The Desert Inn, the first real place to be in Palm Springs, was far more than a boardinghouse. It was one of the most celebrated resorts in California, with meticulous standards and an international reputation.

And it put Palm Springs on the map at the beginning of the 20th century because of the inspiration and hard work of Nellie Coffman.

Coffman was born in Illinois in 1867; her father was, off and on, a hotel manager. Coffman moved with her family to Texas, where she married George Roberson, a Dallas building contractor. He died in a fire before their son George Jr. was born.

She and George Jr. joined her parents near Los Angeles, where she married Harry Coffman who subsequently earned a medical degree.

While she learned the hotel business from her father, her enthusiasm for it came from elsewhere. To get over a cold one summer she went to Strawberry Valley, now Idyllwild, and stayed at the resort operated by the celebrated Mrs. Keen. Keen later moved her Keen Camp to present-day Mountain Center.

It was from Keen that Coffman heard of Palm Springs. In December 1908, Coffman headed to the desert and stayed at Wellwood Murray's old Palm Springs Hotel, where the service was poor and the guests few.

With $2,000 she and her husband had saved from his medical practice, Coffman made a down payment on a bungalow and 1 ¾ acres on Main Street, later Palm Canyon Drive.

Eventually, the site was expanded to 35 acres, including 7 acres of rugged hill slope.

Their goal was to turn the property into a health resort, with Dr. Coffman as medical director. For the first few years they operated their business as a sanitarium, but by 1914 they were divorced and the sanitarium patients were leaving.

Nellie Coffman now had her boardinghouse.

". . .When I was young and cocky, I said many times -- Well, if I'm ever forced to earn my own living, I don't know what I could do, but there's one thing I know I wouldn't do, and that is to run a boardinghouse . . .," Coffman said. "There were few avenues open to women. The chief ones were teaching, nursing, dressmaking and running a boarding house. I wasn't fitted for any one of the first three and hated the thought of the last."

One day banker W.B. Clancy of Riverside, in Palm Springs on a tour of California roads, asked Coffman: "Why don't you do something about making the Desert Inn a really fine hotel?" "No money," Coffman answered. At that, Clancy gave Coffman a loan.

With the money, Coffman bought prefabricated tent houses in Los Angeles for her first guest quarters -- along with a few rooms in the bungalow. There were no telephones, no water system, no electricity and no railway within miles.

But Coffman's enthusiasm for the desert was infectious and her reputation for her concern and diligence as an innkeeper spread far and wide through her guests.

Then, with post-World War I Europe in a shambles, a new surge of guests -- looking for a new vacation spot -- began to arrive. Her boys, George Roberson and Earl Coffman, who had served in the war, came home to join her in hotel management.

By the mid-1920s the Desert Inn was an international hot spot.

With a ritzier clientele came changes. The tent houses were replaced by small all-wood bungalows. In turn they were moved aside to form the nucleus of a separate and more modest Village Inn. The original bungalow was supplemented by luxurious Spanish-style guest houses amid an immaculate oasis garden.

The Desert Inn attracted a great variety of notables, from Albert Einstein to Shirley Temple. In fact, Temple was such a frequent vistor as a child star that one of the hotel's cottages became known as the Shirley Temple Cottage.

Jimmy Walker vacationed at the inn from his duties as mayor on New York. John Galsworty wrote "The Silver Spoon" while wintering at Coffman's hotel.

Benjamin Fairless of United States Steel, a Desert Inn visitor, offered to make his company's resources available when he heard of early plans for the Palm Springs Tramway.

Coffman herself was a tireless worker who did everything from cleaning the yard to running the business. She also expected great efforts from her employees.

"Work as if everything depended on me," she wrote of her philosophy of diligence. "Pray as if nothing depended on me."

In later years, she served on the school board and in many other civic capacities. In 1950, with the town closing in around the pool and its grounds, Coffman died. By that time the desert's resort industry, which she was largely responsible for founding, had spread to other nearby communities.

In 1955 the hotel was sold and in 1967 its Palm Canyon frontage and much of its space made way for a shopping center.

Much of the information in this story first appeared in articles by Don MacPherson in 1952 and by Tom Patterson in the Aug. 24, 1980, edition of The Press-Enterprise.