Niantic Conn. Archives - New England Historical Society

The family-owned motel that flowered along New England’s roads after World War II has grown increasingly scarce. Today, there are one quarter as many independent motels as there were in the year John F. Kennedy became president.

Hearthside Village, Bethlehem, N.H. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The vintage motel and the tourist court do still exist in New England, though you might have to look for them. Some got run-down and seedy after interstate highways bypassed them. They’ve become a standing joke in popular culture as “no-tell motels” or “the Bates Motel.” The Simpsons featured a motel called the “Sleep-Eazy Motel,” with burned-out lights that read “Sleazy Motel.

“The business marches along a depressing decline from nightly vacation rates to weekly apartment rents,” wrote a motel historian.

Many motels and tourist courts have been torn down to make way for suburban sprawl. But some still do survive as neat, clean, affordable havens along New England’s mountains and beaches.

But how did the ubiquitous roadside motel rise – and fall – so fast?

Tourist Camps

The motel started out as a “tourist camp,” a space in a farmer’s field or along a body of water where motorists could pitch their tents. But from the very beginning, the federal government played a big part in the evolution of the motel.

Teddy Roosevelt got the ball rolling in 1901 when he told Congress he wanted free campgrounds on public lands.

A public campground near Acadia National Park.

His cousin, Franklin, created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, which built campgrounds around the country, including two at Acadia National Park. As with other campsites on federal lands, they provided picnic grounds, tent space, restrooms and running water.

“The first public campgrounds in the United States were nothing more than large, dedicated clearings, free of trees, within which to concentrate groups of tourists,” wrote Martin Hogue in A Short History of the Campsite.

Then along came the trailer, and with it a bad reputation. People complained about the loose morals, the littering and the noise that “tin can tourists” brought with them. One postcard described the tin can tourists as having “one shirt and a $20 bill — and they didn’t change either.”

Cabin Camps and Tourist Courts

The Coastal Motel, Wells, Maine. Photo by John Margolies, courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The cabin camp emerged as America’s highway network grew along with the population. According to Smithsonian Magazine, farmers and other businesspeople would make deals with an oil company, put up a gas pump and built a few shacks. The cabin camps weren’t exactly luxe. Often dingy, they usually lacked running water or electricity.

But other roadside amenities, such as Howard Johnson’s restaurants, began to proliferate, adding to the allure of automobile travel.

Interior of the Howard Johnson’s in Niantic, Conn. Photo by John Margolies,, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

By the 1930s a homier alternative became popular: the cottage court, also known as the tourist court. More expensive than the cabin camps, they had indoor plumbing and electricity. They were mom-and-pop affairs, with a shared lawn and cottages decorated with standard themes.

Motels didn’t always accept all comers. For African-Americans, travel was a challenge. Many carried the Negro Motorists Green Book, a guide to accommodations that didn’t threaten embarrassment or danger.

Rise of the Motel

The Snyders’ largest motel in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Meanwhile, the first so-called motel, or ‘motor hotel,’ opened in 1925 as the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

After World War II, the growing middle class demanded more and more roadside lodging as the federal highway system expanded. People built motor courts at a furious pace. By 1947, there were 22,000 motor courts in the United States.

Bar Harbor

The motels that sprang up in Bar Harbor, Maine, demonstrate the great economic leveling that took place during most of the 19th century. The town changed from a Gilded Age resort for millionaires into a middle-class tourist destination.

After the 1947 Maine fires wiped out many of the Bar Harbor mansions, cottage courts and motels replaced them.

Mount Desert Island Cabins, one unit, Bar Harbor, Maine. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Throughout the United States, 50,000 motels and motor courts served motoring tourists by 1951.

Golden Age of the Motel

The Little Village Motel on the Berlin Turnpike

The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the motel. Mom and pop added color televisions, swimming pools and the Magic Fingers vibrating bed. Neon signs advertised their amenities along strips of road like the Berlin Turnpike in Connecticut, along the Massachusetts coast, on Route 1 in Maine and in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

The industry peaked in 1961, with 61,000 motels in America. Today, there are perhaps a quarter of that. The mom and pop motel fell to motel chains like Holiday Inn and Best Western, then to discount hotels like Hampton Inn and Marriott.

