May 17 – September 12, 2019
Museum of the White Mountains, Main Gallery
Curated by Bryant F. Tolles, Jr., Cynthia Robinson, Rebecca Enman
Explore The Grand Hotels of the White Mountains, featuring the origins, development, and history of New Hampshire’s grand resort hotels. The creative visual journey includes paintings, photographs, various artifacts, and stories of the people who visited and worked at these gracious establishments. Special focus for the exhibition are the four surviving hotels: the Omni Mount Washington Resort, Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, Eagle Mountain House & Golf Club, and The Wentworth Hotel.
Explore the Online Exhibit
Walk through the Grand Hotels Exhibition
The White Mountains of New Hampshire have long attracted tourists wanting to escape growing urbanization and enjoy spectacular scenery, clean air, and a slower paced lifestyle.
The expansion of the rail service in the 1850s opened up the once remote wilderness to tourism, making travel easier and more comfortable. New grand resort hotels were built to satisfy fashionable upper class tourists seeking exclusivity, ambiance, indoor and outdoor entertainments, and the chance to be seen and admired.
During the golden age of the Grand Resort Hotels in the White Mountain region, between 1880-1910, there were approximately 30 hotels that could be considered “Grand”, meaning those hotels that provided room for 200+ guests, with elegantly styled dining rooms, parlors, and lobby spaces, incorporating recreation activities and events that targeted an elite class of tourists. These gracious establishments cultivated exclusive worlds apart where the honored guests could truly re-create themselves.
Chronology of the Grand Hotels

Grand Survivors
Of these many hotels that flourished during the period, only four have survived and are still in operation today.
The Omni Mount Washington Resort, Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, Eagle Mountain House and Golf Club, and The Wentworth Hotel, Jackson NH have continued to evolve and respond to New Hampshire tourist needs and trends, redefining what a “Grand Hotel” can mean in today’s culture.





In the United States, the hotel first appeared in the 1700s and were expanded versions of a tavern or highway inn. As the railroad made travel more prevalent and business grew, larger and more specialized hotels were built, which had space for dining halls, ballrooms, and recreation.
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the earliest travelers began coming to the White Mountains in small but significant numbers. Explorers, writers, scientists and adventurers, drawn to the beauty, grandeur and natural curiosities of the region, pursued scientific, spiritual and aesthetic inquiry as well as outdoor activity. As transportation improved, farmers and merchants settled in the wilderness environment, moving their produce and wares within or through the mountains. By the 1820s, they were joined by ‘a class whose purpose in coming was entirely one of pleasure and recreation.’ These early excursionists were the forerunners of the summer tourists and visitors who would populate the grant resort hotels of the region after the Civil War.
-Bryant F. Tolles, Jr. The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains: A Vanishing Architectural Legacy. David R Godine. 1998.
The Evolution of the Hotels
Many of the grand hotels developed piecemeal over time, evolving from humble private residences or small inns and hotels. Over the years, they were continually renovated, expanded, and even rebuilt in order to accommodate changing needs and fashions.
Plymouth’s Pemigewasset House began as a small tavern in 1800. By 1859, the original building had tripled in size, and offered guests a grand dining room and its own railroad depot.



The Balsams Hotel also began as a small summer inn that first opened just after the Civil War. It was later purchased by Henry Hale, who set about converting it into a grand resort hotel by building additions and introducing luxurious amenities. The addition of the Hampshire House in 1918 doubled the hotel’s capacity to 400 guests.


Addition of the Hampshire House, a new fireproof wing at The Balsams Hotel.
Museum of the White Mountains, Barba collection
Unlike many other grand hotels, the Mount Washington Hotel, now known as The Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, was designed and built from its inception to be a grand hotel. Built between 1900 and 1902 in the Spanish Renaissance revival architecture style, 250 Italian craftsmen were brought to Bretton Woods to construct the hotel.
![Foundations of new hotel [Mount Washington Hotel] near Mount Pleasant House, White Mountains, N.H. Courtesy of Library of Congress](/mwm/sites/default/files/styles/max_width_480px/public/media/2024-12/Foundations-of-new-hotel-Mount-Washington-Hotel-near-Mount-Pleasant-House.jpg?itok=_MQ61d_1)
Experiencing the Grand
The successful models were based on a “pay one price” “American Plan” for room, meals, activities, and amenities, and incorporated excellent business management, effective marketing, outstanding facilities maintenance, and flexible social/recreational programming.
As insular worlds of their own, the grand hotels sought to offer all the comforts and luxuries that visitors required during their vacation in the mountains. Guests often stayed for weeks or even the entire summer, and so the hotels were furnished with popular indoor amusements and conveniences to keep their guests entertained. Guests enjoyed inviting lobbies, lounges, reading and writing rooms, and music salons, all adorned with rich furnishings and elegant decorations.



