Unit 13 Plan: Tourism and New Hampshire

The Big Picture

New Hampshire became a major tourist destination in the 19th century. The idea of traveling for pleasure and enjoying leisure time was new to this era, and New Hampshire, with its great natural beauty and convenient location close to Boston, was well positioned as a vacation spot. There are several main points to remember when studying the rise of the tourist industry in the Granite State:

• Tourism was a 19th-century phenomenon, fueled by the development of transportation networks (stagecoaches and railroads), the emergence of dedicated leisure time (due to changes in Americans’ work habits prompted by industrialization), and a growing appreciation for America’s natural wonders (as an escape from growing, overcrowded cities).
  
  

• The Willey landslide in the White Mountains in 1826 was a terrible tragedy that captured national attention and the public’s imagination. This very early example of what became known as “disaster tourism” saw thousands of people visit New Hampshire and the haunting site of the Willey tragedy. Through this means, tourists were introduced to the beauty of the White Mountains and quickly found other attractions to visit in the region, such as the Old Man of the Mountain and Mount Washington. Other parts of the state also drew tourists looking to spend a day or two at the beach, on a lake, hiking a mountain, or visiting an amusement park.
  
  

• Changes to Americans’ work habits allowed for leisure time, as the regulated schedule in the country’s factories led to a more pronounced division of time between work and play. As a result, Americans became familiar with the concepts of a “weekend” and “vacations.” Travel for pleasure became a favorite American past time.
  
  

• At the beginning of the 19th century, travel to New Hampshire was done on foot or by horseback over very rough roads. The roads were much improved in the first decades of the century, and stagecoaches became a common mode of transport. In the middle of the century, railroads began to crisscross the state, making accessible areas that had before been fairly remote. Via trains, most of New Hampshire became reachable in just a day’s travel. Trolleys and electric railways provided increased travel opportunities for those living in New Hampshire’s cities and suburbs. In the early 20th century, automobiles replaced railroads as the primary means of transport, once again reshaping the tourist industry in the state.
  
  

• New Hampshire once boasted 150 grand resort hotels, which offered luxurious accommodations to tourists. These resorts provided lavish meals, state-of-the-art amenities (like hot and cold running water and electricity), lots of recreational opportunities to enjoy New Hampshire’s pristine environment, and entertainment like bands, dances, and plays. The state became the summer playground for Boston and New York’s upper classes. There were also less grand options for those farther down the socio-economic scale, including taverns, inns, boarding houses, and camps.
  
  

• The beauty of the state was promoted by the number of artists and writers who visited and shared their vision of New Hampshire with other Americans. White Mountain art, a style that was particularly popular in the late 19th century, showcased New Hampshire scenery, from the grandeur of mountain vistas to the tranquility of the region’s valleys and lakes. Artists sold their work in major metropolitan areas like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, thus fueling interest in New Hampshire and contributing to the state’s flourishing tourist industry.
  
  

• Tourism in New Hampshire had a dramatic impact on the state. It brought thousands of people here and helped connect New Hampshire to the rest of the country. It encouraged the development of infrastructure, which helped the regions of the Granite State become more connected to one another. And it became one of the state’s most important industries, generating thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue.
  
  

Introduction

Tourism has been an important part of the New Hampshire economy since the 1820s and has brought visitors from all over the nation and the world to the Granite State. During the 19th century, the growth of railroads and the rise of tourism in New Hampshire went hand-in-hand. Although both the railroads and the first taverns developed for commercial traffic, entrepreneurs saw a business opportunity as more and more people traveled to appreciate the natural wonders of the Granite State. Railroads facilitated shorter and cheaper journeys drawing visitors to new areas. A range of visitor services sprang up along railroad lines to accommodate tourists, things like hotels, restaurants, shops, and attractions. The more visitors that came—encouraged by artists and photographers who marketed tourist destinations—the more the tourist industry expanded.

