Swan's Island: Six miles east of ordinary

The Ocean View Hotel was located at 241 Harbor Road in Swan's Island village. What was left of it eventually became the summer home of Eric and Fran Chetwynd. The current house is a much smaller, but recognizable version of the original. The hotel was built and run by Captain William Herrick (1841-1925). William's son Charles had the hotel afterwards, though it was said of him that he 'had a rocking chair permanently attached to his butt.'

Lilla Moulden owned and operated the Ocean View Hotel after 1927. She fixed up the building, did all the baking and washing herself, and held regular dances before and after the war. The dances raised money for the first island fire truck. In addition to taking in guests, she ran a pie shop and sold ice cream. The building was also home to Lila and Ray Stinson, who was a selectman for many years and planted the trees that line both sides of the road on Steamboat Hill.

Island resident Marion Stinson remembers the hotel: "Mom took me to one over to Lilla Moulden’s and I raised heck I guess, she never took me again (laughing). She used to take my brother, of course he’d fall asleep on the settees and that was fine, but not me, boy—music, I right up and at ‘em! I remember—we used to go in there and have pie and ice cream. And right next door to where that was, there was—Chetwynds have got that little house now, used to be bigger. The kids from Stonington High School used to come down once a year on the steamboat and they’d play, come up and play different, you know, their instruments and everything. And you could hear them coming on the steamboat. It would be so calm and nice, you know. And even sometimes you could hear them coming from the Sheriff (the island), that’s out behind the lighthouse. If it was really a calm day. And they’d play all the way in the harbor."

People who lived in other parts of the island would sometimes travel to the Harbor (Swan's Island village) and stay at the hotel before catching the steamboat in the morning. The Ocean View hotel was open throughout the 1920s but it was shut down during the Depression, along with many of the island's industries.