Big River House

Excerpted and annotated from “Mendocino’s Hotels & Saloons,” by Dorothy Bear and Beth Stebbins, Mendocino Historical Review, June, 1980.

Big River House was a hotel at the west end of Main Street, just west of the present Zacha Building [Now the Healing Arts Building]. [The three-story hotel sat on the northeast corner of Main and Woodward Streets. Mendocino Jams and Jellies and Mendocino Sandpiper occupy the space today.] It may have been built by William H. Norton in 1871; his daughter Mollie said she was born there in 1872. When Mr. Norton bought a larger and better piece of property at the corner of Lansing and Main streets in 1874, he advertised the Big River House for sale.

Records show that John Pacheco and Anton Jassen purchased it in 1877 but did not keep it long. By September of 1877, J. F. Lazarus, a native of the Azores, was the owner and he added a bar and a barber shop. [In the December 1, 1878 Beacon Lazarus advertised “The Table will be supplied with all the delicacies of the season and no pains will be spared to give satisfaction. The bar will contain the choicest wines, liquors and cigars.” A month later, in January, the Beacon announced “Our friend, Joseph Lazarus of the Big River House, will please accept our thanks for a bunch of fine Havana cigars. Joe has plenty of them left for his customers.”]

It was Lazarus who suffered when the hotel burned on Monday, April 29, 1878, according to the Beacon: “Between 3 and 4 o’clock the usual quiet of our town was disturbed by the cry of fire in the Big River House. Before many were at the scene the flames had reached too much headway to be extinguished. All the lodgers were in bed when the alarm was given and had barely time to escape through the doors, some of them being compelled to jump from the second and third story windows, while others who retained their presence of mind lowered themselves to the ground with the bed sheets. Several who threw themselves out of the windows sustained severe bruises…. Joseph Lazarus is the heaviest loser, as the only thing saved were four sacks of flour…. The occupants of the Big River House lost all that was in their rooms.” 

The loss to Mr. Lazarus was $7500 and he had only $1400 insurance. Fire has always been the most feared catastrophe in Mendocino. The redwood buildings burn fast and furiously. [Fortunately, everyone survived that fire. Its origin remained a mystery. Some people thought that the hotel caught fire on the second floor over the kitchen, while others believed it started downstairs in the back of the building.] 

[After the fire, Lazarus did some logging in Big River woods, but in 1883 he bought another hotel, the Mansion House, on the southwest corner of Lansing and Little Lake Streets. He sold his interest to his brother Frank in 1885 and opened a saloon on west Main Street. In 1900, Lazarus went north to Alaska for the gold rush there. This time he got lucky and actually found a substantial amount of the ore somewhere near Nome. He lived in Alaska until 1907, when he returned to the lower 48 and settled in Shelton, Washington, where he died in 1925.]

The Kelley House Museum is open from 11AM to 3PM Thursday through Monday. During October, there will be Haunted Mendocino Walking Tours every Saturday at 1:30PM and at 5PM and 7PM on Halloween. $25 adults, $15 under 12. Purchase advance tickets.