Christmas in Bethlehem (New Hampshire)

By Diane Foulds, Globe Correspondent, 12/08/02

		The Adair Inn's gazebo blazes with a Christmas tree. (Globe photo / Geoff Forester)  More on New England  More on N.H.  Sleigh rides in Vermont  Bethlehem's Gilded Age hotel  Christmas in Rockport  Christmas in New York City
		Printable version How to get there From Boston, Bethlehem is a four-hour drive north on Interstate 93. Take exit 40, then Route 302 east three miles. What to do The Rocks Christmas Tree Farm 113 Glessner Road 603-444-6228 or 800-639-5373 www.therocks.org Select a tree, then, while a staff member attaches it to your car, browse the craft fair. Open Sunday to Tuesday, Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 10 to 7. Craft fair on Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 14 and 15. Finnegan's Fine Firs Cherry Valley Road 603-444-6275 www.finnegansfinefirs.com Ride a mule-drawn wagon into the woods, then sip hot cider in front of the bonfire. Open all day, every day. Home and Inns Tour Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce visitors center Main Street 603-869-3409 or 888-845-1957 www.bethlehem.whitemtns.com A guided tour of selected historic homes. Dec. 14, noon to 5 p.m. Call for tickets. Where to stay The Adair Inn 80 Guider Lane 603-444-2600 or 888-444-2600 www.adairinn.com Exquisite country estate on 200 acres with views, fireplaces, and tubs for two. Rooms $175-$355. The Mulburn Inn 2370 Main St. 800-457-9440 www.mulburninn.com $85-$149 Once the summer home of the Woolworth family, with many of the original furnishings. Angel of the Mountains 2007 Main St. 603-869-6473 or 888-704-4004 www.angelofthemountains.com $95-$149 Restored Victorian villa with wood-paneled interiors. Where to eat Rosa Flamingos Main Street 603-869-3111 Italian pastas and seafood. Entrees $14-$22. Tim Bir Alley (in the Adair Inn) 80 Guider Lane 603-444-6142 Creative cuisine in intimate atmosphere. Entrees $16-$22. The Wayside Inn Route 302, 3 miles east of village 603-869-3364 Continental dishes with a Swiss flair. Entrees $11-$20. P & H Truck Stop Route 302 and Interstate 91 (exit 17) Wells River, Vt. 802-429-2141 A trucker's dream 30 minutes west of Bethlehem on Route 302. Bakery, huge helpings, 22 flavors of pie, and open nonstop. Entrees $5-$10.

BETHLEHEM, N.H. — For years we had pondered a trip to Bethlehem, New Hampshire's fabled resort town, and December seemed like an auspicious time. We needed a tree. Where better to find one than in the forested depths of the White Mountains?

The road wound through miles of wooded hills like an endless gray ribbon. Images of secluded mountain estates flickered briefly between the trees as we approached the village, a community of about 2,100 just west of the Presidential Range.

Layers of history seemed to peel away as we entered town. Tourist cabins from the 1950s, 1920s homes, public buildings with "1912" cut into their facades, and the oldest, a wooden house dating from 1832. And everything knee-deep in snow.

Near the center, a derelict hotel with a gambrel roof commanded the village like a dowager empress. A historical marker identified it as The Maplehurst, the largest of the 19th-century hotels. In the 1970s it had evolved into the Chase Golf and Tennis Camp, an elite summer residence for rich kids.

In its prime, we learned, the Maplehurst was one of a dozen white-pillared structures that had lined Main Street, drawing their clientele from allergy sufferers in heat-prostrated cities. The curbside stone trough we noticed must have watered scores of horses.

We couldn't wait to explore this snowy village all dressed up in its holiday finery. The majority of the bed and breakfasts had once been the summer estates of industrial magnates. F. W. Woolworth built the English Tudor-style house that is now the Mulburn Inn. A guest, Thomas Edison, bequeathed its 1924 stove, which still sits in a corner. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were frequent visitors, and Cary Grant and Betty Hutton honeymooned upstairs. Across town, the Adair Inn was the country residence of Frank Hogan, lawyer to Theodore Roosevelt, and the Wayside Inn was built for John Pierce Jr., nephew of President Franklin Pierce.

We settled in at Angel of the Mountains, built for William Kellner, who owned one of New Jersey's largest department stores, Hahne & Co. in Newark. A Victorian confection with a circular porch, the house was glowing in lights and golden ribbons. It was surrounded by empty spaces, and more puzzling, its pewter room numbers inside started in the 80s. Our hosts, Sally McLaren and her husband, Ben Gumm, explained that the house had been an overflow annex to an adjacent hotel that was razed in 1958.

"Anywhere in town that you see a little terrace with nothing on it, you can bet there was something there," Gumm said.

We started looking, and he was right: the historical markers were there to fill in the missing pieces. The hotel industry started booming in the late 19th century, transforming this sleepy mountain village into a lucrative resort.

