The Sutter Creek Inn

Guests and owners at the Sutter Creek Inn describe Edward Voorheis pacing the upstairs rooms and his wife Clara in the hallway, and the inn's keepers have always spoken of them as company rather than as anything to be uneasy about. John Keyes built this two-storey New England-style house in 1859–60 for his bride, Clara McIntire; he died in 1875, leaving her a widow at thirty-four. She married Edward Converse Voorheis, whose mining interests carried him into the state senate from 1890 to 1898, and he extended the house considerably. In 1966 Jane Way, a mother of five from Burlingame who had never thought of running an inn, turned it into what is generally recognised as the first bed and breakfast in the western United States.