Bar Harbor, Maine · (207)288-3044


Pat and Roger Samuel
Owners and Innkeepers


Innkeepers, Graycote Inn, Bar Harbor, Maine Perhaps the questions most frequently asked of us are "how did you come to be innkeepers?", or "What did you do before becoming innkeepers?" Some have even asked what we did "when we worked"!! So, to satisfy that curiosity…

Pat grew up on a dairy farm in northern Ohio. She attended Notre Dame College of Ohio where she majored in Chemistry and Physics. She did graduate work at Oregon State and Boston University and received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Washington, Seattle. She spent most of her academic career on the Chemistry faculty at Boston University where she was responsible for the freshman chemistry program (about 1000 students). Roger grew up in Cleveland. He attended MIT and the University of Michigan where he took degrees in Civil Engineering. Following graduate school he worked as a structural engineer for the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company in Seattle. He then returned to MIT where he worked as a liaison between academic and industrial researchers. During his last ten years at MIT he was a research manager and director of an executive education program in MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Roger and Pat were married in 1966. They have a daughter who is an orthodontist with her own practice in Vermont. She and her husband have two daughters.

We have always enjoyed staying in B&Bs during our travel in the U.S. and in Europe; for many years we had thought about the possibility of buying an inn to enjoy working together in retirement. In late 1995 we both found ourselves thinking about some sort of job change - nothing radical, just something different for the last ten years or so of a career. This led to some thought about what we would do after that. We decided that we should look into innkeeping to make certain that it really was what we might do after retirement and if so start some serious planning. We read books about innkeeping and it still looked promising. In February we took a seminar for prospective innkeepers. At that point we started feeling comfortable that innkeeping was something that we would enjoy doing. It also became clear just how much physical work was involved in the job, and therefore the difficulty of entering the business at normal retirement age. Early 50s was a good age. If so, why waste time? Things then moved at a rapid pace and in June 1996 we became the proud owners of the Graycote Inn.

We haven't looked back, finding that "Maine, the way life should be" is much more than just a marketing slogan - and there is no place of which it is more true than Bar Harbor and Mt. Desert Island. Nothing makes us happier than sharing our home with our guests and helping them get the most enjoyment out of their time with us here in Downeast Maine.




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