LB2018.10.81

Color transparency taken c. 1960 of the Seaside Inn, originally called the Seaside House, in Seal Cove. It was torn down in 1964, a year after the Greenrock Corp., the major stockholders of which were Laurence and Nelson Rockefeller, sold the contents and tore the building down. The Seaside House started as a small home style inn in the 1860s. Run by two brothers, Amos and James Clement Jr., it was housed in the Clement Family clapboard homestead at the head of Seal Harbor. Overlooking a fine sand beach, at the time the inn boasted a "water closet" on each floor with beds that had spring bottoms and mattresses. The more expensive rooms had closets and full chamber sets." The price ran from $7-$10 per week. By the 1890s, MDI had become a tourist destination and the Maine Central Railroad extended it line to the Mount Desert Ferry in Hancock and steamboat service was offered from there to various MDI destinations, including Seal Harbor. In order to keep pace with other large inns that sprang up around MDI, the Clement brothers vastly expanded the Seaside House to 100 rooms and 4 stories with a paved driveway that led up to the port-cochere. It had a 230 ft. long piazza and inside were 14 fireplaces and an elaborate electric bell system. The name was changed at this point to the Seaside Inn. In the 1930s a different generation of Clement brothers were running the inn. Stephen Clement, a sociology professo,r and Dr. Donald Clement, an ear nose and throat doctor, and their families spent the entire summers there. After their husbands' deaths, the brothers' wives, Charlotte and Jean, jointly ran the inn for another 15 years. By the 1960s the inn became to costly to run. The Greenrock Corp., of which Seal Harbor summer residents Nelson and David Rockerfeller were the main stockholders, bought the inn in 1963. The following year the contents were sold off and the inn was torn down. -- BDN 9/30/1996 http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2457&dat=19960830&id=v65JAAAAIBAJ&sjid=rg4NAAAAIBAJ&pg=1397,3866837