The Harmon Historical Museum

The house on Portland Avenue has a quieter presence than Old Orchard Beach’s busy waterfront. Its porch, lawn, and pitched roof make it easy to imagine as a family home. That is what it was built to be, although the family story behind it reaches back to the beginnings of the town’s summer resort.

Josephine Goss had the house built in 1926. She was the last surviving child of Ebenezer and Eliza Staples. In 1837, Ebenezer had begun taking summer boarders at his farm, an early step in the development of Old Orchard Beach as a destination for visitors. Nearly ninety years later, his daughter built her home in a town transformed by hotels, railroads, and generations of vacationers.

After Josephine’s death, the property changed hands. Warren and Grace Harmon eventually made it their home. They rented rooms and operated a real estate business there, taking part in a town where welcoming newcomers remained an important part of daily life. The Harmons were also early supporters of the Old Orchard Beach Historical Society, founded in 1954 to preserve the community’s past. 

When Warren Harmon died in 1974, he left the house and land to the town with the direction that it become a permanent home for the historical society. The former residence became the Harmon Museum, giving the society a place to care for and share the objects, images, and accounts it had collected. Its exhibits have explored the beach’s hotels and entertainment, as well as events such as fires, automobile races, and early flights from the sand.

The building holds an unusually direct connection to the history it preserves. It began as the home of a daughter of one of Old Orchard Beach’s first hosts to summer visitors. Through the Harmons’ gift, it became a place where the town could keep telling the stories of those visitors and the people who lived