The Rocklands Hotel

1884 – The Glen House opens; later it becomes the middle section of the Rocklands. A separate one room building to the east is built as a hotel meeting room or for other uses. This building was later sold to the Campbell family and then to H.A. McIntyre in 1898 for use as a summer home.

1887 – The first “Estemere House” is moved and attached to the west side of the Glen House.

1888 – Dr. Thompson incorporates The Colorado Hotel & Sanitarium Co. to build and operate a hotel and sanitarium at Palmer Lake. No evidence, however, that a sanitarium was ever established.

1889 – An east wing, costing $12,000, is added, and the Rocklands Hotel opens in July with 40 furnished rooms. A weather station is established at the hotel, and monthly reports are sent to the U.S. Signal Corps in Washington, DC.

1891 – The Palmer Lake Hotel Co. is formed and buys the Rocklands for $12,000.

1894 – With the failure of the Palmer Lake Hotel Co., Stephen Osborn purchases the Rocklands.

1895 to 1897 – Entertainments held at the Rocklands include dances serenaded by orchestras, card parties, indoor games, and musicals. The hotel keeps a group of donkeys ready for guests to ride.

1900 – Judge Thomas Stuart of Denver buys the hotel for $4,750. His sister, Mrs. Isadore Van Gilder, becomes the manager. For most of its life, the Rocklands was open only three months a year—from mid-June to mid-September.

1901 – Stuart sells the Rocklands to Mrs. Van Gilder for $6,000 who owns the hotel for six years. Her son Hal and his wife Mildred buy the Rocklands in 1907 and manage the hotel through 1912, during which time the hotel puts on entertainments, parties, picnics, dances and tennis and golf matches. The hotel claims to have 80 rooms, but that number is probably exaggerated, since the last addition to the structure was in 1889.

1905 – The Rocklands Hotel fields a baseball team and hosts large meetings and conventions. Guests also make use of a billiard room and skating rink.

1913 – The hotel is sold in March to a Texan for $35,000. The new owner claims he has made $10,000 worth of improvements that include a facility called “Ye Old Dutch Tavern.” The hotel is sold again in October with a $10,000 encumbrance (debt owed) on the property.

1914 – The El Paso County sheriff sells the Rocklands at a public auction for $8,100. The new owner immediately leases the hotel to a gentleman from Denver, who in turn leases it to the couple who operate the hotel during the summer of 1914 upon payment of $900. With the end of the Chautauqua at Palmer Lake, the increasing popularity of the automobile for summer travel, and the competition of the Pine Crest Resort, tourist trade at the Rocklands is steadily declining.

1915 – The hotel is sold again to a Denver man for $1.00 and exchange of property. There was $4,000 of encumbrance on the property and two years of unpaid taxes.

1916 – The hotel is sold again in November.

1917 – The Rocklands is sold again for (according to a newspaper) $40,000. The true figure must have been $4,000.

1920 – Another sale of the hotel in May, again for a reported price of $40,000. A young widow with three children signed a lease to run the hotel, and the family arrived in Palmer Lake on August 31. Three days later (Sept. 2), the three children took a candle or kerosene lantern to light the water heater or check the gas-generator for the acetylene lighting system located in the basement. A gas leak caused a violent explosion, but fortunately the children were not seriously injured. The Rocklands, however, burned to the ground and was never rebuilt.