Recreation

There were also endless opportunities for outdoor sport, relaxation, and entertainment at the grand hotels, which sought to meet their guests’ every need. Guests enjoyed hiking, golf, bowling, baseball, croquet, billiards, fishing, bicycling, horseback riding, polo, boating, archery, and badminton, plus promenades, coaching parades, dances, dinners, and musical performances.
The grand hotels typically operated between May and September. However, new opportunities for outdoor recreation arose in 1926, when the Second Eagle Mountain House in Jackson was equipped with steam heat, enabling the hotel to offer year-round services and opportunities such as cross-country skiing.




The grand hotels each maintained their own livery stables, stagecoaches, and mountain wagons, providing transportation to popular tourist sites, including day trips to the Summit and Tip-Top Houses on Mount Washington. Several of the larger hotels had their own on-site train depots for even greater convenience.



Dining
Guests enjoyed taking their daily meals in elegantly styled dining rooms where they could socialize and be seen and admired by other fashionable tourists. The cuisine was excellent, menus extensive, and the table service was kept to a high standard.



New menus were printed daily, and meals featured fresh fruits, vegetables, milk, cream and butter, which was furnished by nearby farms owned by the hotels. Children and servants dined separately at specific times during the day.




Marketing


Museum of the White Mountains, Hamilton collection.
These first and second floor plans from a circa 1885 booklet advertising the Mount Pleasant House in Carroll, NH allowed guests to select their rooms sight unseen.
Taking full advantage of new techniques in graphic reproduction, these enterprises, in their promotional publications, press and advertising, sought to capture the public’s imagination by presenting carefully chosen, orchestrated and packaged stylized images. The rhetoric of the printed word and pictorial representation, when combined with the realism of the building and site, proved a convincing and effective educational vehicle, drawing the unconverted to the grand hotel mystique.
Bryant F. Tolles, Jr. The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains: A Vanishing Architectural Legacy. David R Godine. 1998.

Balsams Hotel employee photo album, circa 1913-1917. Museum of the White Mountains, Barba collection.
In order to keep the daily operations of these self-contained resort communities running smoothly, an enormous staff of several hundred employees was required. Employees came from all over to work as cooks, bellmen, chamber girls, waitresses, laundresses, hostlers, nurses, drivers, carpenters, and more during the summer hotel season.
Employees who interacted with guests, such as waitresses, had to follow strict instructions regarding their behavior, appearance, and how they spoke to guests during mealtimes.




Maplewood Club Dining Room Rules, 1940. Courtesy of Bethlehem Heritage Society.
The Profile House in Franconia Notch provided employment for hundreds of men and women who came from across Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire to work at the hotel during the summer season. In 1896, the hotel published a list of all its 179 employees, their names, job titles, and hometowns. The list included 65 waitresses, 2 stage drivers, 18 laundresses, and 7 bellmen. See the entire brochure courtesy of WhiteMountainHistory.org and Bryant Tolles.
Like many of the grand hotels, much of the food at The Balsams in Dixville Notch was supplied by the hotel’s own farm, including fresh fruits, vegetables, and eggs. Their herd of Jersey cows furnished milk, cream, and butter; freshly caught trout from Lake Gloriette was served daily at breakfast and other meals.


Grand Personalities
The grand hotels were owned and managed by a variety of “grand personalities.” Some were wealthy tycoons of industry – others were farmers who stumbled by accident into the hotel business. All were celebrated for the hospitality that they offered to their guests.






Artists-in-Residence
During the second half of the 19th century it became popular for artists to spend the summer at a grand hotel, where they set up their own studio and invited guests to view and purchase their works. One of the most well-known is Frank Henry Shapleigh (1842-1906), who was the artist-in-residence at the Crawford House for sixteen years, from 1877 to 1893. Shapleigh’s original Crawford House artist-in-residence studio still stands today and is part of Appalachian Mountain Club’s Highland Center campus.


Caddy Camps at the Hotels
For many decades, several Caddy Camps serving the Maplewood Hotel, the Mount Washington Hotel, The Balsams, and others, brought boys from all over New England, including inner-city Boston to the White Mountains. For those in charge of a few of the camps, the purpose was not only to provide excellent caddy service to the hotels, but to help the boys grow and develop. There is evidence that these caddy camp experiences promoted significant healthy education and growth for some of the boys, particularly for the inner-city children of immigrant parents.
Vincent Lunetta

Grand Service: The Story of Grace Bickford
Grace Bickford was born on December 19, 1872 and lived in New Hampton, NH as a child. While working as an elementary school teacher, Grace began spending her summers working in tourist hotels in the White Mountains. Her first such experience was working as a “table girl” at Maplewood Cottage, a grand hotel near Bethlehem in the summer of 1895. This pattern was repeated when she secured a summer job in 1897 at Wentworth Hall where she worked as a table girl, maid, and would help assisting in the hotel office.

Because of her talents, Grace continued to thrive in the fast paced world of hospitality, she was able to rise from the status of waitress and part-time office assistant at Wentworth Hall to that of a person of responsibility within the hotel organization. In a short time she became the trusted personal secretary to the hotel manager, Berry, and owner, General Wentworth. Grace became the editor of the hotel’s weekly newsletter Chit Chat, and an affable hostess attending to the needs of guests and rubbing elbows with distinguished entertainers at the hotel.
I don’t know what will become of me. The people here are spoiling me. I put on my new silk waist with my black shirt. It is only the second time I have worn the waist. Well when I went into the dining room – there was a chorus of exclamations. “Oh, how pretty,” “How sweet she looks,” and one man said, “Either you are sweeter every time I see you or I am falling in love with you.”
Now, Mama, don’t be shocked – There’s nothing to it or he would not have said it before a room full of people. Well, of course the sense of approval of my appearance made my dinner taste very good.Grace Bickford in a letter to her mother, dated August 1900
It is unclear how closely Grace was associated with Wentworth Hall, in particular, after 1900, she apparently continued as personal assistant for Wentworth and Berry in their hotel operations for several more years.

In their heyday, the grand hotels catered to fashionable upper-class tourists who sought exclusivity, ambiance, indoor and outdoor entertainments, and the chance to be seen and admired. Guests of other ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds therefore, were not welcome to mix with the wealthy, white, Christian guests who frequented the hotels.
Many of us look back with nostalgia on the former Grand Hotel era, and there is certainly much to celebrate. That said, there are also pervasive stories of ethnic, racial, religious, and social discrimination as part of the hotels’ culture. What today we might find shocking, at the time and even into the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, such behaviors would have been considered to be ‘part of our way of life in the Live Free or Die State.’
Vincent Lunetta
An undated article in the Salem Observer (which published between 1823 and 1919) reported the following visit by Mr. Gangooly to the Glen House:
Mr. Gangooly, the converted Brahmin, now on a visit to this country to observe the workings of Christianity under free institutions, happened along at the Glen House in the White Mountains, the other day, and was there refused entertainment on account of the dark color of his skin! … He may have thought there was no ‘caste’ prejudice in India worse than the color-phobia of the Glen House.
Undated article. Salem Observer.
This was not an isolated incidence, even later in the 20th century. In the 1920s and 30s, grand resorts that discriminated against Jews were common. These hotels were known as “restricted” hotels. When a person with a Jewish sounding last name tried to book a room, they were told that the hotel was full.
The Wentworth Hotel in Jackson was one such “restricted” hotel, which did not allow Jewish guests while owned by Marshall Wentworth. When Nathan Amster, a wealthy Jewish business man from New York, tried to check in and was turned away, he subsequently purchased the hotel and changed the policy so that only Jewish guests were welcome.

The Maplewood Club, which organized in 1923, was similarly unwelcoming to Jewish members with a membership that was “entirely Gentile.” Their club brochure states:
Maplewood appeals to patrons with cultivated tastes who prefer refinement to ostentation and extravagance, no tubercular or other person against whom there is a reasonable moral, social, or physical objection being admitted. As a summer resort for congenial persons, the genuinely courteous atmosphere gives one the impression of being a guest in a most delightful home where daily pleasures may be molded to conform with one’s own desires.
Maplewood Club brochure, circa 1923. Courtesy of Vincent Lunetta.

If you have a personal story about racism and discrimination at the grand hotels, share it with us by emailing museum.wm@plymouth.edu
Fire is an unfortunate common thread through the history of the Grand Hotels. This was a period before mandatory fire prevention systems, while construction was mostly wood frame. Many of the hotels had to be rebuilt more than once. By the 1900s however, many grand hotels and smaller area hotels ended permanently as businesses due to fires.





The burning of the Profile House, August 2, 1923. Courtesy of Sugar Hill Historical Museum
The Crawford House burned and was rebuilt twice during its long history. Like many of the grand hotels, it struggled through financial uncertainty in the 20th century before finally closing its doors in 1975. It burned just a few years later.