Colonial Park Motel, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Meriden Conn. Photo by John Margolies,

But many still cherish the retro comfort and convenience – not to mention the individuality – of the mom-and-pop motel. Some preservationists want to see them saved. Hartford Courant writer Dennis Barone, for example, argued the Berlin Turnpike should be named an official scenic road.

This story about the New England motel was updated in 2022.

On a cold, stormy November night in 1944 a German U-Boat surfaced off the coast of Maine near Hancock. William Colepaugh and Erich Gimpel slipped off the sub and into a rubber raft. Then they began rowing to shore as the U-boat disappeared beneath the waves.

William colepaugh

After landing the small boat, the two men began making their way toward Bangor.

Spied in Maine

It wasn’t long before the two men – clad in light topcoats and suits and using a compass as they walked along the road – provoked some curiosity. Harvard Hodgkins, a 17-year-old Hancock boy, spotted the pair while making his way home from a school dance in the storm. He had been curious enough to follow the men’s’ tracks in the snow to the little raft they had come ashore in.

When he got home, he told his parents about the strange men and their boat. His father, a deputy sheriff, called the FBI. Hodgkins had witnessed that night the landing of two Nazi spies in the U.S. – albeit not the most competent spy duo ever.

William Colepaugh

William Colepaugh, born in 1918 in Niantic, Conn., took an unlikely path to his career as a spy. Perhaps because of his German mother, as a child he developed an awe for the German military machine. Armed with a prep school background, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he never finished his degree.

During these years, there was little evidence that he was coming under the sway of the German government. He had a friend in Boston’s German consulate and attended a birthday party thrown for Hitler. But all that happened well before the U.S. entered the war.

Instead, in 1942 Colepaugh joined the U.S. Navy. After an honorable discharge in 1943, he went to sea in the merchant marine as a mess boy. In port in Portugal, he left the ship and contacted the German consulate. He then declared he wanted to join the German army.

The Germans, however, had other ideas. They took William Colepaugh into their school for spies. After a brief training, 26-year-old Colepaugh was paired with Erich Gimpel, a 35-year-old radio engineer and an actual spy.

‘A Spy for Germany’ was a 1956 film loosely based on Gimpel’s memoirs.

Not His Dream Job

Trained in bomb-making, photography and short-wave radio, the two men returned to America on the U-boat that ultimately dropped them in Maine. There, the Germans hoped, Colepaugh’s American background and Gimpel’s skills would let them gather information on America’s nuclear weapons plans.

Colepaugh was, apparently, a reluctant spy. He had dreamt of participating in the powerful German army. But he viewed slipping around the United States trying to gather useful military intelligence as a different matter.

With $60,000 in cash, a pocketful of diamonds and the makings of a radio, the two men made their way to New York City. Though he was no James Bond when it came to his espionage skills, Colepaugh did have two of the famous spy’s other skills down. The ladies liked him, and he liked to drink.

In fact, Gimpel would later say he never knew anyone with such a thirst for booze. Colepaugh’s thirst, however, may have been a byproduct of fear. By Christmas, the two men had burned through more than $2,500 in cash. They also started arguing. Colepaugh, afraid of his partner, fled the apartment they shared for a hotel. He then contacted a friend, telling him that he had made a huge mistake and wanted to contact the FBI.

With Colepaugh in hand, the FBI soon tracked down Gimpel, who spoke little English. If his plan was to win leniency by turning himself in, Colepaugh failed. A jury sentenced him to be hanged. In fact, Gimpel got the better sentence; he was to be executed by firing squad, a more honorable punishment.

Rotarian

Fate intervened for the two men when Franklin Roosevelt died in April of 1945, just days before they were to be executed. With Germany well on its way to officially surrendering, the new president Harry Truman – an opponent of capital punishment – commuted the men’s sentences.

Gimpel would later be shipped back to Germany, where he would tell his story to interviewers and write a book about it. Colepaugh, meanwhile, occupied a bunk in Leavenworth Prison, where he was a model prisoner and learned the trade of metalworking.

In 1960, he won his release and would settle in Pennsylvania and marry. For the remainder of his life he declined to discuss his days as a spy or why he made the choice he did. But he was highly regarded in his community, known mainly for his volunteer work as a Rotarian.

As for Harvard Hodgkins, when news of his adventure broke, he and his family were invited to New York as guests of a newspaper. They took a whirlwind tour that included a visit with Babe Ruth atop the Empire State Building.

This story was updated in 2023.

Niantic Conn.

The Rise and Fall of the New England Motel