Service Stations

HISTORY OF SERVICE STATIONS

Probably Weirs Beach’s first “service station”, the Lakeside Garage was located on the north end of Lakeside Avenue, where the concrete patio of the the Big House is now. Built in the 1910s, it was converted to several different businesses over the years. In the 1940’s, it was a roller skating rink, the Weirs Roller Way. In the 1950’s, it was the Knotty Pine Grill (a restaurant). In the 1960’s, it was a dance club known as Teen Haven. In the early 1970’s, it was the Weirs Beach Playhouse by night, and a bike rental shop by day. In 1974, it became the nightclub “Nashville North”. The country music nightclub opened for the 1974 season on May 11, and had a capacity of 405 persons. This was the final use of the building, as it burned down near the end of its twelfth season of operations, on October 3, 1985.

The Lakeside Garage not only serviced autos, it was also a convenience store. According to a 1921 Laconia Democrat article, G. Henry Davis, who had managed the nearby Tarlson’s store for 20 years, entered business for himself at the new garage. He was the local agent for S.S. Pierce Co. of Boston, and offered a full line of package groceries, canned goods, fruits, vegetables, candy and cigars. Could that be him in the white shirt and tie standing at the door to his shop? The sign over his head cannot be read, but the first sign on the left reads “Fancy Groceries”.

Another early garage was the Blue Sign garage. The garage was located at the junction of US Route 3 (Weirs Boulevard) and Route 11B (Endicott Street East). There is now a parking lot at this corner location. A September 4, 1929 article noted, “All traffic over the leading central New Hampshire boulevard that is going to and from the White Mountains comes into the service radius of this garage…An expert staff of mechanics can be found at the Blue Sign Garage, ready to take care of all automobile difficulties.” On the back side of the garage’s business card, an interesting map of the roads in 1920 appears. For a photo gallery of other early gas and/or service stations in Weirs Beach, click here.

Roads of the time were made of macadam, a method of constructing roads of small stones, with stone dust to fill in the gaps between the stones, and a tar coating on the top. Whilst this method worked reasonably well in more temperate climates, it was quite a problem for the roads to make it through the typical New England winter. A February, 1919 article in the Laconia Democrat noted that the local roads were “said to be in the worst condition ever known…The macadam roads which usually come out good in the spring are badly heaved and cracked, and it will require considerable expense to get them into shape for summer travel. The gravel and clay roads on the main route are regular quagmires of mud, and the trucks and heavy cars which have been through them have left these pieces of highway in bad shape.”

Things were not much better six years later. A March, 1925 Laconia Democrat article noted that springtime road heaves had necessitated “the well-known truck ban”, and that traffic was impossible during some weeks of the spring. But improvements were coming soon, noted the article. “To our knowledge there is only one kind of road bed which not only stands up under the winter scraping, but will also weather the period of Spring safely. That is the concrete road, of which the state has so little and of which it someday will have so much.” New Hampshire should “more rapidly acquire a respectable percentage of cement road, properly laid…Only when this is accomplished will New Hampshire be able to boast of year-round traffic.”

Locally, that took another decade. Starting in 1930-1931, Route 3 between Laconia and Tilton was being rebuilt, and by late 1936, the state highway, all the way from Laconia to Concord, was finally completed of cement concrete.