Nathanial G. Marshall built the first Marshall House in 1871 on Stage Neck Island after a life marked by early family tragedy, self-support through teaching and store work, and long service in local government. The four-story frame hotel, enlarged three times to hold 325 guests, became the largest hotel complex in York, with verandas overlooking the harbor and beach, extensive guest facilities, and regular horse-drawn bus service to Portsmouth, before it burned on January 25th, 1918. Frank D. Marshall then built a larger, more opulent four-story brick hotel on the same site, with cottages, a beach, heated pool, bath houses, tennis courts, boat docking, garages, and chauffeur facilities, until its closing and sale marked the end of York's grand hotel era. In 1971, York Harbor residents organized as Stage Neck, Inc., bought most of the complex, demolished it, and developed the Stage Neck Inn and condominium units. Nearby, Hartley Mason's Sea Urchin Bathhouses, built in 1893-1894 on York Harbor Beach, served the summer crowd with 400 changing stalls, separate areas for men, women, and families, showers, tubs, valet service, food service, and pavilion spaces for socializing; the first Catholic Mass there was celebrated in 1895, and most of the buildings were destroyed in a fierce northeaster in February 1978 after tourism had declined during the Second World War. Stage Neck Island, sometimes called the Neck, had long been used by fishermen for shelters and drying racks and as a ferry point on the coastal route to Kittery and Portsmouth; its disputed ownership stretched from early colonial settlers through a documented 1648 auction to Captain Thomas Donnell and later claims by Henry Donnell's descendants before Marshall acquired it in 1870. The site also saw ferry service beginning with William Hilton's appointment in 1652, tavern and fishing use by Henry Donnell, the resettlement of twenty-two Isle of Shoals families during the Revolutionary War, harbor defenses during the War of 1812 at Fort Point, and, by the eighteenth century, the name Gallows Neck for its use as an execution site, including the 1735 execution of Patience Boston.