This unit focuses mainly on the White Mountains region of New Hampshire but also includes the seacoast, such as Rye Beach and Little Boar’s Head in North Hampton, and the Lakes Region, such as Wolfeboro (“America’s oldest summer resort”) and other towns.

Disaster Tourism, Natural Wonders, and Tourist Sites

Why did people visit New Hampshire?

Most tourists visit New Hampshire in the 21st century for the same reasons that tourists visited in the 19th century. The natural beauty and relatively uncrowded open spaces of the Granite State signal rest, relaxation, and recharging. Strangely, though, the earliest tourists visited the White Mountains to see the location of a terrible tragedy—the Willey slide.

A severe drought hit the White Mountains in the summer of 1826, which ended with a massive rain storm on August 28. Near midnight, a tremendous cloudburst caused the Saco River to flood through Crawford Notch, and a powerful landslide of trees, branches, gravel, boulders, and water surged down the mountains into the valley where the Willey family lived. They apparently fled their house, fearing that the landslide would sweep it away, but were caught in the slide anyway. When the storm ended, local residents came to search for the family and discovered that their house was untouched, protected by a huge boulder embedded in the hillside behind it that diverted the landslide around the building. But the Willey family—Samuel and Polly Willey, their five children, and two hired men—all perished.

News of the tragedy spread all across the nation, and people were captivated by the idea that nature could destroy an entire family but leave their home intact. Details such as the unmade beds they left behind and the burnt candle end and open Bible sitting on the kitchen table fascinated the public. The tragedy was popularized by artists, writers, journalists, and even ministers, who saw in the Willeys’ demise a metaphor for the power of nature and the sometimes inexplicable will of God. A young, New England author named Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story about the event, “The Ambitious Guest,” and other authors wrote poems and even a ballad about it. The story had incredible staying power, and even decades later, most Americans knew about the tragic fate of the Willeys.

As early as the fall of 1826, hundreds of visitors began journeying to the White Mountains to see the site of the Willey slide, and thousands more came in the years following. The Willey house became one of America’s first major tourist attractions. A local entrepreneur even built a hotel attached to the house in 1845. The house and hotel burned down in 1898, but the spot where it stood is marked as a state historic site today.

Although many of the earliest tourists to the White Mountains came for the Willey house, they stayed for the natural beauty of New Hampshire. The Old Man of the Mountain was first spotted by people other than Native Americans in 1805. The first known image of the famous granite profile was published in 1828, and it quickly became a major tourist attraction in its own right.

Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the northeastern United States, and the other mountains in the Presidential Range drew hikers and naturalists. The Flume Gorge and other scenic sites in the White Mountains, as well as the beaches and swimming spots of the Lakes region and the seacoast, became popular tourist destinations. The Cog Railway opened in 1869 and not only brought visitors to the famed summit of Mount Washington but became a tourist attraction itself. This ingenious incline railway used metal teeth operating on a central rail to pull its cars up the steep mountain and descended using special airbrakes. It was the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world.

Businessmen quickly realized that visitors might want to do more than hike, sketch, paint, or swim, and opened dance halls and amusement parks for entertainment. Pine Island Park opened in Manchester in 1901 and Canobie Lake Park in Salem the following year. The amusement parks had Ferris wheels and roller coasters, but also swimming holes, landscaped promenades, boathouses, and roller rinks. They catered to day-trippers who could take the train and trolley from Boston or Lowell, as well as being a draw for local residents.

As tourism developed in New Hampshire, visitors flocked in droves to see these natural wonders and tourist sites, part of a larger pattern in the growth of tourism throughout the northeastern United States. As cities boomed along the eastern seaboard of the country during the 19th century, they became overcrowded, hot, and prone to outbreaks of disease during the summer. People with the means to do so fled urban areas for wide-open spaces and clean air and water. Throughout this period, the Industrial Revolution fueled urbanization and advances in technology, two forces that drove tourism in the Granite State, pushing people out of the cities and making it easier for them to reach the mountains, lakes, and seacoast. Industrialization also changed people’s work habits. The regulated schedule of work in factories introduced new concepts, like the “weekend” and “vacations.” With time allotted in their schedules specifically for rest and relaxation, people began looking for things to do during their leisure time. Even those in the working class got a day or two off each week and sought ways to enjoy themselves and break away from the monotony of industrial labor.

