The Glen House, Pinkham Notch, White Mountains, New Hampshire

A hotels/motels photo for the Vintage Photos Theme Park.

"The Glen House, Pinkham Notch, White Mountains, N.H."

According to Wikipedia, "Glen House was the name of a series of grand resorts, between 1852 and 1893, in Pinkham Notch very near Mount Washington in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA."

This seemed puzzling to me, since the Glen House pictured on this real photo postcard certainly wasn't one of those "grand resorts" of the nineteenth century. Fortunately, I discovered Steven Caming's book, Mt. Washington Auto Road (Arcadia Publishing, 2014), which contains a chapter about the history of the Glen House.

As Caming explains, there have actually been four different Glen Houses. The one shown here was built in 1925 as the fourth Glen House and "was only a mere shadow of those grand hotels that had come before." So what happened to the previous hotels? All three of them burned to the ground, with accidental fires occurring in 1884, 1893, and 1924.

This view of Glen House No, 4 was intended to illustrate what a relaxing and convenient place it was (mouse over the image above to see a cropped version). A man and women are resting on comfortable chairs in the front yard as a small child plays nearby. Another man has parked his car right in front and is carrying a suitcase up the steps toward the entrance of the hotel.

Sad to say, a fourth fire in 1967 destroyed this hotel, too, and put an end to this idyllic scene. Fifty yeas later, however, a fifth Glen House is now under construction and is scheduled to open in June 2018.