History

Before Idyllwild

Idyllwild history starts long before the name. The Cahuilla lived in the San Jacinto Mountains for at least 2,500 years before the 1860s, according to the Idyllwild Area Historical Society. They used high-country camps in season, to gather acorns and to hunt. The 1852 Treaty of Temecula would have given them legal ownership of the whole range. The U.S. Senate rejected it, and the Cahuilla clans were pushed onto scattered reservations.

Ranchers came next. Charles Thomas began grazing cattle in Garner Valley in 1861, and in the drought of the early 1860s herds were driven up into Strawberry Valley and Tahquitz Valley for summer grass. Prospectors combed the range from 1860 on and found nothing worth the trouble.

Sawmills and the toll road

The Southern Pacific Railroad’s line through San Gorgonio Pass brought the first logging crews into the forest in 1875. By 1878 commercial loggers were cutting in Strawberry Valley and the Fuller Mill Creek basin. In 1897 President Grover Cleveland created the San Jacinto Forest Reserve, which put the federal government in charge of what was left. The San Jacintos became part of the San Bernardino National Forest in 1925.

By 1875 enough people were riding up that someone built a toll road between Strawberry Valley and Hemet. In 1888, after lumbermen lobbied for it, San Diego County cancelled the toll franchise, and the visitors followed.

How Idyllwild got its name

George Hannahs opened Strawberry Valley’s first hotel in 1889 and a tent resort, Camp Idylwilde, in 1890. When a post office opened at the Hannahs’ store on March 3, 1893, it was named Rayneta, after their young son, Raymond.

In 1900 a group of Los Angeles doctors led by Dr. Walter Lindley formed the California Health Resort Company. Their Idyllwild Sanatorium opened in June 1901, meant to pay for tuberculosis care with hotel guests. That same year the post office dropped Rayneta and became Idyllwild, and the new name stuck.

Who picked it is less settled than the old story suggests. Laura Rutledge, whose husband Charles kept the sanatorium’s books, is often given the credit. Historian John Robinson found that the story first appeared in her 1937 obituary, and that the Hannahs had been using the name for their camp since 1890. It may still have been her idea. We like that nobody can be sure.

The Inn and the vacation lots

The sanatorium burned in 1904 and was rebuilt as the Idyllwild Inn in 1905. The Historical Society calls it the prime hostelry on the Hill for 40 years. New roads from Banning and Hemet in 1909 and 1910, and the cars that used them, brought far more visitors.

In 1917 Claudius Emerson bought the Inn and 1,000 acres around it and sold them off as vacation lots. He lost the property in the Depression, in 1938. A competing developer, the Idyllwild Mountain Park Company, held 2,600 acres in Fern Valley and began subdividing in 1923. Most of the homes in Idyllwild today trace back to one of those two holdings. Emerson also gave or sold land cheaply to churches, scouts and Riverside County, which is where camps like Camp Emerson and Idyllwild Pines came from.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, local craftsmen built rustic furniture from mountain timber. Pinecraft and Woodland Craft were the best-known names. You will still see the pieces around town.

Park, wilderness and the paper

The Forest Service began protecting much of the high country above town in 1929; it became federal wilderness in 1964. Mount San Jacinto State Park was dedicated in 1937. The park covers 14,000 acres today, and San Jacinto Peak, at 10,834 feet, is the highest point in the California State Park System. The high country is still wilderness, looked after by the state and federal governments together.

Ernie and Betty Maxwell started the Town Crier, the weekly paper, in 1946. Ernie’s campaigns for the forest are remembered in the Ernie Maxwell Scenic Trail.

Films, climbers and an arts school

Cecil B. DeMille filmed in Garner and Strawberry valleys from 1914, including “The Girl of the Golden West”. At least 20 feature films were shot here in the 1920s, and Elvis Presley made “Kid Galahad” here in 1961.

Climbers found Tahquitz Rock in the 1930s. It is where they first worked out the numbered system for rating a climb’s difficulty that Yosemite and everyone else later adopted. Tahquitz and Suicide Rock now carry hundreds of routes.

The Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts opened in 1950. It later served as a branch campus of the University of Southern California, passed to the Idyllwild Arts Foundation in 1983, and in 1986 the foundation opened Idyllwild Arts Academy, a residential arts high school.

Visit the museum

Idyllwild looks after its history. The Idyllwild Area Historical Society runs a free museum in the village, at 54470 North Circle Drive on the corner of Oakwood, with exhibits on the logging camps, cattle ranching, the sanatorium, filmmaking and mountain road travel. Opening days vary through the year, so check the Society’s site before you go.

For the long version, the Society sells Robert B. Smith’s “Idyllwild and the High San Jacintos”. Much of this page leans on the Society’s work. The mistakes, if any, are ours.