Enter now to win a copy of
Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier
During the late 1880s, Gold Country hostelries were literally filled with blushing brides. Women arrived from eastern locations to wed the men they’d met through mail-order advertisements and set up house in the rich hills of northern California. San Francisco was one of the most popular places in the country to honeymoon. Couples found it to be a cheerful city with enough sights to occupy their time for months. The presence of many new partners gave the location a sense of solace that helped make the mail-order pairs feel at home as well. San Francisco innkeepers competed for the business of honeymooning couples, offering them a variety of goods and services in return for staying at their establishments. The rivalry between the hotels was fierce and often made front-page news.
So great has become the competition between three or four of the leading city’s hotels in the solicitation for bridal couples that the most successful of the landlords in this effort presents each one of the brides who stop at his hostelry a beautiful bouquet or basket of cut flowers. The clerk who receives the couple inquires of the bridegroom if he suspects a recent marriage – an it is seldom that a mistake is made – and then the flowers go up to the apartments engaged.
One of the most lucrative classes for the landlords is the newly married. Beginning in October and ending in April, it is estimated that there are in the city an average all the time of two hundred pairs of brides and grooms. The manager of the hotel which entertains most of them says he frequently has forty couples, and averages over twenty-five during the busy season. They are, he says, the most desirable class of guests. Always pleasant, they want the best of everything, and are given it. This hostelry makes a feature of pleasing those people, and all embarrassments are lessened to the minimum. Guests there are so used to seeing large numbers of brides and grooms that they are spared the stares so customary where this class is rare.
It is said to be the purpose of the great hotel company organizing here, and which intends to build a structure at a cost of $2,500,000, to arrange on floor with bridal apartments.
Matrimonial News – January 1887
Enter now to win a copy of
Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier
