Built in 1908 by Robert Montgomery Watson, the Watson Log Cabin is the only surviving historic log cabin in the Tahoe City area and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Watson's name lives on in nearby Watson Creek and Watson Lake, both just north of the lake.
The cabin is owned and maintained by the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society and is open to the public seasonally. Inside, it functions as a small community and historical museum, with exhibits on the early settlement of the north shore. It is physically adjacent to the Gatekeeper's Museum and can be visited in the same trip. The cabin is modest in scale — a genuine working cabin of its era, not a grand summer home — and gives a good sense of the early-20th-century character of Tahoe City before the resort era transformed it.