Lawton Hot Springs Hotel

Lawton's Hot Springs: Wild West to Ghost Town

by Riley Kessinger

Cars passing notice an abandoned, ominous building, looming upon the Truckee River, sitting by the railroad tracks. The structure is surrounded on all sides by gates that warn would-be trespassers to keep off the grounds. Unknown to many, this lifeless building was once a bustling hotel with a steady clientele. Guests enjoyed the luxurious geothermal hot springs located in the Truckee River right next to the hotel. The only reason I'm aware of the past life of one of Reno's forgotten artifacts is because my grandpa worked there as a teenager for a brief stint in the 1950s. I did not even know the place existed, let alone that my great-grandfather had owned it until my grandparents came up to Reno to visit me after my first few weeks of college. Upon researching the property, I unveiled a plethora of interesting stories and people associated with what is most commonly referred to as Lawton's Hot Springs Hotel.

Sumner Lee Laughton hailed from Maine, but he migrated to California shortly after the gold rush in 1852. Seven years later, Laughton moved to Reno, Nevada where he took up ranching (“Pioneers”). After developing the land, Laughton decided he could make a better living if he created a hotel by the hot springs that were near his home. Laughton bought the land which would become Lawton's Hot Springs in 1884 for the hefty price of $1040 which is the equivalent of about $25,000 today (Manuel). The hotel opened on July 08, 1906, as was proclaimed that day in issues of the Nevada State Journal. The hotel earned a decent amount from the influx of locals in its early days, and the hot springs, which could reach temperatures of 120.02 degrees Fahrenheit (Garside), were marketed as a therapeutic experience able to help those suffering from “asthmatics, rheumatics, and... arthritis” (“Descendant").

Sumner Laughton, or Sam, as he “as he was familiarly known” (“Pioneers”), lived a life straight out of a western movie. According to Laughton's obituary “Nevada [had] lost one of her oldest and sturdiest pioneers” at the time of his death. Laughton was the first white man to cross the Isthmus of Panama with his team and wagon in order to reach the fabled gold mines of California. Laughton also lost his eye in an undocumented accident and came to be called the “Great Old Man with one Eye” by local Native Americans. Laughton also saved one of the survivors from the Pyramid Lake War, “the single greatest confrontation between American Indians and whites in Nevada's history” (Edwards). Finally, Laughton “assisted lawmen after the first train robbery in the United States was pulled off nearby” (“Descendant”).

The Verdi, Nevada train robbery was well documented, and it occurred very close to Lawton's Hot Springs. The train robbery doesn't have much to do with Lawton's other than its close proximity, but I wanted to include it since the story was so interesting. In 1870 “a gang of robbers led by 'Big Jack' Davis boarded the locomotive in Verdi and then held up the train” (Boessenecker). Deputy James E. Kinkead is the man most responsible for apprehending the criminals who stole a “Wells Fargo sack of gold, containing 41,000$.” The robbers accomplished this scheme by boarding the train shortly after it left the Verdi train station and pointing guns at the train's engineer, forcing him to disconnect the “engine, mail car, and express car” from the train and leaving the rest of the train to sit at a standstill. The robbers threatened the men guarding the gold by putting guns to their temples, and the thieves took their loot and seemed to have escaped (Kinkead).

News of the robbery reached the sheriff and Deputy Kinkead later that morning by telegraph. The lawmen and a mob of vigilante citizens searched a full day for the robbers, but they were unable to find any trace of the criminals. The deputy went to the scene of the robbery and was able to find a few footprints on the freshly fallen snow. The robbers had walked on the railroad tracks to avoid leaving a trace, but Kinkead eventually found a house which doubled as a hotel along the railroad tracks where three of the robbers had slept the night before. After apprehending the first criminal at the hotel which was unnamed in the report, Kinkead painstakingly hunted down every last train robber. Kinkead traveled through snowy mountains in the middle of the night to trail the robbers as they tried to escape to California. Kinkead snuck into the houses and hotels where the other robbers were hiding late at night, and he would quietly remove any firearms within an arm's length from the perpetrators and awaken them to the cold gaze of the law through the scope of a “Henry rifle”(Kinkead). Kinkead went on to write up an article detailing his pursuit of the Verdi robbers, and he refused to mention himself by name as he was modest about his accomplishments.

