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Gc 974.101 H19 sa 1751270
M. L.
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01088 2352
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019
https://archive.org/details/mountdeserthisto00stre 1
MOUNT DESERT
champlain-
MOUNT DESERT
A History
BY GEORGE E. STREET
EDITED BY SAMUEL A. ELIOT
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
New Edition Revised by the Editor
Ac 974.101 H 19 sa
TOVT BIEN OV RIEN
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1926
COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY MARY A. STREET COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
1751270
PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION
THE materials for this book were originally collected by Dr. George Edward Street. For a quarter of a century Dr. Street spent his summer vacations at Southwest Harbor. He loved the charm of hill and sea and shore with abounding and never failing ardor. He was always keenly interested in people and events and eager to ac- quire knowledge about the legends and history of his summer home. He talked with winsome enthusiasm with the representatives of the fam- ilies longest settled on the Island and with sum- mer residents interested in his project. He gath- ered references, collected pictures, and persuaded his neighbors to open to him their stores of local knowledge.
Dr. Street was a busy and successful minister. He was born in Connecticut in 1835 of an an- cestry which included many of the founders and leaders of the Connecticut Colony. He grad- uated at Yale in 1858 and, after a period of teaching, studied at the Andover Theological Seminary and graduated in 1863. He served in the Christian Commission in the Civil War and in 1864 became minister of the Congregational Church in Wiscasset, Maine. After eight years of service there he was called to the Second Con-
vi
PREFACE
gregational Church in Exeter, N.H., and there remained the beloved pastor and good citizen for nearly thirty years. He died at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1903.
It was during the winter evenings at Exeter or Hartford that Dr. and Mrs. Street arranged the notes and papers gathered during the sum- mer days at Southwest Harbor. Then sickness came and the task lingered. After Dr. Street's death the generous confidence of his wife and children entrusted his incomplete task to me, and the collected material was placed in my hands in the spring of 1904. The original contribu- tions were incorporated into one narrative and the book was published in 1905. It at once took its place as the most authoritative and complete history of Mount Desert Island. In this new edition certain minor corrections of fact have been made, two of the original chapters have been combined into one, and a new chapter has been added bringing the record to the year 1925.
SAMUEL A. ELIOT.
CONTENTS
I. SAINT CROIX 1
II. SAINT SAUVEUR 31
III. PEMETIC 57
IV. THE TORY AND REFUGEE PROPRIETORS
101
V. MOUNT DESERT PLANTATION 137
VI. MOUNT DESERT TOWNSHIPS 183
VII. SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 225
VIII. THE SUMMER COLONIES 269
IX. LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PARK 297
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 315
INDEX 329
ILLUSTRATIONS
SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN
. Frontispiece
MAP OF MOUNT DESERT AND THE LAFAYETTE NATIONAL
PARK
1
Reproduced by permission of the National Parks Associa- tion, Washington, D.C.
TITLE OF DE MONTS'S "COMMISSIONS"
14
CADILLAC CLIFFS
.
24
Photograph by Charles A. Townsend, Belfast, Maine
FERNALD'S POINT (FROM GREENING'S ISLAND)
44
MANCHESTER'S POINT
66
BEAR ISLAND
82
CADILLAC'S HARBOR (FROM BEAR ISLAND)
82
THE OVENS
104
Photograph by Charles A. Townsend
OTTER CLIFF
. 122
SOMES SOUND
144
SEAL COVE
. 150
JORDAN POND
170
Photograph by Charles A. Townsend
ENTRANCE TO BAR HARBOR
196
SOMESVILLE
196
AT NORWOOD'S COVE .
214
PATH TO JORDAN POND
248
Photograph by Charles A. Townsend
FIRST HOTEL AT BAR HARBOR .
276
FIRST COTTAGE AT BAR HARBOR
.
276
x ILLUSTRATIONS
NORTHEAST HARBOR . 286
FROM SARGENT'S MOUNTAIN . 286
THE LADDER TRAIL, BEEHIVE MOUNTAIN . 310 Photograph by Charles A. Townsend
-
1
UNION RIVER BAY
West Trenton
Thomas
Thompson Luisland
Eden
Salisbury Cove
Thomas
Haynes Pt
52
Northeastern
Br
Hulls Cove
Lookout Pt.
BAY
Hulls cove
PORCUPINE ISLANDS
Lake Wood
West Eden
Oak-Et
Indian PF
BAR HARBOR
WESTERN
Indian Point.
M
C
Z
T
Ogden Pt.
North Pt
Mount Desert
Somest Pond
The Flying Squadron
Huguenot
Head
The
BARTLETT
Jan Champlain Mtn PE
Cadillac Mtn.
T
Bubbles P & NIE Pond "
The Bubbles
The Bow!
