Elk Mountain Hotel and Garden Spot Pavilion

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In the 1940s and '50s, The Elk Mountain Hotel (formerly known as the Grand View Hotel and or the Mountain View Hotel) and  the Garden Spot Dance Pavilion located in the tiny little town of Elk Mountain, Wyo., routinely drew huge crowds to hear big-name acts such as Hank Thompson and Louis Armstrong.  The enthusiastic crowds traveled long distances to hear the music and have a chance to dance on a floor that was reported to have been built on springs.

Today, the dance pavilion is gone, but the Historic Elk Mountain Hotel remains, on the very site that has served travelers since it was an 1860’s stage stop on the Overland Trail. The hotel, a three-story folk Victorian building painted white with green trim, stands near the bridge that crosses over the Medicine Bow River. Nearby, Elk Mountain itself rises to 11,156 feet and is visible from the hotel grounds.

The river crossing became a stage stop on the Overland Trail in 1862, when the stagecoach king Ben Holladay moved his stage line south from the original Oregon Trail route. The original stage stop and its boarding house fell into disuse and disrepair after the Union Pacific Railroad was built across what is now southern Wyoming in1868. The old wooden boarding house, known as ‘The Crossing’, was destroyed by fire. In 1905 John Evans built the hotel on the site. When Evans built his hotel, it was the first establishment in the area to have electricity and indoor plumbing. The on-site coal-fired electrical plant provided power for the hotel, but also served several close neighbors as well. The hotel offered 16 bedrooms upstairs and a bar in what is now the dining room. In 1909 The Town of Elk Mountain was officially incorporated. 

In 1920, Evans and his sons built an open-air pavilion and called it The Garden Spot Pavilion. They later enclosed the pavilion with pine walls so it could be used year-round. Legend had it that Evans built the dance floor on railroad springs. The slogan for the Garden Spot Pavilion was “If you can’t dance, just jump on and ride!” One story is told of a young man who was deaf and blind, but still asked the ladies to dance because he could always tell the rhythm of the song by how the floor was bouncing.  It wasn’t until the Dance Pavilion was torn down in 2000 that the legend was debunked. It turns out that Evans had used green logs moored in concrete with no center support. As a happy mishap, when those logs cured out and shrank a little bit, the result was the wonderfully bouncy dance floor. Many still believe it was built on railroad springs and have sweet memories of dancing the night away at the Garden Spot Dance Pavilion. 

In 1947, Hanna, Wyo., resident Mark Jackson bought the hotel and pavilion from the Evans family. He remodeled the dance hall the next year, and often performed there with his Cowboy Band. Jackson was successful in enticing famous traveling bands to stop in Elk Mountain as it was half-way between Denver and Salt Lake City. They would stay the night and play at the Garden Spot. Many famous musicians including Hank Thompson, Jim Reeves and bands led by Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong and Lawrence Welk (just to name a few) performed in Elk Mountain over the years.

Rawlins, Wyo., resident Ralph Penman remembers how people from around the region packed the pavilion on Saturday nights all summer. They were drawn in by the music and the chance to dance on the bouncy floor. Groups of local teenagers often drove there, he says. “It was a good place to go. We knew most everyone there.” According to the old posters, the cost of admission was $2 for “gents” and $1 for ladies.

Hanna resident Robert Warburton, now deceased, recalled in a 2002 interview conducted by local historian Nancy Anderson, that the dances always drew huge crowds. Six deputies were stationed at various points in the bar, the dance hall and outside to help keep order. Warburton, who was in partnership with Jackson in the 1940s and 1950s, said that one night he counted 36 different state license plates on cars in the parking lot, and he remembered 56 different bands having performed at the pavilion over the years.

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Weekends were often tightly scheduled with a Saturday evening dance that began around 8 p.m. and continued until 3 a.m., followed by a Sunday afternoon rodeo and another dance after that. “Sometimes,” Warburton said, “I’d get up on Saturday morning and not go to bed again until Monday.”

There were usually one or two fights every Saturday night, Penman says. On May 18, 1946, one of those conflicts resulted in a tragedy. Two deputies tried to break up a number of fist fights that night and were knocked down in the process. Deputy Sheriff Claude Simmons of Hanna drew his gun to fire a warning shot in the air, but someone grabbed his arm and pushed it up. When his arm came down, his gun grip struck a person in the head. The gun discharged and the bullet struck and killed a bystander, 40-year-old John Milliken, Jr., of Hanna. Within the week, a coroner’s jury ruled Milliken’s death accidental, and Simmons was exonerated. It was a week too late however, the sheriff had already left town to avoid the angry crowds blaming him for killing an innocent man.

The Jackson family retained ownership of the hotel for many years. When both the hotel and the pavilion were named to the National Register of Historic Places in the mid-1980s, the owners were a couple named Martin. In 1999, Peter Thieriot of California purchased the property. Thieriot completely restored the hotel in an intensive two-year project during the early 2000's. It now offers 12 rooms, each with private bath, and a third-floor conference room where the attic once was located. The Garden Spot Pavilion was demolished for safety reasons. Susan Prescott-Havers and her husband Arthur bought the hotel in 2007. In early 2020 Christine Ledder Neels bought the hotel and still offers exquisite dinning and a relaxing stay in one of the beautifully renovated rooms at the Historic Elk Mountain Hotel built in 1905.