Ben Mere Hotel, Runals House, Sunapee Waterfront Park

The Gazebo at Sunapee Harbor stands at the former site of the grand hotel - The Ben Mere Inn. In the 1800s the green lawns, shrubs, and walkways led a multitude of vacationers from rooms in the big hotel down to the steamships at the woodsum wharf at water's edge.

The arrival in 1876 of train service to Newbury with its connecting passenger steamboat service was the critical factor that spurred the dawn of Sunapee Harbor’s tourism era. In 1877 business partners Albert Runals and John Gardner began purchasing land at Sunapee Harbor for their new Harbor hotel and made plans for a 40-guest room structure modelled after the nearby Burkehaven Hotel. It was 190-feet long, two-stories high, with a broad porch, and large attached barn, a formidable presence on the Sunapee waterfront. The Runals House opened on July 4, 1878 and more than 200 people dined in the hotel’s hall on opening day. In 1881 a bandstand was built where the Sunapee Brass Band played and in 1885 a bowling alley was added at the waterfront.

In March 1890 work began on a larger and grander hotel. The Lake Sunapee Hotel Company investors considered several names for their new enterprise and settled on Ben Mere meaning “high hill lake” in Gaelic and opened the Ben Mere Inn the summer of 1890. The new hotel included reading rooms, a large parlor with fireplaces, a broad piazza overlooking the lake, an observation tower on the roof, and 100 guest rooms with toilet and bathing facilities for men and women on each floor. A plank walk was built from the hotel’s entrance to the steamboat wharf so that guests need not walk in the mud. The Ben Mere Inn offered tennis, bowling, billiards, band concerts, dancing, horseback riding, sailing and boating. 

In the early spring of 1903 a fire broke out in the rear wing but Sunapee firemen worked valiantly and saved the building. Although business was difficult during World War I, it blossomed during the Roaring 20’s when thousands of people arrived each summer to vacation. But the growing use of autos reduced train and steamboat travel and by 1930 the era of the big steamboats on Lake Sunapee was nearly over. In 1930 Lewis Dudley, owner of the Ben Mere, bought the Woodsum Steamboat Company properties only to watch over the decline of an era. By the end of 1940, the Ben Mere property was owned by a Newport bank and the country entered WWII.

Over the next 20 years the hotel was owned, managed, sold, and remortgaged as the old hotels slowly lost their appeal. In 1967 the Ben Mere opened for its final summer. In 1968 a liquidation sale was held by the partners of Ben Mere Inc. and in June the building was torn down and burned on site. The property continued to be owned by Ben Mere Inc. until 1970 when it was sold to the Sunapee Conservation Commission for $41,000 to be used as a park.

Today this area makes up part of the town’s Sunapee Harbor park, enhanced with a band stand and parking. The broad lawn that once graced the front of the Hotels remains along with a few hydrangea bushes that once lined the walkways to the lake, a reminder of days gone by. 

Barbara Bache Chalmers, Sunapee's Historic Buildings & Places Vol. 1 (Sunapee Historical Society, 1918 & 1919).