Yosemite’s luxurious Ahwahnee Hotel was the brainchild of the National Park Service’s first director. Almost from the first moment he saw Yosemite Valley, Stephen Mather envisioned building a luxury resort hotel to attract the wealthier class of visitors. Given the park service’s precarious funding situation in its earliest days, Mather felt that attracting a well-to-do and politically influential patronage would be crucial for financing development of other essential services for all classes of visitors to the park. The director dedicated his political expertise and personal financial resources to making the scheme a reality. Unfortunately, the first two concessioners chosen to complete the project failed to measure up to the task. Frustration over these failures was largely responsible for the forced consolidation of the second of Mather’s failed concessioners with its chief competitor, the Curry Camping Company, in 1925. One of the conditions in the lease given to the new Yosemite Park & Curry Company required that it construct the luxury hotel. Fourteen months later, the site of the new hotel was being cleared for construction. On July 14, 1927, it was formally opened.
The Ahwahnee did not prove to be initially as successful as expected. Almost immediately company management began lobbying the National Park Service for self-contained recreational facilities at the hotel: a dance pavilion, golf course, swimming pool, tennis and croquet courts, a “Kiddie Kamp,” and “the building of bridle paths and foot paths.” By 1930, the golf course and tennis/croquet courts had been added.
More at
http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/navy-hospital.htm
