The Rise and Fall of America's Grandest Mountain Paradise: The White Mountains

White Mountains, New Hampshire, was once more than a summer retreat — it was a proving ground for the men who built America's first grand mountain resorts. In 1900, coal broker Joseph Stickney began building a hotel at the base of Mount Washington that cost him 1.7 million dollars, more than almost any private citizen in America could have raised for a single building. When it opened on July 28th, 1902, Stickney told the reporters gathered before him to look at him — he was, in his own words, the fool who had built all of it. He was dead within a year, but the hotel outlived him by more than a century, standing through eras that swallowed nearly everything built beside it, from the Italian craftsmen who raised its walls to the railroads that carried the wealthy up from Boston and New York. But the same ambition that built these mountain palaces also made the resort era dangerously dependent on the rail lines, the fashions, and the fortunes of a Gilded Age elite who could vanish as quickly as they arrived. Only a handful of buildings from that first era still stand in these mountains, and only four still operate as hotels — Stickney's among them. This is the story of how coal money, Italian labor, and the railroads built a paradise in the White Mountains — and how changing fortunes and the arithmetic of decline brought its golden age to an end. A full history documentary about the White Mountains, New Hampshire — from the Gilded Age grand hotel boom to the modern reckoning with what survived. Copyright & Fair Use Disclaimer • This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary created for commentary, criticism and research. • Some archival photos and footage are used under the principles of Fair Use (Section 107, U.S. Copyright Act) for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.