John Crellin House and Stevens Hotel c. 1915

     My mother was born in 1911.  Even though the numbers tell me so, it’s hard to realize that one hundred years have passed since then.  And it’s even harder to imagine how Oysterville must have looked in the days of her childhood.
     As she grew older, she often talked about the way things were here in the teens and twenties of the last century.  “Next door, just to the north, was the Stevens Hotel.  No one lived in it then.  Well, maybe a couple of bachelors.”
     I could never pin her down on just who those bachelors were or what the hotel looked like.  She must have been quite young and the memories were probably fuzzy.  She did tell me that the Stevens Hotel eventually ‘fell down.’  I’m not sure whether that was before or after Glen Heckes salvaged some of the lumber from it to build “The Annex” to the Heckes Inn.  The Annex became the garage in the 1970s and then it, in its turn, was razed.
     The Stevens Hotel had been one of the earliest buildings in Oysterville.  It was built by Elvira Wing Viles and Gilbert Stevens who came here in 1854 within months of the town’s founding.  In fact, at one of the first meetings of the residents, it was Elvira who suggested the name for the growing settlement.
     Years ago, I had several requests for photographs of the Stevens Hotel but, at that time, I didn’t know of any.  Then, when I was on a search for other photographs of historic Oysterville for my Arcadia Press book about the village, Judy Heckes Stamp came up with an early photograph of the John Crellin House, probably before it became the Heckes Inn.  And there, to the south of it, just as my mother had described, was the Stevens Hotel.
     I don’t know exactly what I had imagined the building to look like.  When I first saw the picture, I was taken by the fact that it just looked like a large house but, of course, it would have, given the time-frame.  I also know that the Stevenses (no relation to Nyel) had eight children and I wondered if they built that house as a family dwelling place initially and then gradually began renting rooms.
     I also came to the clear realization that the Crellin brothers (who built our house and the Heckes house) had purchased their properties in the 1860s with the Stevens Hotel buffering the distance between them.  I knew they were a bit competitive in the way they built their homes, but the photograph made me wonder if they purposely bought their properties with a building located between them.
     Picturing the past is difficult even with photographs to help clarify the way it looked!