Five Gables Inn
BED AND BREAKFAST
P.O. Box 335
Murray Hill Road
East Boothbay, Maine 04544
email: info@fivegablesinn.com
1-207-633-4551
1-800-451-5048

Snapshots From the Past

 Historic Maine Coast
Bed and Breakfast

Ever since its beginnings as the Forest House, The Five Gables Inn has been a local landmark. As we have pieced together the details of its rich and colorful history, a particular pleasure has been chats with local old timers. The vignettes offered by them are especially evocative of the gentler days.

According to the town records, the original Maine coast bed and breakfast inn was purchased by Walter McDougall just before the turn of the century. In those early days, we're told, there was a casino nearby. Guests stayed at the Forest House and walked to the casino. In those days, guests came by boat and stayed for the entire summer, bringing their big steamer trunks with them.

Most guests returned to the inn every year, so friendships between guests and summer residents flourished. Old photographs show a path running along the waterfront, past the summer cottages; and many locals recall how guests strolled along this path, waving and chatting with people rocking on the front porches of their cottages. Local kids walked along the lane in front of the cottages, carrying bushel baskets of freshly caught lobsters and selling them for 25 cents. The Forest House served three meals a day, at a cost of $7.00 a week. Because of this, says a local boatbuilder, people didn't even bother to build kitchens in the private summer cottages along the lane, because everyone ate at the inn.

A warm summer day ... in Boothbay.On soft summer evenings, in East Boothbay, ME bands performed down by the pond in a spot called the fe'te place. Inn guests and cottagers gathered for the concerts, bringing along chairs on which to sit. Since the inn and the cottagers all had identical chairs, ownership was determined by name labels under each seat. The historic Maine coast bed and breakfast The Five Gables Inn still has those same chairs, and uses them in the breakfast room.

In 1946, the Forest House was acquired by Norman Linker, an Austrian Jew who had escaped from Germany before Hitler's rise to power. A psychology professor, Linker also translated Russian and German medical books into English. His wife Marguerite, was a concert pianist. Many of the Linkers' guests were from the New York theatre and music crowd. Displaced Europeans who had escaped the hard times abroad, also lodged at the Forest House, giving the inn an international, artistic atmosphere--and one that must certainly have seemed foreign to old-time Mainers.

According to a brochure from the 1960s, the going Maine coast bed and breakfast rate was just $120 per person, per week! Yes, inflation has taken its toll--but all the pleasures of a stay here remain just as wonderful today for your Maine coastal vacation.

Meet Your Innkeepers

Mike and De Kennedy are natural, outgoing hosts who know how to make their guests feel welcome ,while never imposing on them. Having traveled extensively, and working in several careers, they have an appreciation of new and exciting experiences; this makes them particularly well suited to helping their guests explore the Boothbay area. As soon as they set eyes on The Five Gables, they knew they had found what they had always been looking for.

Mike, the inn's breakfast chef, is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in New Haven, Connecticut. He has worked on freighters and ocean liners, on a communal farm in Israel, and on a road gang building roads in the Sinai desert. He has also sold an artist's drawings on the beach on the Greek Island of Rhodes, worked with an American theatre group in Paris, France, and served as a cook and deck-hand on a four-masted schooner in the Caribbean. He and De came to Maine from Atlanta, Georgia, where he renovated old homes, performed in TV commercials, and gave historic tours of the city.

De is an artist who has taught children, and her hand crocheted Afghans add her delicate artistic touch to many of the inn's rooms. Having spent a decade in the corporate world, specializing in personnel management, she is also adept at seeing that the daily workings of the inn go smoothly.

De comes from an old Southern family, and in fact some of the inn's china and silver belonged to her great-great-great grandfather, who bought it on the Savannah docks, back in the 1830s. Raised in the time honored tradition of Southern hospitality, De has always enjoyed entertaining guests. All her adult life, she has organized large house parties at her family's antebellum home in the North Georgia hills, that was built in 1853, as a summer retreat from Savannah, by her great-great aunt. The pleasure she took in turning back the years to a more genteel, leisurely past for her family and friends inspired her to capture that same atmosphere at this wonderful Maine coast bed and breakfast The Five Gables in East Boothbay, ME.

This is how that old brochure described them:

"...a walk 'round Ocean Point, lovely Linekin Bay by moonlight, the fragrance of wild strawberries in the summer sun, snuggling into a chair with a book from the inn's bookshelves, star-fish-gazing at the mill pond, swimming or fishing, conversation with new friends, time and space to be alone, the cackle of the morning gulls in the crisp Maine air, and the sounds of silence."

Five Gables Inn
HOW TO CONTACT US:
P.O. Box 335
Murray Hill Road
East Boothbay, Maine 04544
email: info@fivegablesinn.com
1-207-633-4551
1-800-451-5048
WE INVITE YOU TO
TAKE A LOOK AROUND