Writers, Educators & Enterprise
The register at Idylease reflects more than resort life. It also records guests whose work touched journalism, literature, education, language instruction, finance, and transportation.
David Banks Sickels
David Banks Sickels (1837–1918) was a Civil War correspondent, fiscal agent for the State of Arkansas, diplomatic representative of Siam, and Acting Consul of the Netherlands. With Lyman W. Griggs, he founded the American Surety Company.
After retiring from business, Sickels turned toward literary work. He wrote many poems, including work published in Leaves of the Lotos and Flowers from the Wayside.
In 1909, while a guest at Idylease, he authored a poem titled Idylease, linking the hotel not only to a name in the register, but to a written impression of the place itself.
Victor Harrison Berlitz
Berlitz Language Centers became global leaders in language education and training. The company was founded in 1878 by Maximilian Berlitz in Providence, Rhode Island, and later grew into an international network of schools.
Between the summer of 1925 and the spring of 1932, Victor Harrison Berlitz served as General Manager of the Berlitz language schools worldwide, overseeing a period of broad organizational reach.
His name appears as a registered guest at Idylease in 1929, connecting the hotel to the history of international language education and one of its best-known institutions.
H. Montague Vickers
H. Montague Vickers was a Wall Street bond broker and railroad securities trader during the early twentieth century. A member of the New York Stock Exchange, he was associated with Vickers & Phelps, a firm involved in railroad finance, and served as an incorporator and board member of the Rahway Valley Railroad.
The world Vickers moved through was the Wall Street of railroad bonds, private firms, securities offices, and speculative capital — the financial world that would soon become inseparable from the larger story of the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.
Vickers maintained ties to Newfoundland, New Jersey, where his Green Pond Road residence is still remembered locally. His name appears as a guest at Idylease in 1906.
Contemporary newspaper accounts later reported his death in New York in 1926. For Idylease, the significance is not only the tragedy, but the connection: a national financial era passing through a small mountain village, leaving behind a residence, a railroad story, and a name in the hotel register.