Rewind a couple of decades and I was fully immersed in “Wentworth by the Sea: The Life and Times of a Grand Hotel” (2004). The story divided itself easily into chapters focused on the parade of owners, from Charles and Sarah Campbell in 1874. They built the breezy, boxy Wentworth Hotel for $50,000. Ale tycoon Frank Jones quickly picked up the failing business and pumped $100,000 into improvements, including the distinctive mansard roof and attractive tower.
By the end of the Jones era in 1902, the hotel had been massively expanded to include a golf course and marina on a campus that covered almost 300 acres. The hotel became internationally known for housing both Japanese and Russian envoys during negotiations for the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. Moving through a series of owner-managers, the exclusive seaside hotel passed from Harry Beckwith to Margaret and Jim Smith in 1946. Like Frank Jones, the Smiths also ran the Rockingham Hotel in downtown Portsmouth.
“It was love at first sight,” the lanky Major James Barker Smith from Colorado later recalled, when he first saw the aging Victorian resort. “When I entered the dining room, I was the only man in the room that didn’t have a dinner jacket on. I had on a uniform, of course. The women were so resplendent in their silks and their satins and diamonds and pearls.”
The couple, strapped for cash, purchased the hotel, golf course, tennis courts, marina, tidal pool, restaurant, staff dormitories, and a private home just across Little Harbor bridge for $200,000. They sold it for an estimated $5.8 million in 1982.
You can ask any true local about the parties, concerts, sporting events, and masquerade balls of the Smith Era. It seems like half the population either worked or dined there. In an historic encounter in 1965, the exclusive hotel was required by law to seat its first African American couple in the public dining room. By the 1960s and ’70s, despite promotional brochures that showed young people swimming, boating, dining and dancing, the hardcore patrons, like the Smiths and their vintage hotel, were aging out.
By the time I met the Smiths in the 1980s after the sale, their sprawling resort had begun its sharp decline. After two failed reboots, Wentworth by the Sea fell into the hands of a series of owners who sold off portions of the surrounding acreage, even as the hotel fell into ruin. The nonprofit Friends of the Wentworth, meanwhile, continued to search for a new owner willing to save the local landmark. By the time Ocean Properties began their bold $26 million renovation and expansion, only a few precious acres surrounding the hotel remained. Almost lost, the heart of the original “Wentworth House” still beats inside New Castle’s luxury hilltop hotel.
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson. Photos courtesy Portsmouth Athenaeum
The Negro League Collection of Joe Calliro