Far off the beaten path in Yellowstone National Park’s Lower Geyser Basin two hours from the nearest road, tenacious visitors can see an important piece of National Park Service history. It’s the oldest building in Yellowstone, and the first ever built by the federal government for public use in a national park.
The irony is that it was never open to the public because it was never finished.
The Queen’s Laundry Bath House never served its intended purpose, but it’s still standing 144 years after its construction started and stalled. It will eventually collapse and deteriorate into nothing, or it could become a permanent fixture on the landscape. Or both.
“Yellowstone is a wilderness, but there's a very strong cultural component to the landscape too,” said author and lifelong Yellowstone employee and enthusiast Jeff Henry. “The Queen’s Laundry Bath House is the oldest remaining building in the park, so I think it belongs there.”
A Great Boiling Fountain
When Yellowstone National Park was established as the world’s first national park in 1872, there wasn’t a National Park Service to manage and conserve it.
The Queen’s Laundry Bath House was a project undertaken during the brief period of civilian administration between 1872 and 1886, when the U.S. Army firmly established federal management of Yellowstone, which continues to this day.
Philetus Norris was the second of five Yellowstone superintendents during this period of civilian administration.
He secured the park’s first federal appropriation of $10,000, which he used to build the park’s first road from Old Faithful to Mammoth Hot Springs, and built the park’s first administration buildings at both sites.
During this time, visitors and park employees frequently enjoyed the use of a hot spring in the Lower Geyser Basin. The thermal water was cool enough for safe bathing, swimming, and washing, and the pool was only five feet deep.
“During a Sabbath’s rest and bathing recreation,” Norris wrote, “some of the boys crossed from our camp to the attractive bordered pools below this great boiling fountain, and in one cool enough for bathing discovered its matchless cleansing properties, and from the long lines of bright-colored clothing soon seen drying upon the adjacent stumps and branches, while their owners were gamboling like dolphins in the pools, the envious cooks and other camp attaches dubbed it the Laundry, with a variety of prefixes, of which that which I deemed the most appropriate adheres, and hence the name Queen’s Laundry.”
Seeing the opportunity, Norris ordered the construction of an on-site bathhouse that would provide public access to the shallow spring. Construction of a two-room, 8-by-19-foot log structure adjacent to Queen’s Laundry Spring began in 1881.
The finished bathhouse would have had doors, wooden troughs for water circulation, and a shed roof covered with earth. It never got that far.
By Default
The Queen’s Laundry Bath House still stands, mostly finished but unfinished. Norris was maneuvered out of his position in 1882 and replaced by P.H. Conger, who had more ambitious and lucrative plans for Yellowstone.
Conger secured a 10-year lease for visitor accommodations through the Yellowstone Park Improvement Company, with an extraordinary lack of oversight. Conger was ousted in 1884, and the company went bankrupt the following year.
Norris’s five-year tenure as superintendent was significant. He recognized the scientific, anthropological, and archaeological significance of Yellowstone, working with federal agencies to monitor wildlife, curtail hunting, preserve artifacts, and establish the first official monitoring and records of geyser eruptions and thermal activity.
Norris also established the beginnings of the National Park Service’s ranger corps, wrote Yellowstone’s first annual reports, and prioritized visitor education through the placement of wayfinding and interpretive signs. Hiram M. Chittenden called Norris “one of the most unique, picturesque, and important characters” in Yellowstone’s history.
The administrative buildings during Norris’s administration are long gone, but the Queen’s Laundry Bath House remains. That makes it, by default, one of the oldest surviving structures in Yellowstone, and the first federal-funding facility for public use in a national park (even if it was never officially opened to the public).
Still Standing
Queen’s Laundry Spring remained a popular swimming spot for years, but lost its appeal over time. The Queen’s Laundry Bath House has stayed standing, and unfinished, ever since.
A proposal to remove the structure was made in 1964, but park officials opted to leave it standing. One motivating reason might have been Yellowstone historian Aubrey Haines, who was vehemently opposed to the removal of the bathhouse.
Haines wrote a letter to Yellowstone’s chief naturalist in 1964, infuriated that park officials would destroy a structure that “has historical value of a high order as a unique remnant of an important period…aimed at serving the park visitor" to restore a "mediocre" thermal area to its natural state.
The Queen’s Laundry Bath House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 because of its historical significance and Norris’s impact on what would become the National Park Service.
The official reason the structure has been left standing so long is that it was the only surviving structure from Yellowstone’s brief era of civilian administration, but Henry has a simpler explanation.
