What we know
Built about 1889 for the Red Stone Town, Land and Mining Company, the resort venture of John D. Perry and other investors, together with the dam on Bear Creek that made Lake Wauconda (S-0243). It was first called the Nanichant Inn, after Nanichant Rock, and faced east; an 1891 Douglas County News advertisement announced it open under the management of Miss Hammond (a 1971 Perry Park history); George Nickson helped build the hotel and the dam, and the resort closed in the early 1900s (Barbara Cannon's history) (Larkspur Historical Society files, S-0199). Guests came by stage from the Larkspur and Greenland depots (S-0243). The Castle Rock Journal carried its advertisement for mineral springs on Aug. 30, 1893 (S-0016); in late 1901 the Journal's Larkspur column had A. Ferguson, manager, and Miss E. M. Hammond, proprietor, leaving the inn for the winter. Visitors from the Rocklands at Palmer Lake went on to 'Perry Park's Nanichant Inn' in 1899, and a party 'dined at Nanichant hotel' in August 1903 (Edwards, S-0230). Weber and Schlupp, from the Castle Rock Journal, have the 1888 company's 20-room hotel opening in July 1891 under Miss Hammond, golf, horseback riding and home-cooked meals by 1900, and a new manager, Underwood, holding a Thanksgiving turkey shoot in 1902; they give its end as a cyclone that demolished it (Journal, Aug. 14, 1903) and elsewhere as a fire in the 1920s (ch. 27-28, pp. 152-158; S-0262). The newspapers settle it. The Journal of June 27, 1888 has George Brace beginning a 20-room hotel that week, to bear the name of the old sawmill, and on July 1, 1891 the Nanichant House under Miss Hammond. The cyclone of Thursday, Aug. 6, 1903 tore the roof off the big veranda and badly damaged the outside, but the owners had carpenters at work and the damage repaired within two days. A Clifton Inn, with its entrance moved from the west side to the north, opened at Perry Park under new management in 1905 and ran into 1906, apparently the same building renamed. On a Wednesday afternoon in April 1929 the bunkhouse on R. P. Lamont's Perry Park ranch, formerly the old hotel building, burned to the ground (Castle Rock Journal and Record Journal, 1888-1929, and Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 7-9, 1903; CHNC, S-0268). So a fire in 1929 ended it; the cyclone's 'demolished' is the outlier.
Where it was
The Perry Park Country Club's history puts the hotel 'Southwest of the lake where the 18th tee is currently located' (S-0243); placed at the 18th tees in OpenStreetMap (2026-10-17), south-southwest of Waucondah Reservoir. One modern source for the spot; good to a few hundred feet. It falls in the NE1/4 of Sec. 22, T9S R68W, the quarter of the 1892 Perry Park post office (see that entry); whether the office was in the hotel is not known. A 1971 Perry Park history's 'some hundred yards west of where the main business office in Perry Park today (1971) stands' cannot be checked.
Placed from a written description, such as a land section, a distance from a landmark or an old survey note.
Sources
- S-0016: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (coloradohistoricnewspapers.org)
- S-0045: Larkspur Historical Society website (larkspurhistoricalsociety.org)
- S-0103: OpenStreetMap extracts via the Overpass API (2026-10-05)
- S-0199: Larkspur Historical Society, the document store behind its "LHS Search Agent" (larkspurhistoricalsociety.org/resources/lhs-search-agents/): 362 files, about 810 MB, uploaded April–June 2026
- S-0230: Daniel W. Edwards, The Rocklands Hotel at Palmer Lake, Palmer Lake Historical Society Occasional Paper No. 4 (July 2012)
- S-0243: Perry Park Country Club, "Our History" (perryparkcc.com/course)
- S-0262: Tim Weber and Larry Schlupp, eds., Douglas County, Colorado: Prehistory to 2020 (Castle Rock: Historic Douglas County, Inc., 2022; first edition, printed by Amazon)
- S-0268: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection: the Weber and Schlupp leads, 1865–1965 (via S-0016)
Sources are named in the text above. Numbers such as S-0080 refer to our source list. Most newspaper quotations were read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. Long quotations from recent books are shortened here.