In the 1890s, the Spring Valley Water Company began to sell off its landholdings around the lake. In 1892, William brought over a wooden house from Maine or Canada by ship around the horn of South America to the grove which became called the Trocadero Inn, dubbed "the first house built in San Francisco west of Twin Peaks", still standing in Stern Grove as a popular meeting space and wedding area. The first residents at the inn were millionaire lumberman Charles Appleton Hooper, then Adolph Bernard Spreckels (1857-1924), then Hiram Cook who made the place an attractive Sunday breakfast area. George said, “We had a deer park, and a boating pavilion, and a beer garden, and the finest trout farm in California.”
