The year was 1927, and Harbin owner N.S. Booth was preparing for the future. Electricity hadn’t yet come to Harbin, and was only sporadically available in town; and the main road through Middletown to the Lake County line in either direction was still just a single lane of hard-packed dirt. The future was nearing, though, and soon more tourists with automobiles would be taking leisurely drives, looking for fun and interesting destinations featuring America’s newest phenomenon: “Motor Hotels”. Booth could see it all coming to Harbin, plain as day, and he wanted to be ready.
Since purchasing the resort in 1912, Booth had been making steady improvements. Harbin already had its historical hot springs, with an enclosed hot plunge and warm pool, a bathhouse with tub baths and steam room, and a large swimming pool. It had three 3-story hotel buildings neatly in a row, with accommodations for nearly 100 guests. There was an activities lawn with tent platforms, plus a large dining hall, and a grand dancehall with live music and dancing until 10pm every weeknight and midnight on weekends. But the hotel building adjacent to the baths – the Capitol Hotel, it was called – was old and outdated. So Booth got busy remodeling the Capitol into something modern to match its already renovated neighbors, Azalea and Walnut.
When completed in 1927, the Capitol Hotel was the jewel of Harbin: a green and white painted hotel with bright red accents, and 35 rooms right next to Harbin’s baths. The ground floor rooms opened onto a big porch that faced down the hill toward the lawn. The second floor rooms were level with the bath area, and opened directly to Harbin’s swimming pool (or “cold plunge”, as it was called then). The third floor had balconies facing both the lawn and the baths, and a staircase to the pools. Best of all, every room in Harbin’s modern Capitol Hotel now featured steam heat and a toilet!
To commemorate this propitious upgrade, Booth, his daughter, and his key workers and guests left a note for posterity. They sealed it up in a green glass bottle, and buried the bottle like a time capsule in the retaining wall next to their newly renovated building.
And there Booth’s bottle was sitting, in 1974, when a fire in one of the upstairs Capitol Hotel rooms destroyed the building’s top two floors. There it sat, as a new roof was installed above the now-single-story building – renamed “Redwood” – and a beautiful flat sundeck was built above it. There Booth’s bottle continued to sit for decades, through changes of Harbin ownership and fortune, the creation of Heart Consciousness Church, years of growth and prosperity… and all through the raging Valley Fire of 2015, which destroyed virtually everything on mainside not made of stone or concrete.
When the burned Redwood and sundeck remains were cleared away after the Valley Fire in 2015, we built an entirely new concrete structure and sundeck to take their place. And as this current structure approached its completion in 2018, our workers began to dismantle the low, white retaining wall next to it. That was when – surprise! – an old, dusty green bottle caught one worker’s eye, and he stopped to investigate. It turned out to be Booth’s bottle – a message from his rebuild to ours! And the rest, as they say, is history.