Technology and Transportation

How did visitors get to the popular tourist sites?

As technology changed over time, the modes of transportation that visitors used to reach the lakes, mountains, and seacoast of New Hampshire shifted accordingly. Stagecoach and steamboat were eventually replaced by the railroad, which was later replaced by the automobile in the mid-20th century.

Travel to and through the White Mountains on horseback and foot was very challenging when Abel Crawford became the first white pioneer to live there in 1790, settling in the notch through the mountains that would later bear his family’s name. In 1803–04 the Tenth New Hampshire Turnpike connected Crawford Notch to Jefferson, near the Connecticut River. This road shortened travel time from the Connecticut River Valley to Portland, Maine, by two weeks. The turnpike saw a high volume of traffic, primarily farmers bringing their goods to market, which prompted Crawford to open the first inn in the White Mountains.

From the 1820s until about 1850, most travelers reached the White Mountains by stagecoach, a journey that took four days from Boston to Crawford Notch. In the decades before the Civil War, there was a major shift to train travel in northern New England, with hundreds of miles of track being laid in rail lines that crisscrossed Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. By 1846 travelers could take a train from Boston to Portland, Maine, and have a shorter stagecoach journey to the mountains, but even bigger changes were to come. In 1851 a railroad route was established that linked Portland, Maine, with Gorham, New Hampshire. By 1853 the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad (later the Boston and Maine Railroad) reached Littleton, at the northern edge of the White Mountains. In the 1870s, rail lines expanded to the interior of the White Mountains, bringing visitors directly to places like Conway and Crawford Notch. By 1876 rail passengers could travel entirely by train to the top of Mount Washington, taking the Boston and Maine Railroad to the base and immediately boarding the Cog Railway to the summit.

By the time reliable rail service was established in the White Mountains, the railroad had expanded through the rest of the state, carrying summer visitors to a wide variety of vacation getaways wherever there was a lake, river, beach, mountain, or meadow to enjoy. Along the seacoast and in the southern portion of the state, the relatively short distance from the heat and crowds of Boston made New Hampshire seem a world away, whether visitors stayed for the day or a summer.

Modern printing techniques made guidebooks, brochures, maps, and advertisements—all products of technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution—cheaper, easier to produce, and far more prevalent than ever before, broadcasting New Hampshire’s allure to beleaguered city dwellers as far south as New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Grand Resorts and Family Camps

Where did visitors stay?

The earliest visitors to the White Mountains stayed in taverns, which sprung up in the region as early as the 1780s. These early taverns served mainly commercial travelers from the Connecticut River Valley taking their goods to market in coastal Maine and Massachusetts. By the 1820s, residents of the mountains began to see more visitors who came specifically to climb and explore the mountains. Tavernkeepers, like Abel Crawford and his son and daughter-in-law, Ethan Allen and Lucy Crawford, often doubled as mountain guides for these guests. The Willey family, in fact, had moved to Crawford Notch to be innkeepers. As the number of visitors increased after their tragic demise, the number and size of taverns, inns, and boardinghouses grew. After about 1850, with the growth of railroads, hotels became larger and began boasting more luxuries than could be offered in taverns or inns.

The period from the 1880s to the 1920s was the “golden age” of grand resort hotels in New Hampshire. Grand resort hotels varied in architectural style but shared certain characteristics. They could hold 200 or more guests; they offered a variety of dining, cultural, social, and recreational experiences; and they cultivated an atmosphere of luxury, grandeur, and sophistication. Amenities included three lavish meals daily, hot and cold running water, park-like landscaping, and eventually even electricity. Guests could enjoy musical performances by the in-house orchestra, pursue outdoor activities such as fishing, hiking, golf, swimming, horseback riding, or lawn games, attend a lecture, take a guided carriage ride to local natural sites, and spend time reading in the library or playing card games in one of the many comfortable parlors.

