From Maple Inn to Quilcene Hotel
By Janet Huck
Leader Staff Write

Clifford Bailey had a vivid memory of the first time he, his three siblings and his mother, Rosetta Bailey, drove to Quilcene to look at a site for a hotel. It was May 16, 1916, and the roadside was a solid mass of rhododendrons.
It was a beautiful welcome to a new life, he told The Leader in April 1993.
Rosetta Bailey built the Maple Inn in 1917 for loggers and hunters. In the early 20th century, adventurers bunked there before they took pack-train hunting trips into the Olympics. For 89 years, little changed at the hotel except its name, which was changed to Quilcene Hotel.
A previous owner removed the large covered porch that wrapped partway around the building. Rick and Kathleen Emmerson bought the building six years ago and planned to restore the porch.
But the historic building burned to the ground on the afternoon of May 15, 2006.
The original owners, the Bailey family, came from South Dakota. When her husband died, the widowed Rosetta realized she couldn’t manage the South Dakota farm by herself so she traveled with her four children to Quilcene, where she had friends. Deciding to build a hotel, she sank all her money into the project and hired a Port Townsend builder to construct it. It was the only hotel in town.
Since Rosetta was a wonderful cook, people came from miles around. The inn was famous throughout the area for its Saturday night fried chicken dinners. In 1993, Quilcene’s Mildred Milroy, Rosetta’s 85-year-old daughter, told a Leader reporter she remembered washing dishes while standing on a box. Her brother Clifford cut wood and milked the cow. The three girls helped their mother around the hotel.
In 1920, Rosetta Bailey and her new husband, Sidney Sewell, traded the hotel for a dairy farm in Kent, Wash.
Over the next two decades, the Maple Inn had several owners. In 1947, Ray and Virginia Corley bought it as a get-away, but the Bremerton dentist plied his trade on the side, making false teeth in the washroom.
The Emmersons bought the hotel in 2000. In negotiations for two years to buy a Friday Harbor restaurant, the couple stopped for breakfast in Quilcene and picked up a real estate magazine. While waiting for the ferry in Port Townsend, they spotted an ad for the Quilcene Hotel, pulled out of the ferry line and went back to Quilcene to check it out. A month later, they were the landmark’s new owners.
“It was like it was meant to be,” Kathleen Emmerson told The Leader a few years ago.

Photo attachment 1: Rosetta Bailey had the Maple Inn built in 1917 and made it famous with her Saturday night fried chicken dinners. The landmark’s name was later changed to the Quilcene Hotel. The hotel was destroyed by a voracious fire on Monday, May 15. – Photo courtesy of Quilcene Historical Museum

Photo attachment 2: Officials said it didn’t take long for the Quilcene Hotel to become fully engulfed in flames. – Photo by Steven J. Barry, The Port Townsend Leader

published in The Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader
vol. 117, no. 20, 17 May 2006
pg. 2, col. 5
Port Townsend, WA
http://www.ptleader.com/