The six-story Redwoods Hotel is the only early 20th century hotel in Grants Pass. It symbolized the early automobile era and celebrated the opening of the Redwoods Highway to the California coast.

The hotel was designed by the Portland firm of Tourtellotte and Hummel, designers of the Lithia Springs Hotel in Ashland and the John Jacob Astor Hotel in Astoria. Each of the vintage Tourtelotte and Hummel hotels in Oregon was held to be forward-looking in its day, a reinforced concrete skyscraper with some eclectic period ornamentation of cast concrete.

The Redwoods Hotel was erected adjacent to the late 19th century Josephine Hotel with the idea that the older hotel would someday be remodeled with a modernistic corner tower to match the newer hotel. The stock market crash of 1929 ended that plan. The Josephine Hotel burned in 1975, the ultimate design having never been fully realized.

Adapted from the NRHP nomination submitted in 1979.