Burning of the Crawford House, 1977. Dick Hamilton photos. Courtesy of WhiteMountainHistory.org
Between 1851 and 1967, four hotels operated on the site of the Glen House at the base of the Mount Washington Auto Road; tragically all were destroyed by fire, most recently in 1967. On September 12, 2018 history was made with the opening of the fifth Glen House in Gorham.

A Changing Tourist Market
By the first decade of this century, however, American grand resort hotels, particularly those in very rural settings, had already peaked and signs of imminent decline were starting to appear. Ever more professionalized and standardized than a quarter century before, the hotel business was being conducted on an increasingly larger scale, requiring greater management expertise and skill, and vast amounts of capital. As resort hotels became more costly to operate, the burden of this expense was passed to the consumer; over time many hotels priced themselves out of existence, eroding the time-honored myth that they functioned solely for their guests’ personal enjoyment. In a curious, almost perverted way the grand hotels were victims of their own success – as ‘insulated stage sets for ordered social contacts and the display of wealth’ their appeal remained for the a selected few, but their broader, largely upper-middle-class clientele gradually slipped away to engage in other leisure-time life patterns and pursuits.
Bryant F. Tolles, Jr. The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains: A Vanishing Architectural Legacy. David R Godine. 1998.
One hotel that managed to hang on through economic uncertainty was the Mount Washington Hotel. This was due in large part to its being selected to host the Bretton Woods Conference, officially known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference.

The Monetary Conference was a gathering of delegates from 44 nations that met from July 1 to 22, 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to agree upon a series of new rules for the post-WWII international monetary system. The two major accomplishments of the conference were the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).
The Conference provided boost to the hotel’s economy and allowed the owners to make much needed upgrades to the hotel’s infrastructure. The publicity generated by the Conference also boosted the hotel’s popularity over the following years.
The Legacy of the Grand Hotels

By the beginning of the 20th century, the appeal of the grand resort hotel was beginning to fade. With the advent of the automobile, tourists who had once stayed for weeks and even entire summers at a single hotel could more easily travel to multiple destinations, and economic changes meant that many could no longer afford to stay at luxury hotels. Others sought increased privacy, independence, and family time, leading to the popularity of seasonal summer cottages and camps. By the 1960s many of the once grand hotels had faded into obsolescence and had been demolished or destroyed by fire.
Over time, the remaining grand hotels reorganized and reinvented. Many made the transition from summer only businesses to year-round enterprises. The impact of this change was felt in the local and regional economy and work force.




The few grand hotels that still exist, plus their smaller counterparts, have managed to successfully adapt to the changing tourist market by virtue of excellent business management, effective marketing, maintenance of facilities, and diversified programming. Today, their unique appeal rests with their historic traditions, ambiance, aesthetics, amenities, and architecture – plus the beauty of their surroundings, which continues to draw tourists to the White Mountains – and to the grand hotels.
Included in The Grand Hotels of the White Mountains exhibition was the work of Plymouth State University students engaged in the business capstone project. Their research spans the context of the industry environment in our state and the strategies of the Grand Hotels of the White Mountains.

Dear visitor,
PSU business students are delighted to share their analyses, research findings and recommendations on New Hampshire’s Grand Hotels!
The students have used this exhibit as a way to showcase their excellent skills as young professionals. Their materials reflect their knowledge on industry and competitive frameworks, functional areas of business and strategy.
An integral part of their business capstone course, the students used this opportunity to hone their abilities as ethical and effective decision-makers and business professionals. In their materials, the students have generated best practices and solutions for businesses.
Sincerely,
The students in BU4220 Strategic Management classes, Spring 2019, under the guidance of Professor Roxana Wright.


The students have used this exhibit as a way to showcase their excellent skills as young professionals. Their materials reflect their knowledge on industry and competitive frameworks, functional areas of business and strategy. An integral part of their business capstone course, the students used this opportunity to hone their abilities as ethical and effective decision-makers and business professionals. In their materials, the students have generated best practices and solutions for businesses.
With their contribution to the exhibit, the students provided business analyses documents and artifacts on:

- industry competitiveness and disruption;
- resources, capabilities and core competencies of the Grand Hotels of the White Mountains;
- business model analyses (including an analysis of the all-inclusive business model);
- strategy analysis and identification of strategies that make a NH Grand Hotel successful; and
- evaluations of the impact of these hotels on the state’s overall hotel industry, economy and tourism, and other businesses.
Class Presentations
The classes also created presentations of their work that included recommendations for hotel administrations to use to address the next generation of guests. A selection of these presentations are available below:
Finance




Ideal Customers






Marketing