“I think it was probably because it was out of sight of the main road,” he said. “It's about two miles from any traveled road, so it was out of sight and out of mind. If a dilapidated building like that were located along a road or in one of the developed areas, it would have been removed a long time ago.”
Just because it’s standing doesn’t mean it’s getting support. Rather than investing time and resources in historical preservation, the National Park Service has opted to leave the bathhouse as it is, allowing time to take its course.
“I don't know what their reaction would be if it started to deteriorate at a rapid rate,” Henry said. “I don't know whether they’d try to save what's left of the structure, or if they would just let it go.”
From The Inside
Henry might have the distinction of being one of the only people in the last century to enter the Queen’s Laundry Bath House. He ventured inside while working as a Yellowstone ranger in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Remember, that was back in the days when things were more relaxed and it was permissible to walk off-trail and into the thermal basins in my official capacity,” he said. “I haven’t been inside that structure in almost 50 years.”
At that time, Henry was participating in the annual winter carcass survey. It’s a defunct program where rangers and biologists scoured Yellowstone’s backcountry, finding and counting the number of animals killed by starvation or exposure during the winter.
When walking alone in the deep snow and frigid winds of winter, Henry occasionally found shelter by stepping inside the Queen’s Laundry Bath House. And, once you’re there, you might as well have lunch.
“I’d stop in when I was surveying the Firehole Valley for carcasses between February and May,” he said. “The ground was dry back then, as the runoff channel from Queen’s Laundry Spring was 20 or 30 feet away from the structure.”
There’s no historical record indicating the structure ever had a finished floor. If it did, it’s been covered up by sediment and thermal crust in the almost century and a half since it was built.
Otherwise, Henry couldn’t recall anything of interest in the interior. Although it was designed for public access, there were no public amenities inside.
The Queen’s Laundry Spring runoff channel has since changed course. Now, mineral water flows directly into and around the Queen’s Laundry Bath House.
“I haven’t been there recently, but it would not be a nice place to sit, even if it were still legal,” Henry said.
Permanent Preservation
The National Park Service isn’t actively trying to preserve the Queen’s Laundry Bath House. That isn’t stopping the park itself from making it a permanent part of the Lower Geyser Basin.
The historic structure is in an intriguing state of preservation. The top half is slowly rotting and deteriorating, while the foundation is gradually becoming silicified.
The mineral-rich thermal water spilling out of Queen’s Laundry Spring is soaking into the wooden logs at the base of the structure. As the logs get covered with siliceous sinter, they are gradually being transformed from wood to hardened mineral deposits.
“That's a pretty common phenomenon in Yellowstone,” Henry said. “Wood that’s exposed to thermal water gets impregnated with minerals that make it resistant to rot, and the lower logs of the bathhouse are partially mineralized from that hydrothermal activity.”
It’s the same phenomenon that creates Yellowstone’s iconic “bobby-sock trees.” Thermal water will often kill stands of lodgepole pines as it flows, while simultaneously covering the lower half of their trunks with siliceous sinter, which keeps the dead trees standing on solid bases.
“You can see spots where lodgepole pines were cut for lumber or firewood in the early days of the park, but the stumps are still well preserved because of the mineralization,” Henry said.
As rain, snow, and winter chip away at the upper half of the Queen’s Laundry Bath House, the lower half is becoming a permanent addition to the Lower Geyser Basin. It’s likely that some remnant of the structure will still be there long after the rest of the structure has disappeared.
Where It’ll Always Be
Anyone can visit the Queen’s Spring Bath House if they’re able and willing to hike the 3.8-mile trail to get there. Start at the end of Fountain Flats Drive, cross the bridge over the Firehole River, and you’ll find the Sentinel Meadows and Queen’s Laundry Trail.
Hiking off-trail is not permitted in any of Yellowstone’s hydrothermal areas. Nobody can step inside the bathhouse, but it’s still standing, more unfinished than it was when construction started and stopped in 1881.
Henry believes the dilapidated Queen’s Laundry Bath House doesn’t detract from the natural beauty of the Lower Geyser Basin. Even as park officials work to reduce human impact in the wilder parts of Yellowstone, he hopes they’ll let the historic structure stand for as long as it can support itself.
The Queen’s Laundry Bath House has been there for 144 years, withstanding the test of time and park priorities. While other structures have or eventually will be demolished and replaced, the foundation of Yellowstone’s oldest and first public structure, which became the foundation for the entire National Park Service, will outlast them all.
“I think it's safe to let it remain until the elements knock it down,” Henry said. “There’s a strong cultural component to Yellowstone’s landscape. That cabin is the oldest remaining structure in the park, and the first built for public use. I think it should remain, and with how the thermal water is doing, it probably will.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