Many grand resort hotels were self-contained, with their own power plants and sanitation systems, farms and greenhouses to produce food, huge stables to accommodate the hundreds of horses and coaches, post and telegraph offices, and dormitories to house the staff. The grand resort hotels provided employment for local residents, with positions ranging from fireman to laundress, blacksmith to waiter, and baggage handler to carriage washer. Wealthy families from Boston or New York often spent the entire summer season at these grand resort hotels, bringing their servants with them.

Most grand resort hotels were located in the White Mountains, but they could be found throughout the state, even in relatively small and remote New Hampshire towns. In fact, at one time New Hampshire boasted more than 150 grand resort hotels. There were, of course, higher concentrations of hotels near the seacoast and in the Lakes region. The first hotel on the Isles of Shoals was Appledore House, opened in 1848 by former White Island lighthouse keeper Thomas Laighton, father of author and poet Celia Laighton Thaxter. Artists and writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whitter, and Childe Hassam stayed there during its heyday. In 1873 the Oceanic Hotel opened on nearby Star Island. It could sleep 300 guests, had one of the first elevators in an American hotel, and boasted two bowling alleys, a billiard room, a dance hall, and an orchestra. The last surviving grand resort hotel on the seacoast is Wentworth by the Sea, which opened in 1874 in New Castle. Guests could enjoy the ocean views and breezes as well as a grand ballroom and golf course. Annie Oakley once stayed there and gave shooting lessons to the women guests.

Grand resort hotels could not have existed without the railroads. Some hotels were deliberately constructed at the end point of a railroad line, and some were even financed by railroad companies. Trains brought not only visitors but the supplies needed to feed and entertain hundreds of guests for an entire summer. Marketing materials for the hotels emphasized the proximity of rail lines and railroad stations.

Advances in transportation drove the rise of the grand resort hotels but were also responsible for their downfall, as the advent of the automobile in the early 20th century gave tourists the flexibility to travel for shorter periods of time and away from the rail lines. Grand resort hotels were replaced by convenient motels or campgrounds. Today, less than a dozen of New Hampshire’s grand resort hotels remain, such as the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods.

Grand resort hotels were not the only lodging option for tourists in New Hampshire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hundreds of smaller hotels, inns, cabins, and boardinghouses sprung up in popular tourist areas for those who could not afford the luxury of a grand resort hotel. There were also plenty of visitors who were looking for a more pristine, natural setting and a more “authentic” experience than was offered at the grand resort hotels. Many of them sought out camping, either building their own rustic accommodations or staying at “family camps,” especially in the Lakes region. The state of New Hampshire actively encouraged the proliferation of summer homes, even creating an annual brochure of farmsteads for sale after a mass exodus of the state’s farmers in the late 19th century. Many of these abandoned farms were converted into summer homes for wealthy Bostonians or New Yorkers who wished to spend the summer months in the pristine New Hampshire countryside.

For those who could not afford a second home, more rustic and temporary accommodations had to suffice. Campers sought out-of-the-way spots on lake shorefronts or on one of the hundreds of small islands in New Hampshire’s numerous lakes, many still only accessible by boat. Camping accommodations were built to encourage people to get and stay out-of-doors, not for comfort. Many camps were simply white canvas tents, like those used during the Civil War, but others were more substantial, including wooden tents and rustic wooden bungalows with plain wooden boards and walls open to the roof. Over the years, these structures were made more enclosed and permanent, but most were still pretty basic. Many of these camps have been held in the same families for five or more generations and have been placed in family trusts to ensure they remain in the family. In the 21st century, Granite Staters are likely to refer to their families’ summer homes as “camps,” even if the structures no longer bear any resemblance to the rustic camps they were in the 19th century.

