Glen Ellen stands in Sonoma Valley, whose name from the Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples translates as Valley of the Moon, and it has long drawn writers and artists including Mary Francis Kennedy, known as MFK Fisher, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jack London. Fisher wrote about food and took part in a growing American attention to cuisine, Thompson lived on Warm Springs Road for six months while writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and wrote Night at the Rustic about the Rustic Inn, and Jack and Charmian London lived at Beauty Ranch, now Jack London Historic State Park, where Wolf House burned just before they were to move in and where Jack died in 1916 in the cottage on the property. The town's central bridge, built of cement in 1939 after earlier steel truss and wooden bridges, spans the meeting of Calabazas and Sonoma Creeks, once known for swimming holes and now seeing protected returns of steelhead trout, river otters, and beaver. In the town center stands a Civil War eight-inch siege howitzer, model 1861, made in 1862 by the Fort Pitt Foundry in Pittsburgh and given to the town in 1905 by General Wagner; its path to Glen Ellen is unknown, and townspeople prevented its sale in 1992. Beginning in the 1880s, two rail lines served Glen Ellen, bringing freight, passengers, and visitors, while travel from San Francisco also involved ferry, stage, and later train connections through Marin and Sonoma Counties. Other landmarks trace the town's development, including Marshall's Garage, which began as a blacksmith shop and became an auto repair business in the 1920s, the horse-and-buggy-era O'Donnell Lane Bridge from around 1900, the London Lodge and Saloon as one of the last of eleven drinking establishments from the turn of the last century, the Poppe Store first built in the 1880s and rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and later fire, the Chauvet Hotel yellow brick building later adapted for new uses and earthquake retrofitting, the Rustic Inn that lasted into the 1970s before burning in 1973, and the old Pagani Winery and original Chauvet Grist Mill in Jack London Village, first built as a sawmill around 1840 and now reused for shops and restaurants.