Lake Crescent Lodge: Where FDR Made a Park
Near Port Angeles, Washington
Lake Crescent Lodge began as Singer's Tavern in nineteen fifteen, a small hotel and cottages built by Avery and Julia Singer on the shore of one of the Olympic Peninsula's deepest lakes. For twenty years it was a quiet retreat. Then, on the evening of September thirtieth, nineteen thirty-seven, President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived and spent the night.
Roosevelt was on a tour of the Olympic Peninsula to assess a proposal to create a large national park in the mountains above. At the lodge he met with National Park Service and Forest Service advisors and Washington senators to weigh the plan. The following year, he signed legislation creating Olympic National Park, which absorbed the lodge property within its boundaries. The lodge is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and operated under the park's concession program. The lake's cold, isolated waters are so clear largely because so few nutrients are present to support the algae that would cloud them.
