I wrote part of this article 16 years ago in 2008. I enjoy at times writing about the not too distant past, meaning the 20th century and my memories of childhood adventures. 

The south end of Murray Hill Road was a quiet place when I was young in the 1950s, but it was not always so. Most sizeable summer colonies had or have casinos, which are places for meetings, church services, group dinners, fairs, and so on—an all-purpose building that colonies often built and that had no relation to gambling. People unused to localities with summer colonies often struggle with the use of the term casino.  

Murray Hill and Bayville 

According to Greene’s 1906 history, in 1904 the Murray Hill and Bayville summer colonies combined forces to build a casino at the end of Murray Hill Road. The printed material we have at the museum generated toward the mid-1900s by Bayville colonists doesn’t mention a shared casino with Murray Hill. As a matter of fact, the material states they didn’t have one at all. I can only assume the arrangement was shortlived and that the Bayville writers hadn’t read Greene’s 1906 region history and had lost its colony’s earliest history. The 7-8-1911 Boothbay Register recorded that the Linekin Bay Casino Association had been changed in name, scope, and organized capacity to the Linekin Bay Yacht Club (the LBYC). Not too much chance it was a fantasy. 

Big Doings 

Soon after the casino was built in 1904, the Bayville and Murray Hill colonists complemented it with a large steamer wharf, and the Linekin Bay Yacht Club was complete. In 2008 John Tibbetts of Burlington, Conn., sent us the photo shown along with a few more of the combined colonies’ amenities, including many other wonderful old region shots. Some were taken from the casino and another shows a regatta near a rather grand wharf. It's too bad that the pattern on the LBYC flag is not clear. I imagine the photos may date to 1912 or 1913, which were particularly active years for the little yacht club. They even entertained the Boston Yacht Club during the July 1913 regatta and Fete Days, putting on motor boat races, clambakes, luncheons, and a dance.   

The wharf disappeared long before I came on the scene. If not removed by the LBYC, the town, or state, or some such entity would have demanded its removal as a navigational hazard with planks and pilings perhaps going adrift. But the old casino lived on in the ramshackle fashion that abandoned buildings did in that era: dark, dank, moldering, and an invitation to kids like me and Sarah Jones Giles in the late 1950s. Large and cavernous, we remembered a stage at one end of the casino. For about five years before high school, I was down at or around Sarah's house on Murray Hill most days, and in the 7th and 8th grade, we enjoyed cooking hot dogs after school on a little fire along the shore down by the casino. We often saw signs in the road of couples having parked down there or the aftermath of parties, but we haunted the place only in daylight.  

Robert Rice’s Memories 

I talked to Robert Rice (born 1938), caretaker for the casino property, about its demise. He said he believed it was used until World War II by Murray Hill summer people. But the war’s increasingly stringent gas rationing cut down the summer population’s ability to drive here, and the casino eventually became disused permanently. I heard many a story from older residents about the illegal hidden buying and selling of ration stamps in that era.  

In the early 1960s, boatbuilder Sonny Hodgdon, of Murray Hill Road and Sarah’s uncle, tried to resurrect the association with the casino a part of a revived organization, but to no avail. At some point, Robert said he thought Merle Hyson tore off the rotten south end of it for the Manns, who’d bought the casino and added on to it to make it their cottage. 

In the 1950s Sarah and I followed the summer surface water line by the casino to the Harbor through the woods. It was a toss-up—walk Route 96 and hope cars would give us a ride or walk directly by the water line. When going by the pipeline the Presley house was the only structure before Bayville, and Sarah remembers us running across his property, to minimize invading his privacy.  

And the first time we hit Bayville heading to the Harbor, we were shocked that there was a village with a post office (seasonal) so close to our homes that we knew nothing about! Not to mention passing through Appalachee and Lobster Cove—brand new places to us. All in all, walking the pipeline from the end of Murray Hill Road to the Harbor was a very revealing adventure.