When Rock Gardens Inn first opened in 1911, many of the buildings that are part of the Inn today were already on the property. The gardens themselves were just underway. The craggy coastline itself has not changed much. We had guests who first came as children in the 1930s and now bring their children and grandchildren. We have other guests who celebrated their 51st wedding anniversary, having come almost every year since their honeymoon at Rock Gardens Inn in 1949. It is this great sense of continuity and of place outside the mainstream that gives Rock Gardens Inn its unique qualities.

"In 1947 we drove down east from New York on our first vacation and I was in a dither. My bride had stipulated the general locale for the precious two weeks, but left specifics to me. Airily I'd asked the Maine Publicity Bureau in Manhattan for a spot 'where the tide comes in and out and formal dress for dinner means a clean shirt.' Now, as we neared the small inn I'd selected, misgivings swelled, I could feel the damp sheets and lumpy mattress, hear the complaints of the guests about the mediocre food. How otherwise at $9 per head per diem? Including meals!

Nine bucks wouldn't even buy a crust to go along with the bed in New York. Diffidently I said, 'If you don’t like it, Jeannie, we can always go somewhere else.' At that moment the convertible crested a hill on the potholed road, my wife's face lit in rapture, I blasphemed reverently and cut the motor. Below us stretched a great bay of blinding blue satin creased only by one distant boat soundlessly pulling its wake across the shimmering surface. A handful of islands dozed under blankets of green, and feather-pillow clouds hung high above a long, low peninsula dwarfed by the far-off massif of Mount Washington."

From "Room with a View", a column in Down East Magazine written in the late 1940's or early 1950's.