Rye Beach drew crowds from all over the country. Victorian Americans began traveling in droves by train. Visitors arrived at the Hampton station, were picked up by carriage and taken to their hotel or boarding house.Guest registers list whole families, or sometimes single business men along with their chauffeurs. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, wooden boardwalks ran along Central Road between Sea Road and South Road; those unmistakeable street lamps that you see today sprang up around 1905 when Rye Beach became designated a village. And the chapels, closed for the off-season months, opened their doors and let the breezes in.The boom of the resort business began in Rye Beach in the mid-nineteenth century with the Ocean House and the Atlantic House; later came the Ocean Wave and the famous Farragut House Hotel. Over a span of seventy-five years, over forty-five boarding houses and hotels opened in the Rye Beach Precinct alone. Many of those grand hotels have come and gone, but without even realizing it you have driven past those quiet gems of beach resort history.The purpose of this guided tour is to explore the history of Rye Beach Precinct and glory days of the Victorian resort era. To understand just how important hotels and boarding houses were to the Rye culture, the Rye Historical Society has created this guided audio tour to explore just one area of the Rye Beach Precinct.This tour is a walking tour. Do not drive while operating this guided tour app. Please stay on the sidewalk and be aware of traffic at all times. Please also note that the properties within this tour are private residences. We ask you not to intrude on the privacy of these residents or trespass on their property.This tour will take you through a special area of Rye Beach, full of local history that you may have never noticed before!Our tour of the historic Rye Beach precinct resort area begins at what was once known as “Locke’s Lodge” at the southeast corner of Sea and Central, though it is possible to scroll through and select the different sites on our tour in any order. Let’s begin!