Photo: Ian Poellet, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Point Comfort is on the northwest shore of Upper Klamath Lake, overlooking Pelican Bay near Rocky Point. Its landmark is Point Comfort Lodge, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The lodge was built for Klamath Development Company president S.O. Johnson after plans by San Francisco architect D.F. McDougall, and opened in 1911 as a place to entertain prospective investors. A commodious shingle-clad building, it epitomizes the early 20th-century fashion for resort architecture, rustic in spirit yet comfortably appointed, and it is an important visual link with the glory days of the Southern Pacific Railroad and its corporate entities in the Klamath Basin.
The years before the Southern Pacific reached Klamath Falls in 1909 were the heyday of land developers and timber claimers, who bought huge tracts of land, opened new businesses and built sawmills in anticipation of the boom a railroad was expected to bring to a young frontier town. 1909 also marked the beginning of the ascendancy of the Pacific Northwest in timber production: that year, the country's all-time record, 44.5 billion board feet of timber were produced.
The early 1900s brought lakeside resorts with dance pavilions where oyster stew was served at midnight to weekend visitors at the close of a night of revelry. The original buildings of places like Pelican Bay Lodge (1899-1942), Odessa Hotel (1902-1928), Rocky Point Resort (1906-1979) and Eagle Ridge Tavern (1909-1926) have been torn down, burned or modernized beyond recognition. Of all the original resort structures, the only one remaining in unchanged condition is Point Comfort Lodge.