UD prof publishes book on grand resort hotels
For press release information, contact: Beth Thomas, (302) 831-8749 [email protected] Oct. 16, 1998
Bryant Tolles visits resorts when he works. His passion is the architecture and history of tourism at the grand, old resort hotels in New Hampshire's White Mountains and other resort regions of the Northeast.
His new book, "The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains, A Vanishing Architectural Legacy," recently published by David R. Godine, is the first to fully explore the architectural, economic and cultural history of these resorts, once situated in one of the nation's most popular locales.
In addition to conducting research on these beautiful buildings-the first structures in America that were designed exclusively for the tourist trade-Tolles also serves as director of the University of Delaware's Museum Studies Program, is an associate professor in the departments of history and art history and is interim chair of the Department of Art Conservation.
The 250-page book contains more than 200 photos, many of them taken by the author. It has been called a "visual delight and a vastly entertaining social document [that] presents scholarship and detective work of the first order." Tolles attributes his interest in these grand resorts to being a native New Englander, who spends part of each summer in New Hampshire.
>From 1875 until the first world war, tourists flocked to New Hampshire's magnificent hotels to leave behind the stresses of urban life. They spent weeks, months and, sometimes, entire summers at the grand hotels- complexes that were self-sufficient, like small cities unto themselves, with their own heating plants, generators and the like, Tolles explained.
Mothers, children, nurses and maids would take the train from New York or Boston and arrive in the White Mountains with steamer trunks filled with clothes and other necessities. Fathers and husbands would commute from the cities on weekends. According to Tolles, hotel carriages and, later, motor cars would whisk guests from the nearby train stations to the hotel front doors, where they were greeted royally. With manicured lawns, elegant gardens and the latest conveniences-electricity, elevators, telephone lines and private baths-the hotels offered their guests only the best.
Golf courses, tennis courts, hiking and carriage trails, bowling, fine dining, an orchestra and an artist-in-residence added to the ambiance, Tolles said. The hotels often trained their own "nines," a baseball team to play teams from other hotels for the entertainment of guests.
Most of the hotels Tolles studies are now gone, lost to fires or demolished when they became shabby. "Most of them were built entirely of wood and they were put up fast to make a profit. Since they also were located in areas quite remote from fire-fighting equipment, fires were quite a hazard," Tolles explained. Two that do remain in New Hampshire, he said, are The Balsams in Dixville Notch and the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods. Both are large, ornate structures.
The American vacation experience changed dramatically with the advent of income tax, wars and depression, Tolles said, but nothing changed the tourist industry as radically as did the popularization of the automobile.
"With the automobile, people didn't have to rely on trains to get them to vacation destinations. They could go more places, stay for shorter periods of time and move on to see more," Tolles said.
"Suddenly, people had access to many more parts of North America. People had different ways to spend their time and, as a result, much smaller lodging options-motor courts and motels-materialized."
Additionally, the very rich, who had become accustomed to stays at the grand hotels, found the automobile could give them access to their own parcels of vacation land, he said. Thus began the American cottage movement, with families building or purchasing their own vacation homes, though sometimes still relying on the grand hotels for meals and entertainment.
In his next book, Tolles will trace this cottage movement in the White Mountains. At present, he is researching a book on resorts of the Adirondack Mountains, Lake George and Lake Champlain, which provided a vacation experience very different from that of the White Mountains because of the focus on lake recreation.
Tolles conducts much of his research in the Morris Library on the campus, and he also conducts research at museums in Boston, New York and Philadelphia and at the American Antiquarian Society, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Adirondack Museum and other small libraries and archives.
One of the joys of the research, he said, is getting to meet hotel and cottage owners, many of whom are very willing to share company and family histories, records and photographs with him.
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