Schooner Head
E
R
ISLAND
(Pretty Marsh
Hadley Pt
EASTERN
BAY
FRENCHMAN
Goose côvel
MAINLAND
Alleys Island
Witch Hole Pond
Eagle Lake
Somest
Sound
WIOS
Sam ont
Beech
St Sauveur
Center
Seal-Cove Por
Min
S
N
D
#Otter Cliff
Hardwood (Island
Mansell Pk.>9
Flying Min. 2
Asticou
Jesuit Field
Seal Harbor
Moose Island
Seal Cove
HARBOR
UNORTHEAST
Greenings
Sutton Is
Southwest H. Island
Manset
CRANBERRY
West Tremont
ISLES
... Islesford Little Cranberry Is.
Seawall
Tremonti(G
Seawall
Nutter P
Mc.Kinley
Island
BAY
Harbo
LH
BOUNDARY OF LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PARK
Ship Harbor
MOUNT DESERT AND THE LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PARK
The boundaries enclose areas purchased or given for the National Park. Not all the territory has as yet (1926) actually been turned over to the Government, however.
BLUEHILL
OCEAN
Great
Cranberry
Baker island
ATLANTIC
KiSeal= Harbor
Seal Core
SOUTHWEST HARBOR Y/
ENortheast.
Bernard" Mtn
N- D
1
I SAINT CROIX
Flawless his heart and tempered to the core Who, beckoned by the forward-leaning wave, First left behind him the firm footed shore, And, urged by every nerve of sail and oar, Steered for the Unknown.
LOWELL
SAINT CROIX. 1604
Do we not too often imagine that there is an absence of romance in the early history of our native land ? There is a widespread notion that the local history of America is commonplace and prosaic, if not trivial. No mist of distance ob- scures the harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition lifts lives and events into importance. Literature and art and song have enriched the charm of Old World scenes and themes, until our sense of the interest and witchery of nearer things has been dimmed. Do we not need to shift our historical perspective and to realize that there is a charm in the records of our own historic past which is as entrancing as any in the annals of mankind ? The hills and fields and islands of New England blossom with the sweet flowers of romance as richly as any meadows of Old World fame.
One cause for our feeling that America has a prosaic history is that we are wont to begin our historical observations with the permanent set- tlements of Europeans on these shores, - with Jamestown and Plymouth, New Amsterdam and Salem. We forget the years of discovery and exploration and futile effort at colonization that antedate the ultimately successive enterprises. We make our history the record of merely material
4
MOUNT DESERT
advance, and so the noise of axe and hammer drowns out the poetry. Is there not always more romance in brave endeavors that fail than in the equally brave endeavors that succeed ? Shall we not do well to remind ourselves sometimes of the fortitude and zeal of the pioneers before the Pil- grims ?
Again, for the most part we inherit a purely English tradition of American history. We for- get that the earliest settlements in America were not English, but Spanish and French, and there is somehow more poetry about the dashing cour- tiers of Philip II and Henry of Navarre, about the black-robed priests and their adventurous companions, than about our grim Puritan fore- fathers or about the sturdy traders of New Neth- erlands. The oldest permanent settlement on our Atlantic coast, St. Augustine, is Spanish in its origin, and the two most interesting of the tem- porary settlements were made, the one by French Huguenots in Florida, and the other by French Jesuits in Maine. The ruthless bigotry of Spanish Catholics exterminated the Huguenots in Florida, and the violence of English Protestants dispersed the Jesuits at Mount Desert.
New England was called New France for fifty years before Captain John Smith gave it its pre- sent name. Fifteen years before the Mayflower came to anchor in Plymouth Harbor its waters had been sounded and its outlines drawn by
5
SAINT CROIX
Frenchmen seeking a permanent home. The Pil- grims, had they known of it, might have bought, ere they sailed, at the little shop of Jean Bergon in the Rue St. Jean de Beauvais, at the sign of the Winged Horse, in Paris, a chart of Plymouth Harbor remarkable for its accuracy and skill. Twenty-five years before John Winthrop and his company landed on the Peninsula where they planted Boston, Frenchmen had mapped the bay, described its features with surprising fidelity, and named its points and rivers.
It is not within the purpose of this history to tell of the exploits of the earlier French voyagers, for they only touched along the New England shores, and their courses cannot always be accu- rately traced. As early as 1524 Verrazano passed along our Atlantic coast from Florida to New- foundland, and his landfalls in New York Bay, at Block Island, at Newport, and several other points can be fairly well identified. He wrote the earliest description known to exist of the shores of the United States. But France, torn with wars, her king a captive, her treasury empty, was in no mood at that time for transatlantic enterprises, and the voyage was fruitless of result.
