Added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 16, 1972

Before Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, before Raging Waters, San Dimas was known as the place where the transcontinental Santa Fe Railway was finally completed, connecting Los Angeles to Chicago. In 1887 in an area called Mud Springs, close to what’s now downtown San Dimas, the line heading east through the San Gabriel Valley met the line heading west through San Bernardino. You can still see part of the original track mounted in Rhoads Park, next to the Pacific Railroad Museum.

It was the same story all along the new rail route. During a spectacular and short-lived land boom in the mid-1880s, speculators promoted new towns along the rail route to lure in residents with the promise of sun, space and fertile soil for agriculture. The developer Moses Wicks and his partners formed the San Jose Ranch Company in March of 1887, and started selling lots in San Dimas for houses and citrus farms. It was Wicks & co. that commissioned the 30-room San Dimas Hotel, as a place for potential buyers to stay while they were evaluating their options. 

In the coming decades, San Dimas would blossom along with the orange and lemon trees that built its early economy. But the San Dimas Hotel was built a few years too early to enjoy that success. As the fervor of the land boom fizzled by 1888, only 12 lots had been sold in downtown San Dimas. In two years of operation, the hotel never had a paying guest – only Wicks and his partners ever checked in. And so in 1889, it was put up for sale. The Los Angeles Times reported in April of 1889 that the Odd Fellows fraternal organization was considering a purchase (“If Mr. Wicks can get the Odd Fellows to take it off his hands for an eleemosynary institution, he is in good luck,” the Times wrote). That plan fell through.

Eventually the hotel and a 40-acre ranch nearby were sold for some $26,000 to a merchant named James W. Walker and his wife Sue, of Covington, Kentucky. Walker had left behind a successful department store back home to try his hand at ranching out west – he even turned down a partnership with department store magnate J.W. Robinson. After a couple years in Los Angeles proper, the Walkers relocated to their new home in San Dimas in 1891. Their descendants lived in the house for nearly 90 years. 

Moses Wicks & co. spared no expense in building their failed hotel, hiring architects Joseph Cather & Samuel Newsom for $20,000. The Newsoms were well known in northern California for their exuberant, highly-detailed Queen Anne/Eastlake-style mansions, most notably the Carson Mansion in Eureka. By the mid-1880s their renown had spread further south – a Los Angeles Herald piece from late 1887 lists 14 southern California projects on the Newsoms’ docket, including seven hotels, five residences and a bank, most of them now demolished. Their best-known work in LA is probably the Sessions House, one of the nine beautifully-preserved Victorians on the 1300 Block of Carroll Avenue.

The latter half of the 19th century was a golden era for California lumber, when old-growth redwoods were plentiful, and the groves along the northern California coast and in the Sierra Nevadas were still unprotected. The Newsoms ordered high-quality redwood from northern California and pine logs from Oregon. All that lumber was floated down the coast on rafts, then hauled via wagon from the port at San Pedro, all the way east to San Dimas. Then the wood was cut to size at a planing mill on the east side of San Dimas Avenue.

The 13,200 square foot San Dimas Hotel featured 30 rooms with extra-tall 12-foot ceilings, including 18 bedrooms. It was designed to be heated by 14 fireplaces, sharing seven chimneys, though most of them were never used, according to the NRHP nomination form. Thick carpeting, oil paintings and stained glass windows abounded. The siding and ornate woodwork on the inside and outside was all redwood. 

The exterior is a typical Newsom cacophony of textures and shapes. On the front facade alone you’ll find clapboard siding alternating with three types of shingles, dormers and pediments and a ½-story tower, arched balconies and a wraparound veranda hemmed in by a hand-carved balustrade. Decorative woodwork rims the veranda’s overhang like wooden icicles.  

As you enter the double front doors, the first thing you’re greeted with is a dark brown booth and staircase in the foyer, with some of the finest wooden grillework I’ve ever encountered. If this isn’t all original, it’s a startling facsimile: There’s an amazing photo from the house’s early days, with James W. Walker sitting at his writing desk right in front of a nearly identical booth. This would have made for a striking check-in desk at the hotel.

Climb up the stairs past a couple square leaded glass windows, and you encounter a network of halls with rooms on either side. These rooms would have been the original hotel suites, refashioned as bedrooms when the Walkers moved in. The hallway doors are tall, with transom windows on top; the halls themselves are narrow, and the red patterned carpeting gives off some slightly unnerving The Shining vibes. Although one serious ghost hunter opined “I would call this a haunted house, but it’s certainly not a negative house…I feel that the spirits here are very happy to be here.”

In the late 19th century the Walkers were part of a tiny community of San Dimas pioneers, as small as 50 people. James and Sue Walker were known as “Uncle Jimmy” and “Aunt Sue” to the locals, and there was always room in their palatial home for community gatherings. The first school in San Dimas met in the basement until a permanent school house was erected, and the living room hosted San Dimas’s first church services, before the First Baptist Church was organized in 1893. Various civic and professional clubs met in the Walkers’ spacious halls; the papers reported on Halloween parties and ladies’ lectures that took place there over the years.

The Walker family oversaw one of San Dimas’s early citrus operations from their massive hotel-cum-homestead. James Walker also made the news for some controversial real estate moves in Los Angeles. According to an 1895 story in the Los Angeles Times, he built a complex of six apartment houses, nearly flush with the street, on a block of West Adams Street known for its genteel mansions “withdrawn to a respectable distance from the sidewalk.” The neighbors offered cash and property swaps to dissuade him from finishing the job, but Walker held firm, threatening “to rent the apartments at any price to anybody without regard to ‘race, color or previous condition of servitude.’” Scandalous! 

