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Prior to 1900 the town center of Hampton stretched along Exeter Road west from the intersection with Lafayette Road. The railroad bridge was not there and the tracks directly crossed the road. A little ways west of the tracks, on the north side of Exeter Road, once stood a medium-sized inn and boarding house. An 1841 map of Hampton shows "Loring Dunbar's Inn" just beyond the home of Amos Towle on the west side of the tracks. Today this location would be just west of the Storage business located on the other side of the bridge.
According to town historian Joseph Dow, Loring Dunbar came from Boston in 1838. Peter Randall, in his history of Hampton, states that Dunbar opened his inn in 1836, and ran it until 1848. Dunbar's first wife Martha Ann Nash died in Hampton in 1852 and he remarried to Mary Jane Cotton two years later. He had seven children by his first wife and five by his second and apparently lived in the inn. On February 7, 1867, Dunbar shot himself and was buried in the High Street Cemetery. He was aged about 61 years at the time.
Whether the inn was known as the Franklin House during its first life in the 1830s and 1840s is not known, but apparently it was not in business as an inn after 1848 for many years, and was simply the home of the Dunbar family. With the coming on the street railway (trolleys) in 1897, Loring's youngest child, his son Melzar, reopened the inn, remodeling it with electric bells and lights, telephones and central heat. We know it was called the Franklin House by at least 1899, when a large fire destroyed a few nearby buildings.
By 1908 Benjamin F. Damsell had taken over management of the inn and it was now called the Hampton House. When Damsell took over from Dunbar is unknown, although it must have been after 1903 as Dunbar was granted a liquor license in June of that year. Benjamin Damsell died in Lakeport, NH on October 6, 1918 of the Spanish Influenza that claimed millions of lives around the world that year.
By April of 1910 Frank Mason had taken over operations from Damsell, as a note in the April 14th Hampton Union stated, "Mr. Frank Mason is having fine success in his management of the Franklin house. He has twenty-two boarders at present, and many transients, who are served fine dinner for thirty-five cents." Why the paper refers to it as the "Franklin" House at this point is uncertain, as the town directory calls it the "Hampton" House in 1908. Perhaps it was an error, because in the September 1, 1910 Hampton Union is the following notice: "The name of the old Hampton House has been changed, and is now the Mason House, according to a new sign recently put up."
On September 7, 1912 the Mason House, along with several other nearby buildings, was burned to the ground in one of Hampton's largest-ever in-town fires. It was never reopened.
