Cyrus and Marcia Gale converted their family farmhouse into a hotel in 1879, right as artists began flocking to the White Mountains and local entrepreneurs realized the tourist trade could support more than campsites and barn lodging. The Gales ran both the inn and a working farm that supplied most of what their guests ate, and by the late 1880s they’d added a few holes of golf, the newly fashionable Scottish import.
A 1915 fire destroyed the original building entirely, and the Gales’ son, Arthur Pinkham Gale, rebuilt it the following year with 75 rooms, doubling that number again in a 1928-29 expansion that added steam heat and an elevator still in operation today. The hotel stayed in Gale family hands until 1973. It’s one of only five surviving large-scale White Mountain resort hotels from that era, and the only one built in Jackson itself.