Then and Now: When tourist towns went into hibernation

Judging by the size of the trees along North Conway’s Main Street, Nathan Pease took the photograph at left around 1870 — notwithstanding the 1911 copyright on the postcard on which he published it. By the early 1900s, those scrawny elms were towering over the street, forming a canopy that provided shade for summer travelers all day long.

Samuel Thompson’s Kearsarge House, the tower of which rises in the center of the older image, was then the largest and most popular of several hotels catering to summer folk at that time. Thompson had gotten into the game early and ardently, siphoning trade away from Conway Village. From late June through October, the Kearsarge House and other village hostelries would fill with refugees from more urban or mundane environs, streaming into town by stagecoach for a few weeks at a time or for the entire season. By early November, the last of them were usually gone, and the town turned somnolent. Once winter came, even the farmers stayed indoors, if they enjoyed the advantage of connected barns. The roads filled with snow. Silence prevailed.