The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains: Architecture, History, and the Preservation Record

This event is part of the Museum’s free Summer 2019 Speaker Series, which will accompany our exhibition “The Grand Hotels of the White Mountains,” on view May 17-September 12, 2019. 

Architectural historian Bryant Tolles, Jr. shares the history and architecture of the grand resort hotel phenomenon and hospitality tourism in the White Mountains of New Hampshire from the pre-Civil War era to the present. The primary focus is on the surviving grand resort hotels: The Omni Mount Washington Resort, the Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, The Balsams, the Eagle Mountain House & Golf Club and The Wentworth Hotel. Extensive illustrations document these buildings and others no longer in existence.

History professor and museum director Bryant Tolles is the author of books on New Hampshire and Salem, Massachusetts architecture, the grand resort, hotels of the White Mountains, the summer cottages of the White Mountains, the resort hotels of the Adirondacks (NY), the resort hotels of the New England seacoast, and college and university architecture in New England before 1860. A graduate of Yale College, he earned his MAT in American Studies at Yale and PhD in American and New England History at Boston University. Bryant has served on the faculty of the University of Delaware, Tufts University, and Harvard University, teaching courses on the history of tourism in America and the history of New England. From 1974-1984 he was the executive director of the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts, now part of the Peabody Essex Museum.