The Grand Hotels of the Boom Years

In the late eighteen hundreds, Old Orchard Beach glittered with grand wooden hotels, and the grandest was the Old Orchard House. It rose on the very ground of the original apple orchard that gave the town its name. The Staples family had farmed here since the seventeen nineties, and by around eighteen forty Ebenezer Staples began taking in summer boarders, an early spark of the tourist trade.

After an earlier hotel burned, the family built the great Old Orchard House in the mid eighteen seventies, a sprawling landmark with a boardwalk running nearly to the sea. Around it clustered a constellation of other resort hotels, places with names like the Fiske House, the Sea Shore House, and Hotel Emerson, wooden palaces full of verandas, dining rooms, and sea breezes. Most of them would not survive.

Fire, the constant enemy of a town built of pine, claimed one after another. The Old Orchard House itself outlasted many rivals but was eventually torn down. One survivor remains.

The Ocean House, built around eighteen ninety-five on West Grand Avenue, still stands as the oldest hotel on the beachfront, a last Victorian witness to the age of the grand seaside resort.