Sacajawea Inn - La Grande, Oregon

Highway 30
La Grande, Oregon
100 Fireproof Guest Rooms - Ultra-Modern Coffee Shop & Dining Rooms - Sand N' Sage Lounge - Parking Lot - Tourist Information & Pamphlets
Phone WO 3-2104

Now:





The Sacajawea Inn no longer stands and Google Maps doesn't have a view down Fir Street to show what the lot looks like now. However, I did find some great information from a 1996 application for the Sacajawea Annex (once attached to the Hotel) joining the National Register of Historic Places:

Julius Roesch (1862-1960), whose residence no longer stands. Roesch arrived in La Grande at the very point when the railroad was completed through the Grande Ronde Valley and a tangential grid aligned with the rail route was platted to become the new townsite. On the southern margin of Chaplin's Addition, where the new plat met the old at an angle, Roesch acquired hi complicated dealings between 1925 and 1927 the lots he would develop with a hotel.

Roesch embarked on a scheme to build a first class hotel that would rival a competitor's ill-fated project known as the La Grande Hotel. Roesch's seven-story Sacajawea Hotel of fireproof,
poured concrete and brick construction was completed in 1927. Three years later, the rival hotel having closed, Roesch expanded his own facility despite the stock market crash and impending economic depression. The Sacajawea Hotel served to the Post War period, at which time the advent of motels siphoned off trade. Its concrete framework made adaptation of interior space problematic. The original unit at a prime location of the main thoroughfare was demolished in 1970. Twenty years later, in 1990, the heirs of the original investor sold the Sacajawea Annex.