Page 112 - John Anderson

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Mount Pleasant House
Today the section of Rt. 302 from the Cherry Mountain Road (which
was the old Jefferson Turnpike) to the area around the Stickney
Chapel has few buildings. However, in the late nineteenth century,
there were three large hotels: The White Mountain House, Fabyans
and the Mt. Pleasant House (The Mt. Washington Hotel had not yet
been built.) There were two or three sawmills, a charcoal kiln, a

school, a settlement
known as “Stovepipe
City”, a tavern, a store, a
tree nursery, barns, a wye
for turning trains, engine
houses, two railroad
stations, boarding houses
for railroad employees,
private homes, a toll
house for the Mt.
Washington Turnpike,
and the list could go on.
While the locations of the
three hotels are well
known, several other buildings have been, to a large degree,
forgotten.
The Mount Pleasant House was built in 1875 by lumberman John T.G.
Leavitt and opened the following year. It was then a simple, almost
box-like structure with only forty rooms, but it would become one of
the largest and finest of the Grand Hotels.
Across the road from the hotel was a sawmill (owned by Leavitt at the
time) and a number of other buildings including a company store and
homes for the mill workers. It was called "Stove Pipe City" because of
the stove pipes extending from the small log buildings. By the early
1890s the mill was operated by V.R. Holmes but it was owned by J.E.
Henry, one of the area's major lumbermen. These additional
buildings appear on the 1892 map of the area, as well as on a hand
drawn survey map in the Dartmouth College Collection. This map,
dated 1895, identifies some of the related buildings as "The Red

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