The main lodge was a large frame structure built by John Daum and situated south of a meadow that slopes toward the lakeshore. Littleton opened it in 1914 as a summer resort, and over the next two decades the property grew steadily. Guest cabins went up through the 1920s and 1930s, each given its own name and character. The Wren and Summerie cabins date to around 1920. The Alabam, Cara Mia, and Dixie cabins arrived in the mid-1920s, followed by Honeysuckle, Red Wing, Silver Moon, and Rock-A-Bye in the late 1920s. The Dardanella cabin was built in 1932, the Indiana in 1933. A manager's residence, a fireplace shelter, and a boathouse rounded out the compound. By the mid-1930s, the Rosemary Inn historic district comprised 16 contributing properties, a small village dedicated to the proposition that Lake Crescent was worth traveling to.

The National Park Service purchased the property in 1943, five years after Olympic National Park's establishment. In 1946, the formal dedication of the park was conducted at the Rosemary Inn lodge, a ceremony that gave the building an outsized role in the park's official history. National Park Concessions operated the restaurant until 1951, when the inn began its second life as employee housing. For 35 years, from 1951 to 1986, the cabins that once sheltered vacationers sheltered the people who kept the park running. Then came a third incarnation: in 1988, the Olympic Park Institute began operating from the site as an environmental education center, teaching students about the ecology of the Olympic Peninsula in buildings that had once served cocktails. The Institute was later rebranded as NatureBridge, and the historic structures found their most recent purpose.

The Rosemary Inn historic district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, earlier than its neighbor Lake Crescent Lodge. The designation recognized the compound's architectural and historical significance as a remarkably intact example of early twentieth-century resort development in the Pacific Northwest. What makes the district distinctive is the individuality of its cabins. Unlike the standardized cabin designs that National Park Service architects later favored, each Rosemary Inn cabin reflects the aesthetic choices of its particular moment in the 1920s and 1930s. The names alone suggest the romantic sensibility of the era: Dardanella references a popular 1919 song, Dreamerie evokes the escapism that drew guests to the lake in the first place. Set against the backdrop of old-growth forest at the foot of Mount Storm King, with Lake Crescent's blue water visible through the trees, the compound remains one of the most atmospheric clusters of historic buildings in any national park.