Ogunquit, Maine

Ogunquit takes its name from an Abenaki phrase meaning beautiful place by the sea, and artists agreed. In the eighteen nineties, painters began gathering here, drawn by the luminous light and the long crescent of Ogunquit Beach. By nineteen twenty-eight, Charles Woodbury's art school had made the village a nationally recognized artists' colony.

That same era saw Ogunquit quietly become one of the earliest welcoming communities for gay and lesbian visitors in America, a tradition that has deepened ever since. The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, founded in nineteen fifty-two, carries on the legacy, sitting on a salt-pond bluff with some of the finest coastal views in New England.