Past meets present: A Mountain Ash Inn open house
The event offered guests a chance to ‘travel back in time’
The Mountain Ash Inn in Brooklin. Photo courtesy of the Penobscot Marine Museum.
July 22, 2026
By Steele Hays
BROOKLIN–For two hours on July 18, the Brooklin Keeping Society offered local residents a chance to travel 100 years back in time to the 1920s, when the Mountain Ash Inn operated as a popular seaside resort with a dining room, nine cottages, tennis courts and the largest ocean water swimming pool in Maine.
The Society operated their “virtual time machine” as a fundraising event marking the 100th anniversary of the Mountain Ash Inn’s founding. Six of the original nine rental cottages built in the 1920s for resort guests are still standing and most were open to visitors for the event. All are now private homes.
Of the 9 cottages at Mountain Ash Inn, most were built without kitchens—guests were expected to take their meals in the inn dining room. Photo by Steele Hays.
A narrated video presentation during the open house painted a vivid picture of the inn’s peak years–from the 1920s to the early 1940s–when it was under the ownership of Miss Isobel Lenman of Washington, D.C. The presentation was researched and created by the society’s vice president, Crystal Kane, and featured historic photographs, news articles and artifacts from the resort’s heyday.
According to the presentation, the inn’s 105x45-foot swimming pool was “a hot spot in the Brooklin community.” The pool drew water through a pipe from Eggemoggin Reach and more water flowed in with each tide cycle. Many Brooklin children learned how to swim by using the pool and in 1958 a synchronized swimming team, ‘The Bangor Flamingos,’ put on a show there. Advertisements that ran in the Bangor Daily News at the time listed tickets at 50 cents.
The former pool site is now largely overgrown, but the recent removal of several trees from the area has exposed its steps and one side wall for the first time in years.
The inn sits at the intersection of Naskeag Road and Mountain Ash Road and was originally built as a home in 1870. It later operated as a hotel called the Watson House for several years before becoming the Mountain Ash Inn in the early 1920s. The inn was closed for about a decade during the 1940s, but reopened in 1950. It closed for good in the early 1960s and in 1966, the owners sold the property to the Faith School of Theology, which used the property as a school campus for several years and built a church on the site of the former swimming pool.
Only traces of the inn’s salt water swimming pool are left. Photo by Steele Hays.
In the late 1970s, a group of Brooklin residents formed a corporation to purchase the property and sold off the remaining cottages to individual owners. The inn building itself was sold in 1977 to WoodenBoat Magazine and WoodenBoat School to serve as its headquarters. WoodenBoat still owns the former inn and uses it as a dormitory for students.
The one-day fundraising event and open house tour grew out of conversations between Kane and Mary Jane Elliott, who owns two of the historic cottages that were formerly part of the Mountain Ash resort. The two shared a desire to find a useful way to mark the inn’s 100-year anniversary, Kane said in an interview with The Rising Tide.
Kane said the Keeping Society is considering screening the video presentation at the Friend Memorial Library in Brooklin and may also organize an exhibit at the society's headquarters, though no specific plans have been finalized.
For more information about the Brooklin Keeping Society, visit https://brooklinkeepingsociety.org/.