Artists and Writers

What was the relationship between art and tourism?

The Willey slide brought not only the curious to the White Mountains but also artists and writers. Like the more typical tourists, they were struck by the beauty and grandeur of the New Hampshire landscape and sought to capture it in their paintings and writings. Particularly for artists, the White Mountains provided inspiration for a new school of art that focused on the power of nature and man’s relative insignificance. In an era of rapid industrialization, when men seemed to be reshaping American cities so dramatically for profit and new industries consumed natural resources at an alarming rate, the majesty of the White Mountains offered a dramatic counterpoint.

Benjamin Champney, considered the founder of the White Mountain School of art, first came to the region in 1838. A New Hampshire native who studied art in Paris, Champney focused on the Saco River Valley area and maintained a studio in North Conway. His paintings of a picturesque and pastoral landscape were purchased as souvenirs by summer tourists, who took pride in exhibiting them in their homes in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago. Champney’s reputation attracted more artistic talent to the area, and eventually a colony of artists spent their summers sketching and painting in the White Mountains.

Hotel owners, mindful that works of art advertised the area and gave it a cultural aura that attracted more tourists, employed artists-in-residence each summer. These artists-in-residence, like Edward Hill, not only produced paintings for sale to guests, but offered art lessons, judged parades, and illustrated dining menus.

Abenaki artisans seized the opportunity provided by the tourism boom to preserve their handicraft traditions and supplement their income. Basket weaving is an important cultural practice for the Abenaki, passed down among the generations. Abenaki people had long sold or traded baskets and other handmade items, like snowshoes, canoe paddles, moccasins, and gloves, to villagers and townspeople. The arrival of tourists, at a time when Victorian culture was fascinated by “Indians” provided a larger market for these items. Many Abenaki families spent the winters producing baskets and other items that they then sold at roadside stands or shops or by traveling from hotel to hotel. Starting in the early 20th century, factories began to flood the market with cheap, machine-made reproductions of these handicrafts, and this source of income dried up. European and American landscape artists were more insulated from these forces, although as the demand for less expensive souvenirs increased, printers mass-produced engravings and other machine-made reproductions of the more popular paintings.

By the late 19th century, a symbiotic relationship between art and tourism had developed. By the 1850s, growing numbers of American and European artists toured and painted each summer in the mountains. The works of art they produced both appealed to and attracted a new class of tourists, who had the money and the taste to appreciate and buy works of art. In the winter months, these works of art were exhibited in places like New York City and Boston, publicizing the natural wonders of New Hampshire and attracting even more visitors to the state, thus fueling the tourism industry.

Growth and Change

How did the rise of tourism change New Hampshire?

The rise of tourism in the 19th century brought more people, revenue, and infrastructure to the Granite State. It also connected New Hampshire with the United States beyond New England. In 1892, for example, the state hosted 50,000 summer visitors who brought in over $5 million in revenue. New Hampshire’s tourism industry has waxed and waned over the years, as the nature of tourism itself has changed, but it has remained an important aspect of the state’s economy almost continuously since the mid-1800s. Today tourism is the second-largest industry in the state, generating millions of dollars in revenue and tax receipts every year and supporting over 70,000 jobs.

The infrastructure created to support the tourism industry also brought dramatic changes to the state, with the growth of railroads, roads, bridges, and all sorts of amenities that improved access and communication throughout New Hampshire. The development of a transportation and communication infrastructure helped link the various regions of the state and connected its remote regions, like the Great North Woods and the White Mountains, more closely to the populated centers of the Merrimack and Connecticut river valleys and the seacoast.

In addition, an appreciation for the natural beauty of New Hampshire’s tourist spots encouraged both residents and visitors to work to protect the Granite State’s natural resources. For more on this, see Unit 14: Preserving New Hampshire’s Natural Landscape.