Laughton must not have wanted to replicate Kinkead's modesty, since he originally meant his hotel to be named “Laughton's.” At first Laughton's land, which was quickly turning into a local recreational area, had no name, but, as the land became a popular train stop, the name Laughton's Hot Springs was assigned. The name was corrupted when signs along the railroad advertising the resort were misspelled at some point leading to the misspelling of every other sign created after the original error (“Descendant”). Visitors would arrive asking for Lawton's Hot Springs, and Laughton eventually allowed the corrupted name to stick. Laughton was able to make a modest earning from local visitors to his hotel until his death in 1915, but Lawton's Hot Springs became a tourist hot spot when the Victory and Lincoln highways were built (Evanoff). Due to this automobile boom, the Laughtons upgraded the hotel by adding an extra pool and expanding the premises to form a “motor inn” (Evanoff). Around this time Reno became known as the “divorce capital of the world” due to its extremely short waiting period for a divorce to finalize. Lawton's Hot Springs became a hot spot for divorcees waiting to be freed from their failed marriages. Lawton's was sold to a man by the name of Mark Yori in the 1920s, who would eventually bring in an unprecedented amount of business. Some of the sources I researched conflicted on when the establishment was sold to Yori, and the most popular dates listed for when Yori took over are either sometime in the 1920s or 1939. Yori is still alive as of 2014, at the age of 101 years old, meaning that he was born in 1913. It seems that Yori buying the hotel in the early 1930s makes the most sense, since in the context of all the renovations Lawton’s went through during the '20s and '30s a new owner taking over would have sparked all of the change. Yori was known to sporadically lease the hotel to others between times of operating it himself.

The first man whom Yori leased Lawton’s to was Felix Turillas Sr. who nearly got the entire hotel shut down during Prohibition. Prohibition lasted in the USA from 1920 to 1933, and Turillas was accused of “possession and sale of liquor at Lawton’s Springs resort on May 6, 1929” (“Prohibition”). The charges against Turillas were dropped without much explanation, but there is speculation that Turillas had friends in high places to get him out of trouble. Soon the business of the resort would take off, and the hotel did so well that by 1930 the facility included “an inside pool, large bar facing the river with an accompanying wooden patio, a comfortable sitting area with a large fireplace and small dining room” (Evanoff). During this period of great financial success, Lawton Hot Springs would become the training ground of heavyweight champion boxer Max Baer.

Max Baer, the antagonist of the 2005 film Cinderella Man, was a real fighter and spent lots of time at Lawton's Hot springs preparing for fights which would take place in Reno. Baer trained at Lawton’s during the early and mid-1930s. For his training headquarters at Lawton’s, staff set up a “ring, shadow boxing platform, and punching bag platform” for him to practice boxing (Bourne). There is speculation that Baer only established his headquarters at Lawton’s Springs because of Nevada’s lenient divorce laws. Baer’s first wife filed for divorce only a year after their unexpected marriage in Reno. Baer’s wife had accused him of infidelity, and the boxer would become known for his womanizing ways as he was portrayed as a man who used women in Cinderella Man. In the film, Baer was portrayed as a “churlish thug” who killed two in the boxing ring. In reality, Baer only killed one man, Frankie Campbell, during a fight, and after the fight he “started diverting a portion of his winnings to Campbell's family” (Myers). Baer would also wear a star-of-David on his shorts when fighting in the ring as he wanted to show his disdain for the way Germany was treating the Jewish.

During the same time period that Hitler rose to power in Germany, the Great Depression was devastating the USA's economy. Mark Yori kept Lawton's afloat by profoundly changing the atmosphere of the resort. Yori added “'ten dancing girls, a striptease act, a 15-piece orchestra, a ballroom, and room for 250 for dinner!'” (Breen). The many new features of Lawton’s made it quite the tourist destination in the 1930s and 1940s, but the resort remained a popular spot for locals who would flock to the $65,000 Olympic swimming pool which opened in 1931. Lawton's Springs also opened up a greyhound racing circuit in 1938, where spectators could bet on which dog would win. In 1944, Lawton's was leased to Bob Neeman who renamed it the Reno Rancho. The Reno Rancho “naturally featured lots of music” and a cowboy theme. The lodge would often close during the winter as its famous swimming pool went out of commission during the cold season. Eventually, business started to dry up at Lawton’s and the property went through numerous owners throughout the 1950s until it was sold to my great-grandfather in 1958 (Kling).

My great grandpa, Paul Kessinger, owned Lawton’s during a relatively uneventful few years. Before owning the riverside resort, Paul had owned a Chrysler dealership, and, capitalizing on his success, decided to expand into the resort industry. My grandpa, also named Paul Kessinger, worked at Lawton’s as a teenager, and he was basically a handyman who did whatever task was asked of him. Oftentimes he would have to go and grab mail and lunch for his father or mop the floors around the bar. My grandpa said his favorite thing to do as an adolescent was to go out onto the bar deck overlooking the Truckee and fish for trout during his free time. One of the most interesting stories my grandpa told me about was the time a hypnotist visited the resort to perform her show. Apparently my grandfather and a few of the other staff members found people who were still in a hypnotic trance huddled in the corner of the theater long after the rest of the audience had left. The hotel earned a decent amount of business, and it was mainly known as a “divorce haven.” Many of the people who stayed there during my grandpa’s time working there were staying in the hotel for extended amounts of time while their divorces finalized. According to my grandpa, the main reason the hotel went through such a massive amount of owners during this time period was because the hotel was three to four miles out of town. Even though Lawton’s made enough to survive, it was not turning out an enormous profit like many of the hotels and casinos on Reno’s strip. According to my grandpa there was a lot of tension between the municipal government of Reno and his father. At the time Reno wanted to get rid of many of the prostitutes roaming the streets, and offered my great grandpa a sum of money if he would house the prostitutes and operate an illegal brothel. My great-grandfather refused the offer, and, soon after, Lawton’s lost half of its gambling permits possibly due to his non-compliance.

