Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Ahwahnee, CA

Ahwahnee is a census-designated place in Madera County, in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada at an elevation of 2,326 feet along Highway 49.

Ahwahnee developed in the 1890s as a midway stagecoach stop on the Raymond-Wawona route to Yosemite, where the two-story Ahwahnee Tavern, built in 1899, served travelers on the one-day stage run.

On May 7, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt stopped for lunch at the Ahwahnee Tavern on his way to Yosemite to meet John Muir.

The name Ahwahnee was suggested by Mary Peck Sell and comes from a Miwok word referring to a "grassy valley."

From 1919 to 1969 Ahwahnee was the site of the Tri-County Tuberculosis Sanatorium, a residential treatment center funded by Madera, Merced, and Stanislaus counties that was sited there for its elevation, air quality, and isolation, and housed more than 100 patients by the 1930s.

In 1961 the Harlow Fire destroyed 50 of Ahwahnee's 60 buildings and killed two residents, making it one of the community's defining disasters.

The former sanatorium grounds are now Ahwahnee Hills Regional Park, a county park that opened in 2014 with hiking trails and preserved remnants of the old hospital campus.

Ahwahnee is home to Wassama Round House State Historic Park, which preserves a Southern Sierra Miwok ceremonial roundhouse site that Native communities still use for traditional gatherings.

Ahwahnee was first counted as a census-designated place in the 2010 census, and the 2020 census recorded 2,296 residents in 902 households, with an average household size of 2.53, about 80% owner-occupancy, and a population the Census classifies as entirely rural.