The Yosemite Park and Curry Company now owns and operates Wawona. It has become one of the largest and most favorably known family resorts in the Sierra Nevada and retains some of the flavor of its earlier years.
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.
Leidig’s
The family of George F. Leidig arrived in Yosemite Valley in 1866. For a time the old Lower Hotel was in their charge, but, when its owner, A. G. Black, assumed its management personally, the Leidigs secured rights to build for themselves. They selected a site just west of the old establishment and constructed a two-story building to become known as Leidig’s. This was in 1869. Charles T. Leidig, the first white boy to be born in the valley, was born in the spring of that year.
Mrs. Leidig’s ability as a cook was quickly noted by visitors, and, no doubt, the popularity of her table did much to draw patrons. Many are the printed comments in the contemporary publications of her guests. Here is an example:
Leidig’s is the best place in the line of hotels. Mrs. L—— attends to the cooking in person; the results are that the food is well cooked and intelligently served. There is not the variety to be obtained here as in places more accessible to market. After traveling a few months in California, a person is liable to think less of variety and more of quality. At this place the beds are cleanly and wholesome, although consisting of pulu mattresses placed upon slat bedsteads. This house stands in the shadow of Sentinel Rock, and faces the great Yosemite Fall; is surrounded with porches, making a pleasant place to sit and contemplate the magnificence of the commanding scenery. (From Caroline M. Churchill, 1876.)
When A. P. Vivian continued on to Yosemite in January of 1878, he found the Leidig family in the valley and commented as follows on his winter reception:
Our host was glad enough to see us, for tourists are very scarce commodities at this time of the year, and he determined to celebrate our arrival by exploding a dynamite cartridge, that we might at the same time enjoy the grand echoes. These were doubtless extraordinary, but I am free to confess I would rather have gone away without hearing them than have experienced the anxiety of mind, and real risk to body, which preceded the pleasure.
Leidig’s, with Black’s, was torn down after the Stoneman House provided more fitting accommodations. The little chapel which had been built near these old hotels in 1879 was moved to its present site in the Old Village. In 1928 the picturesque old well platform and crane, which had marked the Leidig site, was destroyed. Only a group of locust trees now indicates where this center of pioneer activity existed.