Tokeland Hotel

The oldest hotel in Washington State, as its owners call it, began in 1885 as a farmhouse on a peninsula between the Pacific and Willapa Bay, and only opened to travellers as the Kindred Inn in 1899. Its ghost story is famous and its documentation is nil. Charley, in the version the hotel has told since at least 1993, was a Chinese man smuggled ashore during the Exclusion years and hidden in the hollow behind the parlour fireplace; in the version its manager told a radio reporter in 2019, he was an escaped indentured servant who died there of carbon monoxide poisoning when a fire was lit. No name, no date, no death record, and nothing in the National Register file of 1977, which does mention the brothels of Aberdeen and what Prohibition guests were offered. What can be dated is the telling: the fireplace hideaway appears in The Seattle Times in 1993 with no ghost attached, apparitions surface in an amateur directory in 2002, and the name Charley first appears on the hotel's own website in 2003, inside a parenthesis that reads: Ask your innkeeper about Charley.

The land came before the hotel, and it came with a name that was already on it. In 1858 George Brown settled on Toke Point, a low peninsula on the north shore of what was then called Shoalwater Bay. The point was thick with oysters and, in the words of the National Register nomination, "inhabited only by natives of the Willapa tribe"; one of them, Chief Toke, gave the place its name. Brown's daughter Elizabeth — Lizzie, always — was born at Bruceport in 1862 and grew up with the children of that community as her only playmates. The basket and artifact collection that came out of those friendships hung in the hotel until she died in 1931. Tokeland is still tribal ground: the Shoalwater Bay reservation, 334.5 acres set aside by executive order of President Andrew Johnson on 22 September 1866, is here, and the tribal centre serves the village around it. William Stingly Kindred was born in Clatsop County, Oregon, in 1857, into a family that had come overland to Oregon Territory in 1844 and moved north to Puget Sound the following year with the party that founded Tumwater; his father, B. C. Kindred, was one of the first pilots on the Columbia River. William came up to Toke Point from his father's house in Portland in 1880, working on the construction of the North Cove life-saving station on the bay. That is where he met Lizzie Brown, and they married the same year. In December 1884 he bought his father-in-law's 900-acre homestead outright, together with the dairy and the oyster business that went with it. The following year the couple built the farmhouse that is still the south wing of the hotel: two storeys of wood frame, roughly 40 by 65 feet, gabled, with a brick fireplace set into the north wall and a five-foot covered porch on the east side facing the bay. The lumber came by small boat from a mill at South Bend. The outside was clad in six-inch shiplap; the inside walls were vertical rough-sawn planks covered with burlap and then wallpaper. That is 1885, and what it produced was a house. The hotel came fourteen years later. In 1899, with more and more travellers coming down the bay, the Kindreds added a second two-storey wing and opened their home to the public as the Kindred Inn; the name changed to Tokeland Hotel shortly afterwards. From 1898 to 1915 William served as Tokeland's postmaster and the hotel doubled as the village post office. A further wing in 1910 left the building C-shaped, brought gas lighting and a second large fireplace, and fixed the outline the place still has. Their daughter Maude ran the modernisation. Through the 1920s and 1930s she put in plumbing, replaced the gas with electricity and pushed the dining room out to the edge of the east porches — which is why the elevation built as the front now works as the back. An advertisement in the Southwest Washington Labor Press of 29 August 1924 shows what the house was selling in Lizzie's last decade, under the headline "Surf bathing here with no undertow to fear": "Tokeland Hotel. Mrs. W. S. Kindred, Prop. Clam Digging. Crab Fishing. Enlarged Dining Room Capacity. Beautiful Surroundings. Most Pleasant Spot at the Resort. Special Rates by the Week. Make Reservations by Wire or Mail." Guests arrived on the steamers Reliable and Shamrock at the Toke Point dock until Depression-era roads from Aberdeen and then Raymond replaced them. The nomination is candid about Prohibition: remote and close to Canada, Willapa Bay was barely policed, and the hotel "reportedly offered attractions to guests beyond good food and comfortable lodging". When Prohibition ended in 1933, Maude had the resort clubhouse moved onto the lot next door and turned into a tavern and dance hall. Lizzie died in 1931 and William in 1943, and the family's ownership ended with him. From 1950 the Hawthorne family ran the building mainly as a restaurant; it stood idle through the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was painted the barn red it wore for years in 1974. Halfred and Betty Smith were rehabilitating it room by room, serving meals at weekends, when Michael Sullivan of Western Washington University filed the National Register nomination on 25 May 1977. The state signed it on 15 December 1977 and the Tokeland Hotel was listed on 11 April 1978 under reference number 78002766. It is listed on the National Register; it is not a National Historic Landmark, a promotion the Seattle Times gave it in print in 1993 and which has been copied since. By the late 1980s the building was shuttered and derelict again. Scott and Katherine White, a Seattle couple who had holidayed on this coast while their children grew up, bought it in 1989, spent seven months scrubbing, painting and repairing — a porcupine in a back room, a skunk in the basement, mushrooms growing out of an upstairs mattress — and reopened on Mother's Day 1990 with three habitable rooms. There were fifteen by 1993 and seventeen by 2001. They ran it, driving down from Seattle every Friday, until 2018, when they sold to Heather Earnhardt and Zac Young. Earnhardt moved the Wandering Goose, her Capitol Hill café in Seattle since 2012, into the dining room; the family now lives in Tokeland with five children and a working farm behind the hotel. One correction, because this file carried the error for a year: the hotel was not built in 1889. That date is the hotel's own, and it is a slip for 1899. Jean Godden printed it in The Seattle Times on 7 March 1993 — "In 1889, the Kindreds expanded their farmhouse and opened the Kindred Inn" — and the hotel's website repeated it almost word for word from at least 2003 until the site was rebuilt in 2018. The nomination, compiled from county records and from interviews with the president of the Pacific County Historical Society, says 1899, and the present owners now say it too: "It wasn't until 1899 that they opened it to travelers as the Kindred Inn."

