It was the last place I ever expected to see a Holocaust memorial, but there it was, a bronze sculpture about oppression at Terezin at the San Juan Island Sculpture Garden on the island’s northernmost tip.
The 20-acre park in Washington State features 150 different sculptures that vary from month to month as art is rotated. Terezin, a creation of Czech Republic-born Olinka Broadfoot, was inspired by the concentration camp where her father was interred during the war.
“The oppressor is a reflection of that which they are destroying,” she writes in the explanatory plaque beneath her work, adding that it also resembles a wave, a symbol of its inexorability. Broadfoot lived in Prague and Argentina before moving to America as an adult, where she now sculpts and paints from her studio in Portland, Ore.
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The sculpture park’s long grass was wet with an early morning rainfall the day I skirted its periphery, and Terezin was not the history I’d expected to encounter. I’d come to the island captivated by the history at the Roche Harbor Resort, a five-minute walk from the Sculpture Garden. Among the accommodations on the resort site is the 20-room Hotel de Haro, built in 1887. It’s the hotel with the longest continual history of occupancy in the state and if there are ghosts lingering, as some staff and guests report, it’s right here.
John S. McMillin, a lawyer-turned-businessman, was kingpin of the Roche Harbor Lime and Cement Company, a limestone export empire he built at the expense of the island vegetation. The process of making lime required lime kilns to convert the stone, and feeding those kilns meant deforesting San Juan Island and several of its neighbours. Roche Harbor became a company town for his labourers and he constructed the Hotel de Haro to house customers and distinguished guests, which included presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Howard Taft while they were in office.
After the lime business closed and the land fell to new owners Roche Harbor became a resort, expanding with the times to include more contemporary accommodations. Adjacent to the original hotel is Quarry Man House, with a downstairs spa and gift shop and modern suites upstairs featuring granite counters, flat screen televisions and all the accoutrements of luxury.
But the 20 original rooms at the Hotel de Haro remain largely unchanged and charmingly true to their past. Guests share communal bathrooms and tread creaky floorboards in their terrycloth robes when they’re ready to retire for the night.
I started my tour of the property’s history at the end of John S. McMillin’s life, at the mausoleum he built as a memorial for himself and his family. To reach it you walk across the resort, past the picturesque chapel, the old, white clapboard workers’ houses, the little red schoolhouse and the airplane landing strip. You venture deeper into the woods, skirting by a handful of curious, small graves along the way, their tombstone inscriptions dulled and faded by time. The mausoleum announces itself with a large dramatic arch inscribed “Afterglow Vista.” Just past the arch massive columns encircle a limestone table and six cement chairs. The chairs are the crypts for the ashes of the McMillin family, while the table represents their symbolic gathering in the hereafter.
McMillin was a larger-than-life personality and there are signs of him everywhere at Roche Harbor. Adjacent to the Hotel de Haro are the remnants of two kilns that converted stone to lime, – up to 1,500 barrels a day. Today they are quaint historic artifacts but in the late 1800s these kilns and the massive quantities of wood they burned through earned McMillin’s company the title of ‘the largest limeworks east of the Mississippi.’
The resort’s harbour, once a bustling export hub, now serves as a dock for the sophisticated yachts of wealthy boomers who ply its waters in huge numbers in the summer months. They gather on the pier for parties at sunset, share stories on their yacht decks and refuel their supplies at The Company Store. A general store selling milk, wine and groceries, it’s a replica of the original built by McMillin and destroyed by fire in 1923. A shrewd businessman, he would pay his workers a salary in scrip redeemable only at the general store, thereby ensuring continuous demand for store supplies.
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I dined on rack of lamb and Israeli couscous salad at a window table in the McMillins’ old house, now converted into an upscale restaurant called, fittingly, McMillins. It’s easy to get lost in the view of calm harbour waters, herons winging their way across the sky and kayaks neatly stacked for their next excursion. But McMillin is watching. In a large painting adorning one of the walls he stands flanked by friends at one of his banquets. Though the wood-panelled dining room has expanded over the years, a feeling of the past persists in the old McMillin house. “One night as I was closing up I’m certain there was a ghost in here,” a longtime staff member confided. “Each time I turned off the restaurant lights and left the room, they mysteriously turned themselves on again.”
The trees have grown back now, the lime deposits were long ago depleted and tourism is the predominant island business today. Still, there’s no hiding the fascinating history at Roche Harbor, and photographs throughout the resort tell stories of brisk business deals, lavish banquets and family feuds. This is a destination with deep roots and a stay at the resort is both steeped in and enriched by its past.