I2 NORTH SHORE BREEZE and Reminder 
Summer Resorts 
of New England 
By GEORGE FRENCH 
Azur everybody, all over this country, knows about 
New Engiand as a summer resort. That business 
brings to New tingland not less than $60,000,000 annually, 
and a great a.nount in addition in collateral benefit. It is 
iu.possible to exaggerate the importance of the business 
as it is, or the possibilities for expansion. For several 
years it has been taking a form that will eventually add 
immensely to the permanent value of all New England, 
and especially of those sections that are known as pri- 
marily resort territory. Instead of coming for the season 
and stopping at a hotel or farmhouse, many people are 
now buying land and building homes, in which they live 
from early in the spring to late in the fall. Many of this 
class come from the West, or the region that we used 
to call the West—more strictly the Middle West. New 
York has sent many people into the mountain regions of 
New England where they have built fine residences and 
improved large areas of land. This movement has two 
phases: The men who buy picturesque locations and build 
new houses, and break in new farm lands, and the men 
who buy old farms, rebuild and add to the houses, and 
improve the land that has for generations been cultivated, 
When the ownership and development drift to New 
England began it was almost wholly with the purpose of 
obtaining pleasant summer homes. ‘The land was neg- 
lected, except for the purpose of raising such fresh vege- 
tables as the transient occupants needed. Now, however, 
the migration’is of quite a different character. The sum- 
mer people have got the farming fever. Almost all of 
them own large farms and work them with more or less 
intelligence and thoroughness. Many of them make money 
on their lands. One of the best farms I have ever seen, 
consisting of nearly 10,000 acres (nine-tenths of it wood- 
land), pays a net profit of better than 10 per cent., the 
owner paying retail prices for everything he has off the 
land, and paying one-third of the salary of the manager. 
on account of look-after the big house and the affairs of 
the owner. All through New Hampshire and Vermont, 
and to a less extent Maine, there are scores of such sum- 
mer-resort places. The city owners have, almost without 
exception, become shrewd farmers. One whom I know 
well gets right down to farm work and management all 
summer. He spends about half of his time on the farm 
and the other half in New York. He has a big farm of 
good land, and he works it to such good effect that he 
inakes a tidy income from it, in addition to having an ideal 
summer hone for his family and an ideal place to entertain 
his friends. 
I know a Washington official who bought his father’s 
small farm a few years ago. He has no money and gets 
but a moderate salary. Yet he has worked the old farm 
for several years and has bought more land. Now he has 
a farm that comes near being a model one, he makes some 
money every year, and every year he makes some im- 
provements. He has got almost to the point at which he 
can resign his official post and live on the farm in plenty 
and comfort and thrift. I know another, a Boston young 
man, working for a moderate salary, who bought his an- 
cestral farm, in Vermont, a few years ago, and has steadily 
improved it, bit by bit, during his vacations, until it is 
now paying for itself as fast as his mortgage calls for 
installments, and it is more than twice as valuable as 
when he took it over. There is a New York editor of mv 
neevaintance who has a fine New Hampshire farm, and 
is counting the years to the time when he can retire to it. 
It will support him in comparative ease and in absolute 
comfort. It has been developed from the resort idea. 
There is a minister in Boston who is one of the leading 
farmers of a far nothern Vermont town, tempted to the 
land through summer vacations spent there. He has two 
ambitions—to save souls in the city and raise the best ap- 
ples in his town. 
This drift of good business men to the country, and 
their disposition to apply business principles to the tilling 
of the land, has operated to spur the indigenous residents. © 
Go all through the summer-resort regions and you will 
find that the local business men—the lawyers of the 
small cities and large towns, the state and municipal offi- 
cials, the doctors and the merchants—are turning to the 
land for avocations, and that they are making good. The 
lawyer who lives in Brattleboro, or Concord, or Rutland, 
or Montpelier, or St. Johnsbury, or Littleton, is getting 
the farm habit, and their farms are found.all about. They 
are always good farms, well tilled, with good buildings, 
and paying good dividends. They will compare favorably, 
so far as substantial results are concerned, with the big 
show places of the financiers from Chicago, New York 
and other big cities. 
This practical phase of the more recent resort develop- 
ment is largely confined to the mountain regions. The 
shore resorts have been developed more generally along 
aesthetic lines. The places there are mostly for pleasure 
and comfort and health, rather than with profit for a 
secondary motive. Yet there are, all the way from Green- 
wich, Conn., to the borders of Blue-Noseland, a succes- 
sion of summer homes, the owners of which contrive, in 
one way and another, to make them profitable. 
It is this practical recognition of the commercial value 
of the land that is making of the resort business in New 
England the very consequential element in the growth of 
the six states I see in the future for New England. It 
appeals to me, in a way, more than the beauties of the 
New England landscapes, the salubrity of its climate, and 
the virtues of its waters. Those things take care of them- 
selves. It is impossible for men to alter them—add to 
them or take away from them. It is possible for man to 
develop the soil, and by so doing to add immensely to the 
attractiveness of New England as a place for summer 
residence. 
There is the more ephemeral features of the summer- 
resort business—the transient phases. A great multitude 
of people go to these resorts each year, for a week or a 
month, or for the season, who have no attachment to the 
soil and no special preference for any particular section. 
They want auiet or gaiety; the want the sea or the 
mountains; the farmhouse or the hotel. They depend 
upon the railroads, the steamship lines, the hotels and 
the keepers of boarding houses. They want good food. 
decent attendance, good transportation | facilities, good 
fishing. good golf or tennis privileges. These things are 
plentifully supplied in New England, better in some 
sections than in others. The most serious lack is moder- 
ate-priced hotels that give good food and attendance. 
For the most part. the small hotels in New England 
would have been good a generation ago. ‘Thev were bet- 
ter then, because they then gave better food. There is 
need of many more small inns that give real country food. 
Most of them now give city restaurant fare. In the very 
center of the New Hampshire resort region there is a big 
cold-storage plant from which the hotels draw their poul- 
try! Who do not the farmers thereabout contract to 
