Five years after the railway opened the old Tip-Top was succeeded by a much grander
Summit House Hotel, and that was followed by a forty-foot-tower with a multicolored
searchlight, which could be seen all over New England and far out to sea. By late in the
century a daily newspaper was being published on the summit as a summer novelty and
American Express had opened a branch office.
Meanwhile back at ground level, things were also booming. The modern tourist
industry, in the sense of people traveling en masse to a congenial spot and finding lots of
diversions awaiting them when they got there, is essentially a White Mountains invention.
Massive hotels, with up to 250 rooms, sprang up in every glen. Built in a jaunty domestic
style, like cottages blown up to the scale of hospitals or sanitoria, these were exceedingly
ornate and elaborate structures, among the largest and most complicated ever built of
wood, with wandering rooflines robustly punctuated with towers and turrets and every
other mark of architectural busyness the Victorian mind could devise. They had winter
gardens and salons, dining rooms that could seat 200, and porches like the promenade
decks of ocean liners from which guests could drink in the wholesome air and survey
nature's craggy splendor.
The finer hotels were very fine indeed. The Profile House at Franconia Notch had its
own private railway line to Bethlehem Junction eight miles away; its grounds held twenty-
one cottages, each with up to twelve bedrooms. The Maplewood had its own casino.
Guests at the Crawford House could choose among nine daily newspapers from New York
and Boston, shipped in specially. Whatever was new and exciting--elevators, gas lighting,
swimming pools, golf courses--the White Mountain hotels were in the vanguard. By the
1890s, there were 200 hotels scattered through the White Mountains. There has never
been a collection of hotels of comparable grandeur anywhere, certainly not in a mountain
setting. Now, however, they are virtually all gone.
In 1902, the grandest of them all, the Mount Washington Hotel, opened at Bretton
Woods, in an open, meadowy setting against the backdrop of the Presidential Range. Built
in a commanding style described optimistically by the architect as "Spanish Renaissance,"
it was the pinnacle of grace and opulence, with 2,600 acres of cultivated grounds, 235
guest rooms, and every detail of finery that heaps of money could buy. For the
plasterwork alone, the developers brought in 250 Italian artisans. But already it was
something of an anachronism.
Fashion was moving on. American vacationers were discovering the seaside. The White
Mountain hotels were a little too dull, a little too remote and expensive, for modern
tastes. Worse, they had begun to attract the wrong sort of people--parvenus from Boston
and New York. Finally, and above all, there was the automobile. The hotels were built on
the assumption that visitors would come for two weeks at least, but the car gave them a
fickle mobility. In the 1924 edition of New England Highways and Byways from a Motor
Car, the author gushed about the unrivaled splendor of the White Mountains--the
tumbling cataracts of Franconia, the alabaster might of Washington, the secret charm of
little towns like Lincoln and Bethlehem--and strongly encouraged visitors to give the
mountains a full day and night. America was entering the age not just of the automobile
but of the retarded attention span.
One by one the hotels closed down, became derelict, or, more often, burned to the
ground (often, miraculously, almost the only thing to survive was the insurance policy),
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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