The breadth of the Internet continues to rapidly expand as historical text and photos are added to online collections.Places from my pre-Net past seem to be slowly coming online. This morning, I was thinking about the town of my childhood. It's a place I've not visited since the summer of 2002 when I returned for my 25th high school reunion. Yet, I can still remember marching in the town's bicentennial parade as a Cub Scout. The east coast of North America has twice as much recorded history as life out west.
I was trying to locate specific information dealing with the history of Sunapee, New Hampshire. The town boasts a lake which was a tourist destination from the late 1800's. Well-heeled New Yorkers and Bostonians used to come up by train and then shuttle around the 9-mile lake in steamships. The era extended well into the 1930's until the Great Depression hastened the end of the big hotels.
The accompanying top photo was from a postcard of the Ben Mere. This property is in the premier location perfectly aligned for a view of Sunapee Harbor. Today, as you can see, the land has green grass, a bandstand, and parking lots.
I am trying to find out when the old, Ben Mere was torn down. Additionally, I'd be interested in learning any details about it. This blog gets quite a lot of traffic from Internet searches, so I'm hoping that someone will write to me about this topic. I think it is important to have some of this data online as well as in the Abbott Library!