunately, her age had caught up to her and she retired from the National American Woman Suffrage Organization in 1900.

Working with prominent architect Arthur Benton, financed by railroad baron Henry Huntington, and inspired by the growing popularity of California Mission tourism and Mission Revival architecture, Miller opened the first wing of the current Mission Inn building in 1903.

A new era of luxury dawned in 1906, when Harry Gosse of Virginia City, having purchased the old hotel a decade earlier, replaced it with a four-story brick Chateau-style Riverside Hotel—just in time for Reno’s entrance into the divorce trade.

1909: Singer and songwriter Carrie Jacobs-Bond wrote the lyrics to her famous song, “A Perfect Day,” while staying at the Mission Inn.

1914: The renowned Booker T. Washington gave a speech at the Mission Inn, which filled Cloister Music Room to capacity.

Goodhue received a platform for his designs at the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, in which Spanish Colonial architecture was exposed to a national audience for the first time.

Gothic in style and fully appointed throughout, the stately new six-story Riverside Hotel opened on May 14, 1927.

Climbing aboard a Fokker Trimotor dubbed “Friendship,” Earhart and her copilot, Wilmer Stultz, began the historic trip from an airfield in Newfoundland in June of 1928.

By 1931, the Mission Inn comprised four wings in a labyrinth of gardens, towers, arches, and winding stairways that encompassed an entire city block.

1932: One of the last additions that Frank Augustus Miller oversaw was the completion of the St Francis Atrio.

1935: Having managed the Mission Inn for more than 50 years, Frank August Miller passed away.

In 1955, Wingfield sold the hotel to Mert and Lou Wertheimer, and the next few decades brought multiple changes in ownership and periodic closures.

1956: Allis Hutchings herself died, prompting her surviving relatives to sell the location to a hotelier from San Francisco named Benjamin Swig.

Fearful that the hotel would be permanently shuttered and its interior collections destroyed, in 1969 a group of concerned citizens formed the Friends of the Mission Inn, a volunteer organization dedicated to promoting hotel business and safeguarding the historic collections.

As the hotel’s financial woes persisted, the City of Riverside’s Redevelopment Agency purchased the Mission Inn in 1976.

After keeping the hotel afloat for nearly nine years, the city sold the hotel to a Wisconsin- based private development firm, which closed the Inn in June 1985 to begin what would become a seven-year $50 million renovation project.

With restorations nearly complete in December 1988, the hotel was once again plagued by bankruptcy and languished for three years without a buyer.

In late 1992, local Riverside entrepreneur Duane Roberts purchased the Mission Inn and successfully reopened the landmark hotel for business.

1996: The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa joined Historic Hotels of America.

The building faced demolition in 1997, until the local Sierra Arts Foundation partnered with Artspace, a Minneapolis-based developer of historic properties, to convert the original hotel rooms into 35 low-income artist lofts.

The west addition was demolished, and the renovated Riverside re-opened in 2000 with the offices of Sierra Arts and other retail ventures occupying the ground floor.