Bohemian Grove & the Owl Shrine

Bohemian Club, widely documented

The Bohemian Grove is a private campground of 2,700 acres of redwoods at Monte Rio, California, near the Russian River, owned by the Bohemian Club, a San Francisco gentlemen's club founded in 1872 by newspaper journalists. Every year from mid-July its all-male members and invited guests from politics, business and the arts gather there for more than two weeks. The tradition began on 29 June 1878, when fewer than 100 Bohemians met in the Marin County redwoods to send off the actor Henry Edwards, who was leaving for New York. The club rented the present site from 1893, bought it in 1899 from the logger Melvin Cyrus Meeker, and has added land around it since. Its motto, Weaving Spiders Come Not Here, asks that business be left at the gate, though political and business relationships have grown there all the same.

The club's mascot has always been an owl, for wisdom. A 30-foot hollow owl of concrete over steel, designed by the sculptor and two-time club president Haig Patigian and built in the late 1920s, stands at the head of the artificial lake. Since 1929 this Owl Shrine has been the backdrop for the Cremation of Care, a theatrical production first staged in 1881, devised by James F. Bowman, in which members act out the slaying of the spirit of Care and its solemn cremation, meant as a catharsis and to present symbolically the salvation of the trees by the club. The Grove has some 118 camps, a stage seating about 2,000, and a clubhouse by Bernard Maybeck completed in 1904.

History has passed through. In September 1942 a meeting there, hosted by Ernest Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer, helped plan the early work of the Manhattan Project. In July 1950 Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon met for the first time as guests of Herbert Hoover at Cave Man Camp.

The secrecy has drawn intruders and theories. Rick Clogher posed as a worker in 1980 for the first magazine account from inside, and Philip Weiss of Spy spent seven days as a guest in 1989. In 2000 Alex Jones filmed the Cremation of Care and called it a ritual sacrifice, a claim not supported by other reporting; Jon Ronson, using the same footage, likened it to an overgrown frat party. The more ordinary trouble has been labour. In 2023 former valets sued, alleging 16-hour days without breaks, which the club denied; an earlier workers' case had been settled in 2021 for $3.535 million. The Grove is private, open only to members and their guests.