Black’s Hotel
A. G. Black was a pioneer of the Coulterville region. In the late ’fifties, he resided at Bull Creek on the Coulterville trail. Visitors who entered the valley from the north during the first years of tourist travel have left a few records of stops made at the “Black’s” of that place. The “Black’s” of Yosemite Valley did not come into existence until the advent of the ’sixties, when Mrs. Black is reported to have purchased the old Lower Hotel. In 1869 this first structure was torn down, and an elongated shedlike structure built on its site, near the foot of the present Four-Mile Trail to Glacier Point. This was the “Black’s” that for nineteen years served a goodly number of Yosemite tourists. In 1888, after the opening of the Stoneman House, there was among the commissioners “a unanimity of feeling that the old shanties and other architectural bric-a-brac, that had long done service for hotels and stables, and the like, should be torn down.” Black’s Hotel was accordingly removed in the fall of 1888, and the lumber from its sagging walls went into the construction of the “Kenneyville” property, which stood on the present site of the Ahwahnee Hotel.