Over the decades, the Walker clan expanded as James and Sue’s kids married and had kids of their own. The Walker family tree also contains branches of the Potts family, the Carruthers family, then the Brunner, Davis, Trout and Fish families (yes, the Trouts and the Fishes are related). And those are just the ones that lived in the house in San Dimas. Multiple family members were born, got married and died within its walls. 

But an aging, 30-room mansion is expensive to maintain. So in 1979, a sixth generation of the Walkers-Carruthers dynasty decided to lease the “big house” to a restaurateur named Don Wilcott, who remodeled the place to accommodate his upscale French restaurant the Mansion Inn for about a decade. Jack Carruthers, great-grandson of James and Sue Walker, told the Times in 1979 that “We felt that we would be sharing it with other people in the community.” 

After business soured at the Mansion Inn, next up was the San Dimas Festival of Western Arts, which leased the property starting in 1998, but didn’t make much use of it beyond an annual festival. In 2000 the City of San Dimas took up the lease, and later that year the City bought the house outright from the Carruthers family trust. For the next seven years it stood largely vacant. 

All the while, the house was falling apart. By the time the city took over its chimneys and some floors had collapsed, the foundations were uneven, and that glorious staircase leaned inwards. 

In 2007, San Dimas finally began the two-year process of restoring and retrofitting this prized piece of its heritage. They sank nearly $7 million of City funds into the job, with additional funds from the US Department of Housing & Urban Development, the Getty Foundation and others. The firms of Mark Sauer Construction and TB Penick & Sons helped to overhaul the wood, metal and concrete systems that held the house together, and yank back a 1979 addition that had developed dry rot. Lead-based paint was remediated and an elevator was added to help meet accessibility standards. The upgrades earned an LA Conservancy Preservation Award and a California Preservation Award in 2010.

When the old San Dimas Hotel reopened to the public in 2009, it had a fresh set of tenants to match its fresh coat of paint. Another restaurant called Saffron was on the bottom, while The San Dimas Historical Society and the San Dimas Festival of the Arts held offices upstairs. Saffron gave way to Marstellerz in 2011, and Marstellerz was gone by 2017. The current culinary contender is a sit-down Italian joint, Vincenzo’s Terrazza.

While you’re waiting for your risotto, head upstairs to the museum that The San Dimas Historical Society runs. In the rooms where the Walker family once slept, you’ll find exhibits about their lives, and artifacts from every phase of San Dimas history. There’s a room of photos from the restoration process, and unexpected objects unearthed during it. There’s also a gift shop full of donated tchotchkes. It’s a homespun museum, clearly the work of passionate locals with a vast collection of San Dimas memorabilia, and an even vaster amount of local lore to share. Could San Dimas have conceived of a more perfect tenant for one of its most historic buildings? No. Party on, dudes.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “A Property War” (Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1895 – via ProQuest)

+ “‘Aunt Sue’ Paid Final Tribute” (Progress-Bulletin, November 16, 1925 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Early San Dimas History Sketched” (Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1953 – via ProQuest)

+ Elwell, Charles: “Carruthers Home in San Dimas Gets Landmark Status: Carruthers Home Named Landmark” (Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1967 – via ProQuest)

+ “For an Odd Fellows’ Home.” (Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1889 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Henderson, Babara, City of San Dimas: San Dimas Hotel’s NRHP nomination form

+ Kingsbury, Taylor: “The Haunted Mansion Disney Didn’t Build” (La Verne Magazine, July 1, 2003)

+ Landsbaum, Mark: “Relics of Past to Be Preserved by Meat and Potatoes” (Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1979 – via ProQuest)

+ Miglino, Malia: “San Dimas Hotel / Walker House📍San Dimas, CA” (@macabremalia on Instagram, June 13, 2024)

+ “More Buildings in Addition to the Already Long List Published.” (Los Angeles Herald, November 23, 1887 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Palma, Bethania: “Historic home gets renovation funding” (Daily Breeze, October 4, 2007)

+ Ransom, Franki: “History’s for Sale in San Dimas : Landmark: Mansion built in 1887 as a hotel has been a home and a restaurant. Price: $1.19 million.” (Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1991)

+ “San Dimas.” (Obituary – Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1912 – via Newspapers.com)

+ San Dimas Historical Society: “San Dimas Historical Society: Preserving Our Past for the Future” (Brochure – procured 2025)

+ San Dimas Historical Society: “The Walker House” (Flyer – procured 2025)

+ Sarabia, Ambrosia: “This Old House” (Whittier Daily News, August 30, 2017)

+ “The San Dimas Hotel” (sandimashistorical.org)

+ Velasco, Justin: “San Dimas’ Walker House could be sold” (The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, November 7, 2012)

+ Velasco, Justin: “Walker House restaurant shuts down, San Dimas seeking new tenant” (Pasadena Star News, updated August 29, 2017)

+ Vincenzo’s Terrazza Ristorante website

+ “Walker House” (LAConservancy.org)

+ “Walker House” (Mark Sauer Construction, Inc. website)

+ Vils, Ursula: “Home Sweet Home Is a Hotel: San Dimas Residence Started Life as an Inn” (Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1975 – via ProQuest)