A.C. Little, a local carpenter-turned-builder who’d constructed many of Eagles Mere’s homes, bought this plot in 1887 and put up a boarding house he called Hotel Lewis, mainly to house his own construction crews with the occasional traveler renting a spare room. The timing worked in his favor. Philadelphia’s Main Line social set had discovered the mountain lake resort a decade earlier on a judge’s recommendation, and the town was rapidly filling with grand hotels catering to that wealthier crowd.
Little’s modest inn served as an affordable alternative to the pricier resorts run by the Eagles Mere Syndicate. The Ingham family bought the property about a century after it opened and renamed it Eagles Mere Inn, the name it still carries. Each of its 17 rooms is now named for a piece of the town’s history, and the inn joined Historic Hotels of America in 2021.