Historic Honky-Tonk : Roaring ‘20s Club Still Going Strong

Dust devils swirl in the parking lot and sometimes gust through the open double doors of the Pomerado Club, once known as the Big Stone Lodge and soon to again bear that historic name.

A little dust seems right at home in this ranging wooden structure with its supporting columns of boulders brought from the surrounding Poway hills. The rungs of the wooden bar stools are scuffed from decades of cowboy boots, the historic pictures on the walls are flecked with beer foam and an occasional hole from an errant dart. The corners host cobwebs and the walls and ceiling, according to old-timers, bear at least a dozen bullet holes.

It’s a place that leads one to wonder: “If those walls could talk . . . “

Big Stone Lodge claims the title of “the county’s oldest continuously operating honky-tonk,” according to its new owner, Jerry Long, who bought the old Poway building about five months ago and plans to make it a restaurant and dance spot with a decidedly country-western theme.

In doing research on the building, Long discovered that it had been a roadhouse and dance hall since the mid-1920s when Dr. Homer Hansen had the namesake boulders brought down to the creekside tract and built the building near the site of the Twenty Mile House, an adobe way station and drinking establishment where drivers on the San Diego & Escondido Stage Line had once obtained fresh horses for their daily run. Area historians are unsure if the Twenty Mile House was still operating when the Stone Lodge was build.

But Dolora Powers, a Poway Historical Society member who came to Poway in 1925, remembers when the Stone Lodge was new.

“It was built after I moved here,” Powers recalls. “It must have been in the ‘20s that it was built.”

Powers remembers how Hansen and his partners at first planned to build a motel--called a tourist court in those days--on Metate Lane. But the project “went belly up,” so the developers moved over to Pomerado Road--then the main artery between San Diego and Escondido--and built the Big Stone Lodge.

“When I was a teen-ager, I just didn’t go in that place,” Powers said. “I just couldn’t stand the idea of having to hold up my partner all around the dance floor. It was a wild place in those days.”

She did venture into the Big Stone a few times, she confessed, because it was one of the few places where young folks, or anyone else for that matter, could go to dance on a Saturday night.

“I remember the wonderful hardwood dance floor there,” she recalled. “It was so wonderfully smooth.”

Arie DeJong emigrated from Holland to Poway in 1949, along with his parents and nine brothers and sisters. They were sponsored by his father’s brother-in-law, Uncle Sam, to work on his 800-acre dairy farm and they lived in several small stone houses in Wyoming Picnic Grove, south of the Big Stone Lodge.

“I didn’t speak a word of English,” DeJong said. “Every morning my brothers and I would get up about 2 in the morning to walk or ride our bikes to the dairy for the milking. We had to go right past that place and it was going strong at 2 or 3 in the morning.

“It was off-limits to us, of course,” he said. Probably a wise ban, considering the English vocabulary he might have picked up at the rowdy roadhouse.

But even before Big Stone Lodge earned its reputation as a wild, western dance hall in the 1920s, the site on a bend of Old Pomerado Road was a well-known watering hole for man and animal. Back in the 1870s and 1880s, the Twenty Mile House was in its heyday, according to Ernest Cravath, who interviewed Poway pioneers in 1951.

One old-timer told Cravath about how, back in the 1880s, Daniel Dodson shot Henry Feeler dead in the Twenty Mile House, which Dodson ran.

The story went like this:

Dodson’s “stepdaughter was a handsome blond girl who started going with Feeler and Dodson became jealous. Feeler walked into the Twenty Mile House bar one day and Dodson shot him through the heart with a rifle.

“Dodson pleaded self-defense. He claimed Feeler started to pull a gun.

“At the coroner’s inquest, the prosecuting attorney had the dead man’s heart brought in in a pail as evidence. He hoped to demolish the self-defense plea by showing the direction of the bullet through the heart.

“He kept the pail in the anteroom, intending to produce it as a surprise, but hogs got into the room and devoured the heart.

“At the trial, Dodson was set free.”

Over the years and under many names, the Big Stone Lodge has kept the reputation of its predecessors as a rough-and-tumble tavern with a country-western flavor. That flavor is something that Jerry Long hopes to preserve, but without the rowdyism.

“It’s been five or 10 years now since there’s been any problem here,” Long said. “Back then, a bunch of bikers, Hell’s Angels, discovered the place and took it over for a while.”

Two years ago, the roadhouse became a roadless house when the city of San Diego annexed a huge chunk of unincorporated land to the south of the Pomerado Club and closed the road as “unsafe” and “not up to city street standards.”

A new Pomerado Road, built to meet modern highway safety standards, is due to open any day now, but it won’t help the Big Stone Lodge because it bypasses the former highway to the east, leaving the former stage route and federal highway a quiet cul-de-sac.

Long had 20 years’ experience in food service with Service America Corp. (the firm that brought sushi to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium), rising to vice president in charge of operations in the western United States.

“One thing I learned was, don’t make something into what it’s not,” he said.

He plans to reopen the restaurant at the roadhouse, but it won’t be a fancy place. Just good Western food like steaks, chicken-fried steak and hamburgers. No white tableclothes or maitre d’, Long said. “We’re going to keep it simple and authentic.”

Long already has made many changes in the aging Big Stone and hired its former owners, the Savery Brothers, to provide live music. The Savery band is ranked at the top of the charts locally by country-western fans, Long bragged, and brings in fans from “all over the county, from Imperial Beach and Ramona, Lakeside and Encinitas.”

The new owner plans some incentives to bring in the people, including concerts and free dance lessons, “something for everyone, all age groups, but only in authentic country-western style.”

He also plans to “maybe expand on the history of this place” by building old-time western storefronts on the hill. “A blacksmith shop, for instance. And a little wedding chapel over by the creek.

“I’ve got 3.5 acres here, with a beautiful stream down there that runs year-round, and some 100-year-old oak trees,” he said.

But mainly, Long is banking on over 100 years of history to fashion his new, old honky-tonk. As he puts it: “Go with what you’ve got.”