The Staples Inn

Across from Old Orchard Beach’s town hall stands a long, welcoming building with a porch facing Portland Avenue. It is now the Old Orchard Beach Inn, but its history reaches back to the farmhouse of the Staples family and the first years when visitors began coming here to stay by the sea.

The oldest part of the building dates to the eighteenth century, although its exact construction date is uncertain. Elisha Staples acquired the property in the 1790s. Around 1840, his grandson Ebenezer began opening the farmhouse to summer boarders. At the time, people arrived by stagecoach or carriage; soon the expanding railroads brought visitors from farther away, including Montreal. What began as rooms in a family home grew with the demand for a Maine seaside holiday.

Ebenezer enlarged the property into the Old Orchard House, which could accommodate hundreds of guests by the 1870s. In 1875, a fire destroyed the large hotel around the original farmhouse. Remarkably, the older building survived. Ebenezer built a new hotel nearby, while the surviving house went on to welcome guests under the names Staples Cottage and, later, Staples Inn.

The inn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. Its surviving eighteenth-century section still contains features from its early life, alongside additions made as the property changed from farmhouse to lodging house. The building was restored in the late 1990s and reopened to guests in 2000. 

Old Orchard Beach’s larger hotels have largely disappeared, making this building a particularly tangible part of its beginnings. Before the pier and amusement rides, a family welcomed travelers into its home near the shore. More than a century and a half later, people can still come through the door and stay.