1880s: We would have all booked a room at the Swanton House
Sarah Swanton, Pescadero innkeeper, was praised as a woman of remarkable business ability, blessed with the friendliest personality.
“As an entertainer she has few equals and no superiors in hotel management, ” the San Mateo Times & Gazette raved in 1896.
Sarah and husband Charles Swanton ran the Swanton House Hotel for three decades, between the 1860s and 1890s, earning many return guests who appreciated the “courteous and accommodating way” they were always treated.
The Pescadero community loved the Swantons because their well-run business brought cash into the village’s economy, the general store, the restaurant, the stables, and so on.
In fact, she kept a stable business next door to the Swanton Hotel and she hired R.K. Farley to run it, ferrying hotel guests to Pebble Beach,where entire days were spent sifting through the pebbles for a colorful one that might make a perfect pendant.
Owning the stable next door also put Sarah into direct competition with Loren Coburn, Pescadero’s least favorite citizen. Coburn also owned a stable and both Sarah and Loren depended on the tourist trade for profits. As I’ve posted many times, most visitors came to Pescadero to visit Pebble Beach, the well known hunting ground for beautiful “gems.” Horse-and-wagons had to be rented to get to the popular beach a couple miles from town–
Loren also owned the delicious strawberry fields that bordered Pebble Beach-and when Coburn planted a fence around the fields and built a gate with a sturdy lock, he, in effect, declared war on both the locals and the tourists.
Sarah’s horse-and-wagons couldn’t go to Pebble Beach, and she couldn’t stop talking about it; she’d have to shut down the stable–and her loud and bitter complaints reached Loren Coburn.
Now that Coburn had a monopoly on the stable business in Pescadero, he said Sarah was unhappy because “She couldn’t go all over the country and do as she pleases.”
Sarah Swanton may have had little control over the livery stable market, but no one questioned her right to do as she pleased in her own hotel. Read the rest of this entry »
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