Clarie shines a light on the history of the coastal towns of New Hampshire with seventeen short biographies of summer residents of note at Rye Beach, the Farragut Hotel (the subjects of Clarie’s earlier study Oceanside History at Rye Beach and the Farragut), Little Boar's Head, and more, with an emphasis on the late 19th and early 20th century. That's when the wealthy—including major business people, artists, performers, and political figures like presidential son and secretary of war Robert Todd Lincoln—frequented and built stunning resorts, mansions, arts institutions, and clubs along this stretch of the Atlantic.

This survey starts out strong with an extended history of the Studebaker family and the automobile business they ran for decades, with Clarie’s telling intertwining local and national history with a compelling account of a burgeoning family dynasty. Contemporary press accounts, clarifying historical context, and Clarie’s love for period detail—“Paper lampshades of all colors lit up one corner of the hall like huge blossoms” lit up one corner of the Farragut Casino in 1899—bring life to the milieu, and Clarie throughout documents the construction and utility of Rye Beach landmarks, like the Lincoln-affiliated (and now long gone) Gates Ajar home, in North Hampton, and Norman Williams’ nearby colonial mansion, dubbed “one of the finest specimens of that school [of] architecture that can be seen anywhere” in the New Hampshire Agricultural Report 1907-08.

Clarie brings a strong local focus to the material—there’s much here about the Abenaqui Golf Club, organized in 1897, and its tournaments—but also follows his subjects into the world. A chapter on E. Lansing Ray, a St. Louis newspaper man who invested in Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and made a summer home out of the former Rye Beach Inn, boasts fascinating material about Ray’s trip England and France at the end of the first world war, and a surprising number of pages on Lindbergh’s flight. While at times discursive, Clarie’s brisk histories are rich with insight, surprises, and striking detail.

Takeaway: Historical survey of homes and lives of coastal New Hampshire’s “summer people.”

Comparable Titles: Lewis T. Karabatsos’s Rye and Rye Beach, Robert C. Gilmore’s Seacoast New Hampshire.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: B