Lake Crescent WA La Poel (#1428)

Interesting how many defunct resorts there are around, dating back to when you took the train someplace and just stayed there. That paradigm still exists here and there back East (cf. the Poconos), but the automobile has pretty much clobbered it!

I'm suspecting it was more changes in the culture than the move to autos. It seems that some time in about the 60's we began to forget how to relax and just let a day go by sitting at a lake, instead shifting to having to "consume" nature.

I can't give specific citations, but I remember reading somewhere that the trend began in the 20s, with the automobile, and accelerated during the Depression when people weren't willing or able to fork out for a resort stay, but could still go camping in the car. IIRC the rise of the motel also dates from the 30s. Then the trend _really_ accelerated after WW II--

Here's an example I had in mind--Glen Alpine Springs is above Fallen Leaf Lake in the Tahoe basin:
www.ipernity.com/doc/289859/36005193/in/album/450451
It evidently staggered on till the 1930s, but never recovered after WW II.

This reminds me of a lot of the old resorts a day's train ride from here, up in Wisconsin. Their story seems very reminiscent to this place and the resort slgwv mentions.

IIRC part of the story was that it dawned on people that they didn't _have_ to go places where a railroad happened to run. And, of course, the ol' jalopy could go a lot farther than ol' Dobbin could, even back then.

Dobbin??? I don't recall any name that was used to refer to horses.

I'm sure that changes in transportation played a part in changes of use of the older resorts, but do suspect that a significant part was also changes in how families spent time together. All of the rituals of togetherness, from eating together to vacationing together started evaporating some time in, I'm guessing, the 60's. When I was a child in the 50's our entire family sat around the dining room table to listen to story hours on the radio, TV use was initially that way but all that started disappearing in the 60's. In my house the disappearance of together time was related a divorce and all of us having to start working, but similar changes were happening widely.