Collection
The Hotel
1895 to today — the building, its rooms, its guests, and its condition now.
How it was built
The Mountain View was built in 1894 on land Curly Neal had bought four years earlier. Its walls are thick adobe, made on the site, then covered in stucco. The stucco was painted red and lined in white by hand so that, from a distance, the building looks like brick. It opened in February 1895.
In its prime the hotel had porches and balconies, fireplaces in the downstairs rooms, and indoor bathrooms with hot and cold running water on both floors. Outside there was a dance pavilion, a croquet court, stables and a nine-hole golf course.
Its guests
Guests came for the cool mountain air. A room cost $10 to $12.50 a week in 1898. The guest book from 1895 to 1920 records visitors from 45 states and 13 foreign countries. Buffalo Bill Cody and his wife stayed there, and so did Whitelaw Reid, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, and the novelist Harold Bell Wright. A Los Angeles newspaper called it “the peer of the best city hotels in all Arizona.”
After the Neals
Late in Annie’s life the hotel passed out of the Neals’ hands, though she stayed on to run it. The sources disagree on the year. It stood empty through the 1940s. In the 1950s it served as lodging for workers at the new San Manuel mine, and in 1957 it became a church. Somewhere along the way the porches came off and the building was made plain. Garry Davis bought it in 2022.
Sources: Barbara Marriott, Annie’s Guests; Tucson Citizen advertisement, October 6, 1898; Bentz, “Echoes of the Oracle,” Oracle Historian, Winter 1984–85.
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