| LOVING LITTLETON AND |
Town historian, Jim McIntosh, explains although many railroad hotels languished as the rails pushed further on to the next town, Littleton was the terminus of the White Mountain Line for almost 20 years, from the locomotives' arrival in 1853 until the rails reached Lancaster, NH in 1870."With the trains," says McIntosh, "came a clientele more sophisticated than muddy teamsters and drovers-- namely commercial travelers and, equally novel, vacationers.'" visitnh.gov
Guest at the Thayers Inn have included President Ulysses S. Grant who addressed a crowd from its balcony and Harry K. Thaw who was held in the hotel for 30 days during a hearing to determine if the millionaire playboy had murdered architect Sandford White. The inn is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. But most visitors today come to stay at another similarly listed hotel, the Mountain View Grand. They drive past one of the many War Memorials -- and the Pollyanna statue (author Eleanor Hodgman Porter lived here), past the bicuspid sign of the village dentist, and past the array of antique gasoline pumps and oil company signs collected over a lifetime by Don and Ellen Morrow to arrive 10 miles later in Whitefield, NH at one of the last surviving wooden railroad destination hotels in America. Established in 1866 as a simple country inn it grew to become a prime summer resort in the White Mountains, its slogan "A haven for presidents and movie stars." The property, closed since 1986, was slated for demolition in 1998. A young Massachusetts businessman, Kevin Craffey, bought it and restored this Great Old Dame to its former glory at a cost of $20 million. Careless., however in his renovations, he ran afoul of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and sold the resort in June 2005 to a subsidiary of Great American Life Insurance Company which specializes in the acquisition and management of luxury hotels. The resort was recently ranked by Travel+Leisure Magazine as “the #1 reason to love New Hampshire.” |
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