Willmore Lodge: The Log Palace Shipped by Rail
Near Lake Of The Ozarks, Missouri
On a hill overlooking Bagnell Dam sits a sprawling log building with a story as unusual as its rooms are many. This is Willmore Lodge, and Union Electric built it in nineteen thirty as the nerve center of the entire dam project. A Saint Louis architect named Louis La Beaume designed it in the rustic Adirondack style, all peeled logs and stone.
But here is the strange part. The lodge was not first built here. Its western white pine logs are said to have been cut and assembled in Oregon, then taken apart, loaded onto railcars, hauled across the country to the Ozarks, and put back together on this hilltop.
The finished building held many rooms and, for its day, remarkable luxury. It served as the administrative and entertainment headquarters for the great Osage River Project. In nineteen forty five, Union Electric sold the lodge along with a large amount of lakeshore land to a developer named Cyrus Crane Willmore, and the building took his name.
Today it houses the local chamber of commerce, the visitor center, and a museum devoted to the dam that made this lake.