The Tokeland Hotel is open and working, not a ruin. The address is 2964 Kindred Avenue, Tokeland, Washington 98590; the desk is on (360) 267-7006. Heather Earnhardt and Zac Young have owned it since 2018. Seventeen guest rooms occupy the second floor, reached by a staircase tucked in behind the fireplace room, and there are two cabins about a kilometre up the road (Walter's, one bedroom, adults only; Penelope's, two bedrooms, up to four guests). Book with your eyes open. In keeping with the 1885 plan there are no private bathrooms, no televisions, no mini-fridges and no air conditioning; four shared bathrooms serve the whole floor, two with showers and two with claw-foot tubs. There is a two-night minimum all year round. Check-in is 4 p.m. and check-out 11 a.m., with noon available for a fee if the desk can spare the room. Dogs are welcome in designated rooms for a fee; smoking or vaping anywhere in the building carries a $400 cleaning charge. Bookable extras include a wood-fired hot tub with cold plunge in 45-minute private sessions for over-18s, EV charging, and a fire-pit s'mores kit. Accessibility is poor and the hotel says so plainly: the guest floor is up stairs, there is no lift, and the shared bathrooms are not configured for wheelchairs. The cabins have thresholds and a step or two but no staircase. Meals are served by the Wandering Goose in the hotel dining room: breakfast and lunch 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., kitchen closed 2 to 4, supper 4 to 8. Reservations are recommended and walk-ins are taken. Hours contract in winter -- the restaurant closes Tuesdays and Wednesdays from January through May, and hotel and restaurant both close from 23 November to 26 December, reopening at 4 p.m. on the 26th. Call before driving out in the off season, because the hotel also shuts for days or weeks in winter for repairs. The oysters on the menu, Toke Points, are pulled out of the estuary behind the building. Getting there is a commitment: the hotel reckons two and a half hours from Seattle, three from Portland, an hour and a half from Olympia and the same from Astoria, and recommends the road in through Raymond. The building is not on a beach -- it looks south and east across Willapa Bay -- but ocean beaches are minutes away, and the bay side is good for birds, clams and crab, as the 1924 advertising already knew. Two things worth knowing about the ground itself. Three miles west, at North Cove, is Washaway Beach, described as the fastest-eroding shoreline on the west coast of the United States: it loses more than thirty metres of land a year, and by 2016 some sixty homes and over 2,000 acres had gone into the sea. The hotel has its own chapter of that story. Nic Krause, then general manager, told KIRO Radio in 2019 that a storm in the 1970s washed away a small cemetery that had stood on hotel ground; duck hunters recovered three headstones, two of them for family of the hotel's owners -- Leonidas Norris, dead in his early twenties in a shooting accident, and Albert Brown, dead at nine after being caught in the mud on an incoming tide -- and, the remains having gone with the beach, the stones now stand as decoration at the hotel and the tavern next door. The third is plain and carries only the initials CLL. Krause wondered aloud whether it might be Charley's. And if you have come for the ghost, do not expect the front desk to sell it to you: the current owners answer the question once, on their FAQ page, and leave it there.