The History of Frenchglen Hotel

Frenchglen Hotel stands at the southern end of Oregon’s Blitzen Valley, where the wetlands of the Harney Basin meet the western foot of Steens Mountain. Sixty miles from Burns, it remains what it was created to be more than a century ago: a place of welcome in an immense and sparsely settled country.

The P Ranch

The hotel’s story begins in 1872, when twenty-three-year-old Peter French drove 1,200 cattle north from California on behalf of Dr. Hugh James Glenn, a prominent California landowner and agriculturalist. French established his headquarters beside the Donner und Blitzen River and began assembling the ranching empire remembered today as the P Ranch.

The ranch took its name from the “P” livestock brand French acquired with his first local cattle and property. Over the following twenty-five years, the French-Glenn operation spread throughout the Blitzen, Diamond, Happy and Catlow valleys. At its height, it controlled more than 100,000 acres and supported tens of thousands of cattle, along with horses and mules.

After French was killed in 1897, the French and Glenn heirs retained the ranch through the French-Glenn Livestock Company. Company secretary F.C. Lusk managed the property and gradually sold portions of it to settle debts. In 1907, the remaining Blitzen Valley holdings were purchased by Portland investors Henry and Elliott Corbett and C.E.S. Wood, who organized the Blitzen Valley Land Company under the management of rancher William Hanley.

In 1916, Chicago meatpacker Louis F. Swift acquired a large interest in the company. The operation was reorganized as the Eastern Oregon Livestock Company, which continued raising cattle while experimenting with irrigation, dairying and the settlement of smaller farms in the valley.

A Hotel at P Station

In the early cattle country, ranches traditionally offered food and lodging to travelers. Distances were great, settlements were few and refusing shelter could leave a person many miles from the next bed or meal. Hospitality was freely given, but at an operation as large and busy as P Ranch, the unpredictable stream of visitors eventually became a burden.

Soon after 1916, the Eastern Oregon Livestock Company built a small board-and-batten hotel about a mile west of ranch headquarters. The hotel and the little settlement around it became known as P Station—a reference to the nearby P Ranch, not to a railroad station, or stagecoach stop. .

That first hostelry was replaced around 1924 by the original front portion of the present Frenchglen Hotel. The new building was two stories tall and contained five upstairs guest rooms. Its dining and living rooms were separate, and the building had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Early guests included cattle buyers, ranch employees and travelers passing through the upper Blitzen Valley.

The hotel soon became more than a commercial lodging house. During much of the 1930s, it boarded teachers from the Frenchglen School. The school district reportedly paid thirty dollars per month for each teacher’s room and board, including three meals a day. Lunch was carried from the hotel to the school each afternoon.

From Somerange to Frenchglen

The community’s name followed a less direct route.

In 1923, the Bradeen Brothers established a seasonal supply camp on Steens Mountain for local stockmen. When postal authorities rejected their proposed name of “Steens,” the post office was called Somerange—a contraction of the stockmen’s term “summer range.”

The mountain supply venture was abandoned about 1926, and the Somerange post office was moved down to a point just west of P Ranch, in the vicinity of P Station. Somerange therefore did not simply replace P Station on a particular date: P Station was the local name for the hotel settlement, while Somerange was a post office that had begun elsewhere and was later moved there.

On October 1, 1930, the post office was renamed Frenchglen, combining the names of Peter French and Hugh James Glenn. The hotel and settlement have carried that name ever since.

From Ranch to Refuge

By the 1930s, the Eastern Oregon Livestock Company’s Blitzen Valley holdings were no longer considered profitable. In 1935, the federal government purchased the hotel, P Ranch and roughly 65,000 acres of surrounding land. The property was incorporated into the neighboring federal bird refuge, bringing the old livestock-company hotel into public ownership.

The change coincided with the arrival of the Civilian Conservation Corps. More than a thousand CCC enrollees would eventually work on refuge projects, constructing roads, canals, bridges, buildings and wildlife-management facilities throughout the Blitzen Valley.

During the winter of 1937-38, workers from the Five Mile CCC camp undertook a major rebuilding of Frenchglen Hotel. They lengthened the building by twenty feet, created three additional guest rooms, dug a basement and installed indoor plumbing, communal bathrooms and central hot-water heat. The original hipped roof was replaced by the long gabled roof seen today.

The work transformed the original five-room building into the familiar eight-room hotel while preserving its simple, practical character. CCC crews also planted the stately poplars that frame the building.

A gasoline-powered generating plant supplied the hotel’s first electricity. The hotel remained dependent upon its own generator until the late 1950s, when Harney Electric Cooperative extended electrical service to Frenchglen.

A State Heritage Site

Oregon acquired Frenchglen Hotel from the federal government in 1973 to preserve one of the last surviving examples of the small hotels that once served remote ranching and transportation outposts. The state renovated the property during the mid-1970s while retaining the hotel’s historic plan and appearance.

In 1984, Frenchglen Hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is now preserved as Frenchglen Hotel State Heritage Site and continues to serve travelers bound for Steens Mountain, the Blitzen Valley and Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

The hotel’s ownership, architecture and surroundings have changed, but its essential purpose has not. More than a century after the first guests stopped at P Station, Frenchglen Hotel still offers genuine hospitality: a warm welcome, a good meal and a comfortable place to rest in Oregon’s most remote corner.

Hotel Concessionaires

1924-1929 — Bud Hinton
1929-1930 — Clarence Miller
1930-1950 — Jennie McDonald
1950-1951 — Paul Howard
1951-1975 — Kenneth Pruitt
1975-1984 — Malena Konek
1984-1990 — Jerry and Judy Santille
1991-2022 — John Ross
2023-Present — Conlan and Mary Murphy