San Diego History · Julian
The building called the Julian Hotel is not the Julian Hotel.
Albert and Margaret Robinson built it in 1897 and called it the Hotel Robinson. All records sourced and cited.
Albert and Margaret Robinson built it in 1897 and called it the Hotel Robinson. All records sourced and cited.
The two story frame building on Main Street in Julian that takes guests under the name Julian Hotel was built in 1897 and it was not called that for the first twenty four years of its life.
It was the Hotel Robinson. It was built by Albert Robinson, who the San Diego History Center records as a formerly enslaved person from Missouri, and his wife Margaret, who ran it.
There was a real Julian Hotel. It was a different building, put up in 1872 by George and Katherine Hoskings, and it burned down around 1900. The name outlived the building and ended up on this one.
Three things before the story runs. The cedars and locusts standing around the hotel were planted by Albert Robinson while it was going up. Margaret's father was recorded as the first Black man ever summoned as a juror in San Diego County. And the town had fifteen hotels at its peak.
This is the one that is left.
Julian exists because somebody found gold in it, and the account the Journal of San Diego History treats as the more credible one says who.
A. E. Coleman, called Fred, had been enslaved. He had mined in northern California, and he was living with an Indian family near Wynola, about four miles southwest of the Santa Ysabel ranch, when he stopped to water his horse in a creek in January 1869 and saw something in the bed of it. He panned it and found gold.
He formed the Coleman mining district and the mining town of Emily City. Word went up into the hills and down to San Diego, and the rush was on.
The creek is called Coleman Creek.
Six hundred people were in the town soon after. Between 1870 and 1880 Julian had two hotels, five stores, two cafes, two blacksmith shops, two livery stables and several saloons, and no bank until September 1870. The general stores did the banking.
The federal nomination that put the hotel on the National Register gives a figure for the town in 1890: about five hundred people, of whom about seven percent were Black.
America Newton came from Missouri to the Julian area in 1872. She had been enslaved. She homesteaded eighty acres, made her living washing clothes, and was a familiar sight driving her buggy around with the delivery. There is a road above Banner named America Grade.
Albert Robinson came to San Diego County with a man the record calls Major Chase, and worked as a cook on his ranch. He also carried water through the county, which in that terrain was a job.
He and Margaret Tull met in Julian.
They started with food, not beds. A bakery and a restaurant on the Main Street lot.
It ran from 1887 to 1897, and it ran well enough to pay for what came next.
The Hotel Robinson had regulars who ate there nearly every day. The record names some of them: Joe Marks, Doctor Hildreth, the stagecoach driver, a salesman, and a steady run of schoolteachers. People who worked with Margaret Robinson described her as very prim and energetic, and quiet spoken.
The contractors were C.R. Wellington and F.L. Blanc, both well known in the town.
It went up as a plain two story frame building with lap redwood siding and cut shingle in the gables, guest rooms on the second floor only, and a lobby, dining hall, kitchen and the owners' quarters below. Redwood, cedar and oak. Twelve rooms upstairs, small, averaging about ten feet by twelve.
Robinson planted the trees around it while the work was going on.
The guest register, as the nomination describes it, was not a backcountry register. Lady Bronston stopped there. So did the Scripps family and the Whitneys, and the nomination says it carried senators and early congressmen as well. People came up the grade from the coast to stay in a mountain hotel owned by a Black couple in the eighteen nineties, and they signed the book.
Albert Robinson died on June 10, 1915.
Margaret ran the hotel by herself for the next six years. In 1921 she sold it to Martin Jacob, the foreman of the Stonewall Mine, and the Jacob family kept it for decades, passing it from father to son.
The name changed under the Jacobs. The old Julian Hotel had burned by then and the name was free, and it moved across town to the Robinson building and stayed there.
The hotel went on the National Register of Historic Places on June 23, 1978.
When one of the rooms was refurbished before the nomination was written, the people doing the work found what was under the surface.
Pages of a San Diego Union dated June 26, 1870, glued to the wall as insulation. They had come off a structure that stood on the site before the hotel did.
A newspaper printed seven years before California had a transcontinental connection, pasted up to keep the cold out of a mountain room, still there a century later.
The nomination records that the townspeople had the entire townsite declared a State Historical Monument in 1948, and that a community plan for the historic townsite followed. That is not a detail. Designation of that kind governs what can be changed on a facade, what can be added, and how long it takes.
If you are buying anything in or near the old townsite, the rules that preserved this building are the same rules you will be working under, and they are the reason the town looks the way it does.
Julian does not have its own market report. The nearest coverage is East County, and the rest of the county history is on the San Diego history page.
1887 or 1897. Published accounts split. The 1981 Journal article says the Robinsons built the hotel in 1887. The federal nomination says they started a bakery and restaurant on the site in the 1880s and began construction of the hotel in 1897. The San Diego History Center dates their operation from 1887. Those reconcile if 1887 is the food business and 1897 is the building, which is how this piece reads them, and it is what the nomination says in so many words.
The oldest hotel claim. The phrase "oldest continuously operated hotel in Southern California" is attached to this building in several places, including in quotation marks in the 1981 Journal article. The federal nomination is more careful and calls it "one of the oldest operating hotels in Southern California." This piece uses neither as a fact of its own. For scale, the Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888.
When Margaret sold. The nomination and the hotel's own account say 1921. The 2008 Journal article says the Jacobs family bought it around 1919 and notes in its own footnote that sources are unclear. This piece uses 1921 because that is what the federal record says, and flags that it is contested.
When the name changed. The nomination says the name changed when Martin Jacob bought it. The 2008 Journal article says it changed at some point during the decades the Jacobs family ran it. Both agree it happened under the Jacobs and neither gives a dated document, so this piece says it changed under the Jacobs and gives no year.
Who found the gold. The Journal article sets out two accounts of the discovery and calls the Coleman account the more credible tradition, which is not the same as a dated record. This piece reports it the way the source frames it and does not promote a tradition to a fact.
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