Resort hotel · Bretton Woods (Carroll), New Hampshire · Built 1900–1902
Mount Washington Hotel
A Y-shaped, red-roofed resort hotel of 1900–1902 below Mount Washington, built by coal magnate Joseph Stickney to designs by Charles Alling Gifford, and the site of the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary conference.
History
Joseph Stickney, born in Concord, New Hampshire, made a fortune in Pennsylvania coal and railroads and in 1881 bought, with a partner, the Mount Pleasant House at Bretton Woods. His own hotel, begun in 1900 under the contractor W.G. Phillips to designs by Charles Alling Gifford, opened in the summer of 1902 as the largest resort in the White Mountains. Wikipedia reports that Italian craftsmen did much of the masonry and that the cost reached about $1.7 million. Guests, mostly from New York, Boston and Philadelphia, paid around four times the usual American-plan rate; a coach-and-six met the trains, and the house ran its own power, laundry, telephones and even a water-powered press for the daily menus. Stickney died in 1903. His widow, Carolyn, summered here for years and added the Sun Dining Room, a fourth floor between the towers and a memorial chapel.
The hotel struggled through Prohibition and the Depression, passed to Mrs. Stickney's nephew Foster Reynolds in 1936, and stood closed during the war. In 1944 Boston investors bought it, refurbished it, and in July handed it over to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Over three weeks some 730 delegates, among them John Maynard Keynes and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., drafted the agreements that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and set up fixed exchange rates that held until 1973. A Treasury economist later recalled that Morgenthau wanted a hotel that had never barred Jewish guests. Small meeting rooms used by the conference remain off the lobby.
The building was named a National Historic Landmark in 1986. It stayed a summer-only hotel until 1999, when it was refitted for winter, and later became part of the larger Bretton Woods resort.
“Isolation and scale made it a choice location for an international gathering, known as the Bretton Woods Conference, in July 1944, while World War II was still raging.”
Architecture
Gifford wrapped a steel frame on local granite foundations in wood and stucco, under red roofs, and arranged the wings in a Y so that nearly every room faces the mountains. Two five-story octagonal towers mark the main front. A veranda roughly 900 feet long encircles the building, and a mile-long drive ends at a porte-cochère on the west side. Inside, plaster columns hold up a 35-foot lobby ceiling around a fieldstone fireplace; the dining room, more than 85 feet square, has an elaborately worked wooden ceiling. The nomination calls the style Spanish Renaissance; Wikipedia and Wikidata describe it as Renaissance Revival.
What to look for
- Twin octagonal towers and red roofs against the Presidential Range
- The 900-foot wraparound veranda
- Fieldstone fireplace and columned lobby
- Rooms off the lobby used by the 1944 conference
- Carolyn Stickney's memorial chapel on the grounds
Setting
The hotel stands on open lawns in the Ammonoosuc River valley at about 1,600 feet, at the northern end of Crawford Notch, six miles east of Twin Mountain on U.S. Route 302. Mount Washington and the Presidential Range rise directly to the east, with national forest on most sides. The road to the Mount Washington Cog Railway starts nearby, and the hotel's golf courses and Stickney memorial chapel are on the surrounding grounds.
Timeline
- 1881Joseph Stickney buys the Mount Pleasant House at Bretton Woods
- 1900Construction of the Mount Washington Hotel begins
- 1902Hotel opens in midsummer
- 1903Stickney dies
- 1944Bretton Woods Conference held in July
- 1986Designated a National Historic Landmark
- 1999First winter season after refitting
Where sources differ
- Opening date: Wikipedia gives July 28, 1902; the nomination gives August 1, 1902.
- Room count: the nomination gives about 236 guest rooms in one section and 352 rooms in another.
- The 1944 purchase price is given as about $450,000 by Wikipedia and $1.5 million by a 1944 newspaper quoted in the nomination.
