Palm Springs History, Told Through Its Homes and Places

Palm Springs history usually gets told through movie stars. Start with the houses and places instead and you get a longer, more honest story: who lived here first, who built what, with which materials, and who got pushed aside along the way.

The hot spring came first

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians has lived in the Palm Springs area since time immemorial. The tribe's history says archaeological research shows its ancestors at the site of the Agua Caliente hot mineral spring for more than 8,000 years, and in Tahquitz Canyon for at least 5,000.

The people living near the spring called it Sec-he, the sound of boiling water. The Spanish named it Agua Caliente, hot water. "Palm Springs" came later, after the native fan palms and the spring itself. The water gave people drinking water, bathing and healing, and a connection to a spiritual underworld.

In 1876, an executive order by President Ulysses S. Grant established the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation. The federal government divided the land into a checkerboard and gave every other square-mile section to the Southern Pacific Railroad to encourage development, as Palm Springs Life explains. That pattern still runs under the city today.

The square mile that held the spring is Section 14, stretching from East Alejo to East Ramon roads between Indian Canyon Drive and South Sunrise Way.

Two early houses downtown

The first non-Native family to settle was John Guthrie McCallum's. The Palm Springs Historical Society dates the family's arrival to 1884; other accounts say 1885. The McCallum Adobe, now a museum, is the oldest surviving building from that household. The Historical Society is careful to say Native people had lived here for thousands of years before the McCallums came.

Next door is the Cornelia White House, the one in the photo above. It went up in 1893 using railroad ties salvaged from the short-lived Palmdale Railroad, which had been abandoned for lack of water. Welwood Murray recovered the wood and built a bungalow for his Palm Springs Hotel. Cornelia White bought the hotel in 1914, and the bungalow became her home.

So the house that carries her name wasn't built for her. And the ties in its walls connect a failed railroad to a woman's daily life twenty years later.

Hotels, Hollywood and cityhood

In the 1910s Nellie Coffman ran a sanitarium for people seeking dry desert air. Her Desert Inn grew into the center of village social life, according to Palm Springs Life's history of the city.

El Mirador Hotel, a 20-acre resort with an Olympic pool, opened on the last day of 1927 and rivaled the Desert Inn for parties. In 1934, actors Charles Farrell and Ralph Bellamy opened the Racquet Club, which pulled even more of Hollywood out to the desert.

Palm Springs incorporated as a city in 1938. The same magazine marked the 85th anniversary of cityhood in 2022.

The stars matter to the story, but only as one part of it. Famous guests explain the resort's glamour. They don't explain every household, or the people whose work kept the village running.

Section 14

Section 14 sat right in the middle of the booming resort town. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, families there planted orchards, raised cattle and horses and ran small stores, and tribal members later managed the hot spring and bathhouse, as American Indian magazine recounts. Once tribal members could lease their land, Mexican and Black families joined the community there.

The tribe's own exhibition at the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, Section 14: The Untold Story, uses tribal elders' accounts and archival records to show how public and private interests worked to take the tribe's land and deny its rights, and how the tribe fought back. If you want to understand Palm Springs, it's the place to start.

Modern houses become neighborhoods

After the war, homes started arriving by the tract. The Historical Society calls Twin Palms Estates the first mid-century neighborhood the Alexander Construction Company built in Palm Springs, with William Krisel varying rooflines, facades and the way each house faced its lot so neighbors wouldn't look identical.

It's a good reminder that a lot of Palm Springs' famous architecture was built for ordinary buyers. We tell that story in our guide to Alexander homes.

The best way to explore Palm Springs history is to start with a building and keep asking questions. Check the dates. Look at the materials. Separate the architect from the developer. And remember that a surviving house only preserves part of the community around it.

Sources

• Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians: History
• Palm Springs Life: Section 14 exhibition opens at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum
• Smithsonian: How the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians held on in Palm Springs
• American Indian magazine: Section 14
• Palm Springs Historical Society: The McCallum Adobe
• Palm Springs Historical Society: The Cornelia White House
• Palm Springs Life: The storied history of Palm Springs
• Palm Springs Historical Society: Twin Palms Estates