"Already at the end of May and by mid-June, an entire family would get ready to move into the garage, because the father would rent his house, fully furnished, to the manager of a local hotel, who came up with his family from Florida," said Len Reed, who lives in a classic Arts & Crafts-style cottage up the street. "This means a mother, a father, and three kids. It means you go to the filling station [to use the rest rooms] before bed, and you go to the swimming pool during the day for a shower. It's an aspect of living here that has disappeared."

I gazed out at the Christmas shoppers milling about in their ski jackets and hats and imagined them as summer revelers, circa 1925. Robert Frost took a cottage here, along with the Rockefellers and Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who sculpted New York's Central Park and Boston's Emerald Necklace. Wealthy Cubans in the '20s and '30s came to escape Havana's heat, leaving Christ the King Roman Catholic Church here as a memento.

As daylight faded, we browsed Bethlehem's colorful shops. The display window of an antique store, 3 of Cups, was laid out in the kind of china, lingerie, hotel souvenirs, and fedoras that would have been standard merchandise a century ago. Across the street, in the town's oldest building, was the Mt. Agassiz Trading Co., a curiosity shop teeming with eccentric treasures. We admired an antique toilet seat and the vintage televisions. Hanging from the rafters was a shark jaw collection; in the corner a 1940s-era telephone switchboard; and in an alcove, a dental chair and drill from the 1920s that made us shudder. In the back loomed a 1924 Model-T moving van that still runs.

A community-decorated Christmas tree sparkled outside, and skaters scuffed over the ice in a floodlit rink. The air was sweet with the smell of wood smoke, and cars tooled by with Christmas trees attached to their roofs. We took in the annual gingerbread house competition at the Wayside Inn, downed a mug of hot mulled cider, and called it a day.

The next morning, people were lining up at the post office to have Theresa Jellison, the postmistress, hand-stamp their Christmas cards with the Bethlehem postmark. An appropriate gesture, we felt, for a town that incorporated itself on Christmas day in 1799. Then we set out to find a tree.

Old stone walls guided us upward to The Rocks Estate, a nonprofit Christmas tree farm with a spectacular view. Evergreens stretched as far as the eye could see behind two barns, one looking like a European antique and the other typically New England. You could feel the influence of the estate's previous owner, John Glessner, a cofounder of International Harvester. He had used these slopes as a testing ground for farm equipment. The mansion is gone, but family memorabilia is scattered about the property. At the red New England-style barn, passengers were piling into a hay wagon hitched to a team of snorting draft horses. Others were sipping coffee, joking, and milling about the craft fair on the ground floor. The spirit was infectious.

Nigel Manley, the farm's affable British-born director, remarked at the number of familiar faces. "One man comes in shorts every year to cut his tree," he said. "He always waits till it's freezing. People now come asking for him."

Across the road at Finnegan's Fine Firs, a bonfire was warming faces and roasting marshmallows as people streamed in and out of the Christmas Shop, a converted chicken coop. The interior was fragrant with the aroma of balsam: wreaths, swags, and "kissing balls," ribbon-sprouting bobs that double as mistletoe. Miles Finnegan, who bought the place in 1963, grows 17,000 trees. He seated visitors on a mule-drawn wagon for a ride around the woods. "See a tree you want? We'll throw it on," he said. His pet donkey, Jingle Bells, poked his muzzle over the fence toward a group of eager mittened hands. Finnegan's wife, Carol, fed him carrots. Billy the Kid, the resident goat, lives out back, along with "an antique truck retirement home," Finnegan said with a wink. (It houses 19 Chevy trucks from the 1940s).

After lunch we took the Homes and Inns Tour, which allowed us to roam the interiors of some of the most historic buildings. Almost every one greeted us with a crackling fire, hot drinks, and cookies. En route we spotted a second grand hotel, The Arlington, with Hebrew lettering on the sign. It is a summer camp for Hasidic Jews, we learned, with a kosher kitchen and a resident rabbi.

That wasn't all. We found a pagoda-like home with bells on its corners, the Victorian home of the Poors of Standard & Poor's fame, and a variety of gazebos and half-buried swimming pools built between 1870 and 1910, when the town was in its prime. At 1,428 feet above sea level, Bethlehem is the highest elevated incorporated town east of the Rockies, with air so pure that the National Hay Fever Relief Association put its headquarters here in the 1920s.

What appealed to us most was what it lacks: fast food, traffic jams, chain stores, and a sales tax. There was also the indefinable fascination of seeing abandoned Victorian structures tilt, sag, and slump their way into history.

Ultimately, Bethlehem's commercial fortunes were ruined by a lethal mixture of antihistamines, air conditioners, and cars, leaving the town where it started, a sleepy mountain village. Just perfect for Christmas.

Diane Foulds is a freelance writer who lives in Burlington, Vt.