On New Hampshire’s Squam Lake, a historic summer house with a Titanic connection is looking for its first new owner in a century.
The eight-bedroom, four-bathroom, 5,600-square-foot property is set on 3.8 acres that include over 960 feet of shorefront, the Wall Street Journal first reported. It is currently priced at $9.5 million, and would break the area record — which currently stands at less than $9 million — should it get anywhere near its ask.
The residence was built around 1899 by real estate broker Richard Beckwith, who was also a first class passenger aboard the Titanic along with his wife, Sallie Beckwith, and Sallie’s daughter from a previous marriage, Helen Newsom.
As certain versions of the story tell it, the banker Karl Behr proposed to Newsom in their life boat after the ship sank, and their story is the one that inspired the romantic plotline in James Cameron’s still-famous 1997 film “Titanic,” the Journal reported.
Beckwith’s extended family still owns a home nearby, but he sold “Waialua,” as he named the house, to the industrialist John J. Evans in the 1920s.
Six generations of the Evans family have since enjoyed Waialua, which has changed very little over the decades.
Waialua remains uninsulated and lacks so much as a central heating system, not to mention TVs and the internet, John Evans IV, a great-grandson of John J. Evans, told the Journal.
“If someone from 1920 came back now,” added Evans, who has spent every single summer of his life at Waialua, “they might see a little difference, but not much.”
Set atop a knoll, the shingle-roofed property does boast three fireplaces, a screened porch ideal for outdoor dinners, a wraparound porch and numerous period details, including the bathtubs, door handles, windows and more.
As well, there are a number of outbuildings — including a restored boathouse and the original ice house — a chicken coop and a private pump house for bringing lake water to the house for washing.
The listing is held by Joe and Jacalyn Dussault of Dussault Real Estate.
