Join | Save Our Shores

Rooming Houses To Grand Hotels

The growing number of tourists coming to the Squam Watershed dramatically increased the need to house them. The first overnight accommodations to serve artists, writers, and other travelers to Squam in the early 1800s primarily consisted of rustic taverns and inns.

Taverns stood at convenient intervals along the main roads to facilitate the repeated change of horse teams required by the stage-coach companies. Cate’s Tavern, located where Routes 132 and 3/25 now intersect in Ashland, was a well-placed New Holderness stop for anyone wanting to visit Squam Lake.

After rail lines reached the White Mountains in the 1850s, the tourist industry blossomed. In 1840, there were only 22 miles of railroad track, but by the 1880s there were thousands of miles. Grander and more opulent hotels opened, creating a balance of rugged but increasingly tamed wilderness countered by black-tie dinners of lobster, steak, and champagne. The technological revolution brought on by the railroad opened the floodgates and allowed waves of urbanites to discover the mountain wilderness of New England.

In 1843, Cate’s Tavern in Ashland was owned and
managed by Noah Cate and had thirty steam-heated
sleeping rooms, a bridal suite, a first-class dining room,
and cost $2 a day.

Boarding houses provided food and a night’s lodging to travelers passing through as well as vacationers for short stays. The Mount Morgan House on the North side of Squam was such a place.

In addition to several local boarding houses, two Grand Hotels in Holderness offered upscale amenities that kept their rooms filled. The Asquam House built in 1881 on Shepard Hill had rooms for 130 guests and the Mt. Livermore Hotel built in 1883 on NH Rt. 113 had rooms for 250 guests. Several tourist camps including Rockywold and Deephaven Camps on Squam also accommodated visitors.

By the mid-1800s Cate’s Tavern had evolved into the Squam Lake House (later the Ednor Hotel), acquired in 1874 by James Melville Cotton and improved over the next several decades by the Cotton family with steam heat, electric lights, and a bridal suite. Thirty rooms made this the largest hotel in Ashland and it became even larger in 1897 when an annex was added. By the 1880s Center Sandwich advertised three sizable hotels: the Pleasant House, the Maple House, and the Red Hill Hotel (formerly the Eagle Hotel). The Red Hill Hotel was noted for having one of the first tennis courts in town.

Center Harbor claimed the earliest hotels in the region to be conceived as end destinations rather than mere overnight stops on the way to another place. The first and largest was the 200-room Senter Hotel, remodeled in several stages from a small inn built in the vicinity of the present Oliver Nichols Memorial Library by Col. Samuel Senter in 1825.

The 1887 Senter Hotel in downtown Center Harbor greeted guests across the road at the dock on Lake Winnipesaukee. The 200-room grand hotel was then described as the “most attractive summer resort in New England.”

The Asquam House on Shepard Hill in Holderness offered upscale accommodations plus a commanding view of Squam Lake and the mountains beyond.

Of the Grand Hotels in the Squam Lakes region, The Mount Livermore Hotel was considered second only to The Asquam House.

The Garnet Inn on Plymouth Street in Center Harbor was the hot spot to vacation in the early 1920s for the likes of the DuPonts and Roosevelts. The hotel maintained several Packard automobiles to take guests on tours around the region.

The Asquam House interior.

Business was so brisk that the Senter House was immediately rebuilt near the same spot after burning in 1887. An advertisement in the London Illustrated tourist publication described the four-story, colonial-revival style replacement (later named the Colonial Hotel) as the “most attractive summer and autumn resort in New England.” Rooms rented for fourteen to twenty-one dollars a week, double the tariff at the nearby sixty-room Moulton House, which offered guests “fine drives, boating, mountain climbing, and croquet courts.” When the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a frequent patron of the first Senter House, took a room at the new hotel during its inaugural season, he commented that he preferred an old hotel to such a “genteel” one with “too much fashion and ceremony.” After a three-week stay, Whittier retreated to the Sturtevant farm up the road, where he finished out the 1888 summer season “in peace.” During this period, the poet and his sister Elizabeth also made several visits to the Asquam House in Holderness.

The Asquam House was the first major hotel in the region to compete with the Winnipesaukee hotels and to establish Squam Lake as a worthy resort destination in its own right. Financed by a small group of summer residents, The Asquam House opened in 1881 on a superb site atop Shepard Hill. A 200-foot long, three-sided porch and a rooftop widow’s walk treated visitors to an apparently endless panorama of the Lake, the Squam Range beyond, and the Sandwich Mountains. Facilities included a tennis court and private beach on Squam’s Piper Cove. Monday through Saturday a private stage departed for the Ashland Station to meet the morning express train between Boston and Montreal. Almost directly across the lake, the Mount Livermore Hotel offered the Asquam House stiff competition.

The Early Hotels of Squam

These are the more prominent hotels that served the early tourists in the five towns that surround Squam:

ASHLAND

The creation of some of the finest boarding houses, hotels, and inns, together with well-equipped livery stables made Ashland a popular stop.

The Squam Lake Hotel 1843 - 1934 (formerly called Cate’s Tavern)

Ednor Hotel 18XX – 1934 (formerly called The Squam Lake House)

CENTER HARBOR

During the 1880s, Center Harbor was an important halfway station between Concord and the Maine town of Fryeburg as well as a gateway to The White Mountains.

The Senter Hotel 1830 -

Moulton House 1868 -

The New Senter House 1885 – 1919 (Later called The Colonial)

The Garnet Inn 1920 - 1994

Sunset House, Pine Hill