The Colfax Hotel Is About to Tell Its Own Story

For forty years, the Colfax Hotel has kept its secrets behind boarded windows. On Sunday, August 9, it starts talking back.

Wendy and Leif Lowery — the couple who brought the Dutch Flat Hotel back from the dead and turned Foresthill’s Miners Camp into a destination — are opening the doors of the Colfax Theatre for a sneak peek at something new: the first episode of a documentary series following the Colfax Hotel’s restoration from the inside out.

Sunday, August 9. 2:00–3:00 PM. Colfax Theatre, 49 South Main Street. Free. First 75 seats, no RSVP. Co-Co’s Ice Cream will have the doors open next door, so make an afternoon of it.

This isn’t a groundbreaking ceremony or a press release. It’s the Lowerys, in their own words, walking the community through what’s actually happening behind that plywood — the plans, the problems, the pieces they’re fighting to save.

Why this building matters

Long before it was a boarded-up curiosity in our Historic District, the Colfax Hotel was the cornerstone of a railroad town that put itself on the map. Travelers passed through its doors during Colfax’s boom years. Then, like a lot of small-town landmarks along I-80, it went quiet — vacant for over 40 years, watched over mostly by people’s memories of what it used to be.

The Lowery’s know this kind of building. They’ve already proven it with the Dutch Flat Hotel, a nine-room 1852 landmark they took from shuttered to open, and with a string of other historic properties across Dutch Flat and Foresthill. When they turned their attention to the Colfax Hotel, they didn’t come in with a wrecking ball — they came in with a plan to keep it standing the way it was meant to stand. Their conceptual proposal calls for restaurant and retail space on the ground floor, eight hotel rooms, and eight multi-family units for long- and short-term stays upstairs.

The preservation instinct runs deep.The Lowery’s have gone out of their way to protect the building’s authenticity — they even tracked down the hotel’s original doors after spotting them on a Facebook Marketplace listing. That’s not the move of someone chasing a quick flip. That’s someone trying to give a building its history back.

Where things stand

The permit is in hand. After working through the process with the City of Colfax, the Lowery’s have their final permit — and restoration work on the Colfax Hotel is officially underway. That’s the headline this community has been waiting 40 years to read.

Congressman Kevin Kiley toured the site as part of a Main Street visit that also spotlighted the growth happening up and down downtown. Historic Colfax Downtown Association.

We still won’t put a hard date on when the doors open for good — construction timelines shift, and this building has earned the right to be restored carefully instead of quickly. But “permitted and in progress” is no longer a hope, it’s where things stand today. That’s exactly why this documentary series matters: instead of Colfax hearing rumors about the hotel secondhand, we get to watch the actual work happen, in Wendy and Leif’s own words, as it happens.

Grab a seat Sunday. Grab an ice cream next door. And watch the Colfax Hotel start telling you what’s next.