After my great grandfather sold the property, Lawton's Hot Springs was purchased, renovated, and reopened by Bud Ruppert in 1961. Nothing significant happened under Ruppert’s reign, but his heavy promotion of the Holiday Lodge (Ruppert's new name for Lawton’s) surprisingly didn’t gain much attention from the public. Ruppert advertised heavily in the Nevada State Journal throughout the early 1960s, and the majority of the ads featured an all-star cast of celebrities endorsing the Holiday Lodge including Wallace Beery, George Wingfield, Tom Mix, Jack Dempsey, and Tex Rickard. The men appear to be a line up involving famous cowboy movie stars. Tex Rickard and Jack Dempsey were a boxing promoter and boxer respectively, and George Wingfield was one of the richest men in Nevada in 1959. Strangely enough, all of the men except for Jack Dempsey were deceased before Ruppert actually bought the property. The characters all seemed to either embody the spirit of the west or had some connection to Nevada. The only person in the ad directly connected to the hotel was George Wingfield who would play poker there in the 1920s (Moe).

George Wingfield never seemed to be a man destined for success as his “high school education ended at age 15” (Moe). After dropping out of high school at this early age, Wingfield moved to Reno where he tried his luck at gambling and somehow did well enough by the age of twenty-one to open his own gambling saloon. Unfortunately, Wingfield’s club did not do well and ended up shutting down. Wingfield borrowed $1,000 from a friend, and he was able to earn enough money playing poker to buy a mine in Tonopah, Nevada. Wingfield became a multimillionaire and soon bought and renovated his own hotel, called Riverside Hotel. He created the Riverside Bank as well as buying several other properties throughout Reno and leasing them to people who knew how to run casinos. Wingfield was also able to help Reno “move out of the depths of the Great Depression before most cities in the United States” due to his support of Senator Bill Graham who would go on to pass a bill in 1931, which would allow open gambling in Nevada. One of the bankers who worked for Wingfield was caught embezzling money, and the man ended up costing Wingfield his bank and the majority of his fortune. Wingfield once nearly ran Reno, but many of the residents of Reno who had lost deposits in Wingfield’s bank “now turned their backs on him or taunted him on the streets.” Wingfield was apparently too sick to testify at the trial of Graham and Mckay, the men who had been embezzling money, and the trial was eventually called a mistrial. Wingfield quickly became healthy again once the trial ended but would stay mostly out of the public spotlight as a well-off business owner until he died of a stroke in 1959, twenty years after the trial (Moe).

Fraud would end up playing a large role in the rest of the story of Lawton’s Hot Springs. Soon after Bud Ruppert owned the resort, the property was sold to a man named Emmett O’Neill and renamed the River Inn in 1972 (Kling). O’Neill had been a professional baseball player for the Boston Red Sox before owning the River Inn. He had only played for three years on three different teams until he dropped out of the league. O’Neill’s ownership would eventually run the River Inn into bankruptcy by March 1978. The infamous George I. Benny would purchase the River Inn property in a bankruptcy auction in 1979. The fraud associated with the River Inn, along with that of a long list of other properties, would eventually lead Benny to a thirty-year sentence in prison.

At the bankruptcy auction, Benny purchased the property formerly known as Lawton’s Hot Springs for $ 2,070,000 and declared that it would from now on be called the “River Palace.” The creation of the River Palace was not Benny’s first foray into the world of failed real estate, as he would also be convicted for fraud in connection with owning the master-planned neighborhood known as the Double Diamond Ranch. Benny began a “lavish spending program” that would upgrade the River Inn’s structure to the massive one it has today, but would eventually land Benny $16 million in debt once the “project was finally called to a halt” (Kling). Benny claimed he was investing his own money into each project when, in reality, he was not, and he would end up being sentenced to thirty years in prison for fraud and racketeering (Voyles).

Since the River Inn was boarded up in 1983, the site has never been open to the public again. The hulking building is right next to a set of railroad tracks, and it is completely inaccessible to anyone because of barbed wire. Upon visiting the place with my grandpa, I was surprised by how well the place had been closed off to the general public. I could tell from the way that he looked at the place that he was imagining the building teeming with customers, and even though it was a much smaller structure back then, Lawton’s must have been more impressive when people actually frequented it. There was even a sign on the fence which read “Beware of Dog” even though there were no dogs to be seen. The property is now thought to be used in SWAT training, which may be the reason pedestrians are kept out (ReReno).

