American writer Wendell Berry has observed: “If you don’t know where you are; you don’t know who you are.” Where is the heart of a place? Where is the heart of a place that people are attached to because they work there, or meet friends, visit for the first time, return to in search of a memory, or just happen upon? Do buildings have hearts and histories? For a couple of generations of devotees of the Gray House and the Four Corners Grille, the answer would be an unambiguous, resounding YES! And if these walls could talk, they would defy the stereotype of the ever-reticent New Englander, offering instead to any visitor – old-timer or newcomer – volumes of stories, memories, days of ease and laughter, afternoons of family celebrations, and evenings of new conversations and occasions for reunion.
Bob Williams can hear the voices, remember the laughter, recall the hard work, and tear-up a bit thinking about his role as the owner of The Gray House from the early seventies until the late eighties. Sitting over a cup of freshly roasted Kearsarge Mountain Coffee Roasters’ coffee in the Grille’s Flying Goose Brew Pub on a very cold snow-filled winter morning recently, Williams recalled working with the Gray House’s first owners Ruth and Arthur Prescott and being captured by this building’s heart. First as a summer employee, later as Arthur Prescott’s right hand, and finally as the Gray House’s enterprising owner, Bob, Bobby, or Bubba Williams to some, gave these walls a lot to talk about. Exuding the sense of hospitality, the warmth of welcome, and the promise of good times that make a restaurant and bar seem like a that “third place” in a life otherwise most closely attached to life at home and life at work, Williams thought of the Gray House as “an extension of my living room.” And, he continued, “the Gray House was my home.”
After college and a brief stint in the military during the Vietnam era, Bob Williams returned to this area he had known as a summer resident, slipping easily back into longstanding friendships with local folk and “summoned” in some sense to help Arthur Prescott expand the restaurant’s season from summers only to a year-round presence in the area. Bob remembers that his own involvement in the Gray House’s expansion was accelerated by Prescott’s contracting pneumonia and handing-off the first winter season. But everyone pitched in and in a town still small enough for everyone to know your name, cooperation between businesses was common. So if business was interrupted by a storm or a shortage of tomatoes, one restaurant owner could be expected to bailout another.
In Bob Williams’ capable and hospitable hands and with a vision he had for the Gray House as a central gathering place for residents and visitors, the building itself grew to accommodate a downstairs lounge (now brew master Kevin Kerner’s domain) and a much larger upstairs dining room with its stunning view of Mt. Kearsarge. The restaurant’s “All-American cuisine,” in William’s words, reached the attention of a writer for the Boston Globe, bringing folk in off the interstate looking for a steaming bowl of seafood chowder or the eponymous “Bar Harbor classic.” A major renovation of the building - added to much in the manner of a New England farmhouse one new addition added and linked to the original house one step at a time – in 1982 and 1983 enhanced not only the seating, but expanded the kitchen, as the Gray House entered the era of catering parties and events not only on the site but in other locations. William’s adaptations and visions created the “third place” he had dreamed of, a place for good times and good food and the foundation of good memories. But a quick glance backward, will remind anyone that the boom of the eighties also had within it the seeds of the bust of the eighties, and Bob Williams’s vision encountered some inalterable realities as outwardly unconnected as snow less winters and changing drinking ages and tight money. In 1987 the man who had learned to make ice cream from Arthur Prescott, dreamed a new life for the Gray House, and created the ambience that filled the buildings’ walls with new stories and memories, conceded to economic reality and closed one chapter in the restaurant’s history.
End of story? Absolutely not. Not for Bob Williams and not for hospitality at the foot of New London’s Main Street at the town’s four corners. Williams, a naturally hospitable and generous man and coach at heart, recalls how important it has been to be a part of young lives, the lives of those who worked with his dreams for a community gathering place, and now the lives of young baseball players. He feels “at home still” in what now Tom Mills’s vision for the old gray is building. Its’ walls now display memorabilia describing and recreating the building’s history, the building’s heart: pictures of the old cream parlor, its staff and guests; milk pails; sleds and skis; mounted area fish and game; and a menu offering pie for 50 cents, a ginger ice cream sundae for 50 cents, or a take home pint of the legendary ice cream for $1.15.
If these walls could talk….well. They do. Listen. The walls are alive with memories. One wall downstairs literally talks, a wall filled with signed and dated messages from summer and winter members of the restaurant’s staff. Here lie stories of summer romances become marriages, beginnings and endings, and altogether unabashed love for hospitality and good times at the crossroads.
(*available at Morgan Hill Bookstore here in New London, or at the Town office)