The Lodge
The original residence on the property was built by Ernest Pomin in 1938. This is where you’ll check-in and check out.
We offer our guests a complementary home-made breakfast each morning. We deliver to your door at your preferred time between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. You’ll have the option to eat your breakfast in-room or weather permitting, in the garden or on our lodge deck.
The History
The Cottage Inn is part of Lake Tahoe’s history, reaching back to an era when Tahoe was bustling with logging companies and being discovered at the same time as a resort. Steamships plied the waters of the lake carrying timber and luxurious steamboats transported passengers across the region.
The Lodge was originally the home of John Ernest Pomin, who at the age of 18 worked as a crewman on the luxury passenger steamship Mamie, captained by his father Joseph. Joseph (affectionately known as “Cappy”) was also the first and longest-running captain of the S.S. Tahoe – dubbed “Queen of the Lake” – the largest steamship to ever sail across Lake Tahoe. Captain Pomin was at the helm of the Steamer almost daily from the launch date in 1890 until his retirement in 1917.
According to his obituary in the Reno Gazette-Journal, son John Ernest Pomin “stacked pine slabs amid-ships of the 40-foot, pencil-thin steamer and fed her firebox as it chewed away from Elias J. (“Lucky”) Baldwin’s swashbuckling Tallac resort with ‘trouting parties’ of dandy young men and chattering ladies in angle-length, wasp-waisted dresses.”
“The shores of Lake Tahoe had proven a early attraction to people flocking to Nevada and California in the nineteenth century. The timber requirements of the Comstoc mines led to massive logging in the region and the need to move logs, people, and supplies around the lake. Roads were scarce at the time, but Duane L. Bliss, a lumber magnate who owned more than 50,000 acres in the Tahoe Basin, recognized the advantage in applying steam technology to commercial vessels on Lake Tahoe. Between 1865 and 1900, at least a dozen commercial steamers roamed the waters of Lake Tahoe,” wrote John W. Foster and Denise Jaffke of California State Parks.
