Hidden History: The World’s First Motel

On a dead-end drive just off a ramp onto Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo, California stand the last remnants of the World’s First Motel, now a shell, waiting for no likely future use: The Motel Inn, born as the Milestone Mo-Tel.

Yes, there were cabin courts here and there along the developing long-distance highways before it opened just before Christmas 1925, but this one was not only meant to be the trailblazer for the first chain of overnight road stops, but was the one for which the very word, the portmanteau of MOtor and hoTEL was coined by Arthur S. Heineman, architect and owner.

In an era when the 400-mile drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles meant at least two overnights, and when most towns or villages along the way had few rooms available and many travelers either pitched tents or slept in their cars, Heineman had an idea to meet the demand.

^{Image: Omar Omar/Flickr}

Heineman’s plan, for which the San Luis Obispo property was the prototype, was for a chain of eighteen Milestone Mo-Tels along the length of the state, one every 150-200 miles, representing a day’s drive and a night at reasonable cost in either a small apartment or a separate bungalow, with food and laundry available on site. And each room had its own indoor bathroom with shower!

San Luis Obispo was picked as the midpoint between the Bay Area and LA. The exterior was designed after Spanish missions in California, with the bell tower copied from the San Luis Rey mission in Oceanside.

But the future turned out to be less bright than Heinemann and his brother hoped; the ‘motel’ name caught on quickly and they lost in court on their attempt to copyright it. Competitors flooded the market with motels of their own, and the Heinemanns were never able to gather enough capital to build more units; when the Depression came, they lost the one they had built, and it became the Motel Inn.

The Motel Inn stayed in business, adding more rooms over the years, and in the 1970s adding meeting rooms and a banquet catering space, but it never really caught up to the times, and in 1991, the last guest checked out.

There was a brief spurt of hope in the early 2000s, when a next-door tract was developed as the Apple Farm Inn, with a country-inn theme; as it succeeded and expanded, it acquired the remains of Motel Inn and moved its offices into the two-story apartment section of the old Inn.

In 2002, Apple Farm proposed rebuilding Motel Inn, keeping its original design and replacing buildings that were near collapse; it would have operated as an expansion of Apple Farm—but the plans were never carried out, and the sad remains are what you have seen here.

Congratulations to Professor Abe and George G, who identified the site of our One-Clue Mystery this week from the title image above.