474 



HISTORY OF PASADENA. 



York or lyondon except by mere bulk. Connected with the hotel are a 

 picturesque floral park ; a lawn tennis court and croquet ground ; a com- 

 plete steam power and electric light plant; and a dormitory annex— all 

 together representing an investment of about $450,000. J. H. Holmes is 

 the manager, with a corps of eighty -two employes. This hotel has the 

 historic association of having been the scene of a banquet to President 

 Harrison, ApHl 23, 24, 1891. [It was then a much smaller and very different 

 looking structure called "The Webster," built with money borrowed from 

 Col. Green.] Also, banquet to Prof. Lowe, in honor of the completion of 

 his electric railroad to Echo Mountain — August 23, 1893. Also, banquet 

 to Hon. A. G. Throop, founder of Throop Polytechnic Institute, on Pasa- 

 dena's first celebration of "Father Throop Day," December 21, 1893. [For 

 further account of these events, see pages 195, 328, 331.] 



Echo Mountain House. — This house is the latest addition to Pasa- 

 dena's historic hotels, and it challenges the world for wonder fulness of 



position and adjunct attractions. Its 

 projector and owner is the historic 

 Prof T. S. C. Lowe, of army balloon 

 fame, original inventor of artificial ice- 

 making machinery, and of water gas, 

 and other valuable devices. Its build- 

 ers were John V. Carson and his son 

 Eugene, cousins of the famous and histo- 

 ric Kit Carson, whose name is insepara- 

 bly associated with that of Col. John C. 

 Fremont in his world-famed Rocky Moun- 

 tain explorations, and initial conquest of 

 California. Among the workmen em- 

 ployed on its foundations was Jason Brown, a son of the great anti-slavery 

 leader, "Old John Brown " of Kansas and Harper's Ferry fame. It is built 

 on the summit of Echo Mountain, where its south and east front verandas look 

 down the mountain slope, and its rear projects over the declivity northward. 

 It is reached from below by the famous ' ' great cable incline, ' ' which is 

 practically a hotel elevator half a mile long and making a vertical rise of 

 1,300 feet in six to eight minutes, by electrical power — the only structure 

 of its kind now in the world (1895). In front of it on the mountain brow 

 stands the great electric searchlight, which was built for and used at the 

 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 ; then at the sub-national 

 Mid- Winter Fair in San Francisco in 1894 — and is the largest and most 

 powerful instrument of its kind now in the world. A few rods up the 

 mountain side above the hotel is the Mount Lowe Observatory (in its 

 temporary location), in charge of Prof. Lewis Swift, a man of world-wide 

 fame as a discoverer of comets, and who holds rank with the foremost 



ECHO MOUNTAIN HOUSE. 



Colonial Architecture, with octagon rotunda 

 and tower at the wings' vertex. 



