In the age of sail and the early years of steam, New England’s tourists first explored the cities and surrounding countryside. In the decades preceding the Civil War, those with time and money to spare visited New Haven, Newport, Portland, and, most of all, Boston. Crowds strolled the Common, viewed the Athenaeum’s works of art, walked the crooked streets down to the waterfront and Faneuil Hall, and even visited a forerunner of our modern aquarium-complete with trained seals.
Boston, unlike breezy Newport, has a damp, hot summer. Once a steamboat began running in 1817, moneyed Bostonians started taking their summers on Nahant, a nearby rocky island connected to the mainland by a sandspit beach. This was the region then reportedly inhabited by “His Snakeship,” the great New England sea serpent. The creature could have not picked a more socially acceptable location to disport himself. What better credibility for the monster than to be reported by a Beacon Hill Cabot? What better pastime for a vacationer, than lolling about the hotel veranda, scanning the horizon for a sea serpent?
The Nahant Hotel, one of New England’s first attempts at a summer resort, had little to offer beyond a possible view of His Snakeship. A gigantic ugly structure.
The building was ringed by verandas on the first and second floors.
The men left each morning by stage or steamboat for their Boston offices, “When they return in the evening they are tired and not much inclined for anything but indulgence in the bar room or the lower balcony.”
Nahant never fully blossomed as a resort, and by the Civil War its peak had passed. Despite its location close to Boston, its sea air, mists, and mirages, it never caught the public’s fancy. Its rocky shore did little to invite those enjoying the new vogue in sea bathing, and its staid Boston attitudes discouraged the fun seekers.
More successful at attracting the summer crowd was Newport. Since colonial times a retreat from the damp heat of the South for plantation owners, Newport began actively to lure vacationers after its maritime economy collapsed during the eras of the Revolution and the War of 1812. As a first step, the town fathers did what they could to make the town more attractive, which included relocating many destitute townspeople. In 1822 the Newport Asylum was opened to house these poor. The asylum sat on Coasters Island, some 150 feet out in the harbor. (The building is now part of the Naval War College Museum.) Deep water prevented the inmates from coming ashore to wander the town without permission, thus relieving Newport “from the disgrace of having the streets infested with beggars, as formerly, to the great scandal of the citizens and annoyance to strangers.
By the century’s middle, Newport had become the preeminent seaside resort. Activity centered around one great hotel, the Ocean House, dubbed by one wit a huge, yellow pagoda-factory. Visitors however, came for the beach. It was a great wide strand with a gently sloping sea bottom that provided 100 yards of shallow water. From a carriage along the beach one could watch others take their first mouthfuls of seawater.
Newport slowly grew into the most fashionable summering place for America’s very rich. At first, the moneyed families had little sophistication, and an 1852 observer wrote how Mr. Croesus (as the species became called), moves in and “builds a house in the most fashionable street rather larger than his neighbor’s, but a reproduction of it in very upholstered detail.
Newport, like less-publicized Bar Harbor, Maine, had become the watering place for America’s pre-income-tax rich. Bar Harbor had great wooded estates and large hotels, while Newport was a patchwork of large mansions, often built on quite small lots.
At the turn of the century, some 5,000 came to “summer” at Newport. Mil- lionaires who owned entire railroads, banks, and industries-Vanderbilts, Astors, Belmonts, Grosvenors, Morgans, and other, now-forgotten names- lived in a collection of 100-odd mansions which had, said one reporter, “a measure of luxury men have not witnessed since the fall of Rome. The most legendary of these edifices line the high bluff over the ocean along
the Cliff Walk. This shore path, “the vested right of the humblest citizen of Newport in the Atlantic Ocean, skirted the expanses of lawns and gardens behind the big houses. On one side of the walk, gulls wheeled and screamed about the crag face, and far below the surf boomed, folding and refolding its breakers against the barrier before it; on the other side, regally fortified from nature’s fury, flourished the “Gilded Age,” among reflecting pools, terraces, croquet lawns, and roses.
They called these summer homes “cottages”: oversized reproductions of Louis XIV chateaus, or round-towered castles out of medieval England.
Less pretentious homes surrounded themselves with formal gardens and masses of purple hydrangea, which grow lush in the salt air.
From their palaces, the “cottagers” vied among themselves in extravagance, the wives plotting and intriguing for social predominance. Butlers clad in satin knee breeches and powdered wigs rode miniature railway cars to carry the silver tea service from the main house to the Oriental teahouse overlooking the sea. Society dinners often had so many courses that a truly hungry guest had to stab for morsels as liveried servants served from the left, while others simultaneously cleared from the right.
Sea bathing was out of fashion for society by the 1870s. “Strangers and servants may do so, but the cottagers have withdrawn their support from the ocean. Salt water may be carried to the house and used without loss of caste, but bathing in the surf is vulgar, wrote William Dean Howells. Many observers of the period attributed this to the style of women’s bathing dresses, which made even the comeliest belle a caricature.
The fashionable carriage drive along the beach was by now a ritual. People dressed in their formal best. The servants, in livery, sat stiffly atop and behind. No one spoke to those in other carriages; one never even made eye contact outside one’s own vehicle. One simply sat and rode.
Newport itself was a strange mixture of classes. The townspeople ignored the rich.
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