There have been some small signs of life for the abandoned property in recent years. A company called Van Woert Bigotti Architects has been interested in finishing the work that George I. Benny started. Under Van Woert Bigotti “[t]he existing casino and health spa would be retained and remodeled” along with tearing down the old motel rooms and adding some more luxurious ones (“River Inn”). The only problem with this plan is the fact that Lawton's Hot Springs lies in an area designated a flooding zone by Federal Emergency Management Agency. If the Truckee were to flood, as it is sometimes prone to, Lawton's Hot Springs would face crippling damage. Contrasting this problem, Lawton's Hot Springs has been ruled eligible to connect to the City of Reno's sewage system which would go a long way in modernizing the property (ReReno). Since Van Woert Bigotti did a feasibility study on the hotel in 2006, no new development has occurred, which means the future of the once bustling Hot Springs is in limbo.

Whilst sitting at a famous Reno breakfast diner, Peg's Glorified Eggs and Ham, eating country fried steak and eggs, my grandparents began to ask me how my college experience was going. I began to explain a brief synopsis about each of my classes between taking gulps of the delicious non-DC food. I piqued my grandfather's interest after telling my grandparents that my English class was all about the Truckee River watershed. My grandpa told me about how his father owned a hotel on the Truckee, and at first I was skeptical as I had never heard of this before. My grandpa said we would go visit the site after breakfast, and I began, at that moment, theorizing about this essay. My grandparents and I had to drive around the area for about an hour before we saw the old lodge on the river, as the roads, buildings, and landscape had changed since my grandpa's time working there as a teenager.

When I first laid eyes on the site of Lawton's, I immediately wanted to know more about it. The gigantic, ghostly building on the edge of the river only hinted at the many stories contained within its past. Through my research I have found too many stories to include in this paper, some of which are only briefly mentioned in a single newspaper article. These stories have

been lost to the past, and it is more likely than not that the Lawton's Springs legacy will always have some mysteries, much like any other old building. Normally I would not go on a quest to systematically root out any detail I could find about a regular building, but I felt connected in a way since my family owned it even though it was only for a short amount of time. I feel a sense of accomplishment that I have created somewhat of a compilation that includes some of the most interesting stories surrounding Lawton's, and, to some extent, I have helped preserve a small chunk of Nevada history.

Works Cited

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Bourne, Nick. “Coast Athletic Commission Not to Suspend Baer.” Nevada State Journal. 05 June 1932. Web.

Breen, Erin. “100 Years and Counting for Mark Yori.” ktvn.com. WorldNow and Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. 2014. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.

“Descendant Corrects Historical Misspelling.” Editorial. Nevada State Journal 25 Oct. 1970: 36. Print.

Edwards, Jerome. “Pyramid Lake War.” One: Online Nevada Encyclopedia. Online Nevada Encyclopedia. 18 Jan. 2011. Web. 20 Nov.

2014.

Evanoff, John. “A River Bend and Hot Water.” visitreno. Visit Reno. 03 Mar. 2010. Web.

Kessinger, Paul. Personal interview. 16 Nov. 2014.

Kinkead, James H. "The First Train Robbery on the Pacific Coast." Nevada Historical Society Third Biennial Report Vol. III (1911-1912):

108-115. Web.

Kling, Dwayne. The Rise of the Biggest Little City: An Encyclopedic History of Reno Gaming, 1931-1938. University of Nevada

Press, 2010. Print.

Garside L. “Lawton Hot Springs.” www.nmbg.unr.edu. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.

Manuel, David. "Inflation Calculator."DaveManuel.com. DaveManuel, n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

Moe, Al. “George Wingfield – Nevada Gaming Pioneer.” casinogambling.about.com. About. 2014 Web. 14 Nov. 2014.

--- “Reno's Northern Club.” Examiner. AXS Digital Group LLC, 2014. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Myers, Dennis. “Teddy Baer The son of a legendary boxer says a popular movie engaged in some low blows.” newsreview. Chico

Community Publishing, Inc., 15 Dec. 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.

“Pioneers Gather for Last Rites.” Obituary. Reno Evening Gazette. 03 Mar. 1915. Print.

“Prohibition Cases Dismissed in Court.” Editorial. Nevada State Journal. 07 Feb. 1931. Print.

Rereno. “The River Inn.” WordPress.WordPress, 2014. Web. 01 Nov. 2014

“River Inn.” vwbarchitects. VanWoertBigotti. 2010. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.

Voyles, Susan. “New Owners to Restore River Resort.” Reno Gazette Journal. Gannett, 28 Sept. 2006. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.