Nor does it fall within my purpose to speak of the voyages of Jacques Cartier, the discovery of the St. Lawrence River, and the efforts toward colonization made by Roberval and La Roche. These enterprises are but the prelude of the drama
6
MOUNT DESERT
of French colonization in America ; a half cen- tury of silence rolls between them and the more persistent attempts of the later heroes. The New- foundland banks were indeed visited every sum- mer throughout the sixteenth century by the hardy Basque and Breton fishermen. The ports of Dieppe and Honfleur alone sent two hundred sail of fishing craft annually, and these venturesome little vessels may at times have felt their way into the harbors of Cape Breton - a name which commemorates their visits - or even penetrated to the gulf of Maine; but the fishermen left no record of their adventures.1
The romantic story of the exploration of our hundred-harbored New England shore begins when a quaint little vessel, no larger than a fish- ing smack of to-day, glided one summer morning in 1604 under the frowning crags of the Grand Manan and held her way up the river which marks to-day the boundary of Maine and New Bruns- wick and which thenceforth has borne the name of St. Croix. On board this little vessel was an organized French colony seeking a permanent home. The best and meanest of France were crowded on the deck. There were nobles from the court of Henry IV and thieves from the Paris prisons ; there were Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers ; there were ruffians who were flying from justice, and there were young volun- 1 See Winsor's Cartier to Frontenac, p. 79.
7
SAINT CROIX
teers of high birth and character. What had led these men to tempt the perils of the uncharted seas and the unknown wilderness, and what was the origin and impulse of their enterprise ?
One of the motives which stimulated all the first adventurers on the American coasts was doubtless the hope of material gain. To the inquisitive and credulous minds of the men of the sixteenth century the New World meant Eldorado. The Spaniards in the south were cer- tainly spurred to their daring exploits by the expectation of finding gold, and their marvelous success in securing the treasures of the golden kingdoms of Central America stimulated all that came after them. Gold mines reported by Indians are all the time referred to by early voyagers even on the New England shore. The sanguine prospectors believed everything they were told about the hidden wealth of the regions they had come to explore, and the shivering poverty of the naked Indians who were the only inhabit- ants of the new-found coasts did not undeceive them.
National rivalry found a place among the motives that prompted effort. Was the land of boundless wonder and fertility to be abandoned to foreigners ? Frenchmen asked themselves if their English foes were to outdo them in the New World. Englishmen were eager to disprove the claim of the Spaniards to the continent by vir-
8
MOUNT DESERT
tue of " a parchment signed by an Italian priest." Feeling often ran high, and it is well known that the adventurers of the different nations, though at peace at home, often came to blows in distant America.
Next we should recognize the influence of missionary enthusiasm. Even the Spaniards were full of desire to convert the Indians, and some of their most ruthless tyrannies were undertaken in the name of religion. The priests were always important figures in the conquering armies of the Spanish in Central America. Most of the French adventurers were full of equal religious enthusiasm. The story of the Jesuit missions in Canada is a marvel of devotion and self-forget- fulness. The earliest seal of the Massachusetts Colony, granted in 1629, shows an Indian, with the motto " Come over and help us." The mis- sionary zeal was in large measure kindled by the curiosity excited by the Indian captives who were brought at various times from America to the older lands. Here were people from beyond the bounds of Christendom who had never been baptized, " naked slaves of the Devil," as one annalist described them. Christian people every- where were eager to convert these subjects of Satan, not merely from philanthropic motives, but also, as we read, "to spite the Devil." The proselyting spirit was sometimes incongruously mixed up with the hope of commercial gain, as
9
SAINT CROIX
when one navigator wrote to the secretary of Queen Elizabeth that if the Indians " were once brought over to the Christian faith they might soon be brought to relish a more civilized kind of life and take off quantities of our coarser woolen manufactures."
But the chief impulse was just the spirit of adventure that characterized all active-minded men in Europe at the opening of the seventeenth century. There was an intense curiosity about the New World. To men shut in by the narrow limits of mediæval geographical knowledge the unveiling of a new continent was an unceasing marvel. The desire to investigate the marvel was irresistible, and adventure by sea became the favorite road to renown. The theory that the new-found shores must be a part of the golden empire of the great Khan was still enthroned in many men's imaginations. On almost all the maps of the period the coast line of America is figured as very thin, with breaks in it here and there. Even when it became better known the coast was still regarded primarily as an obstruc- tion on the voyage to Asia, and navigator after navigator sought the never-to-be-discovered strait into the Pacific. The hope of coming upon some short cut into the rich commerce of the Orient survived until late in the century. The value of the New World was dimmed before the glory of the Indies. The Pacific was always just behind
10
MOUNT DESERT
the next point. It was a dream that stimulated discovery but retarded settlement.
No better description of these nobler motives can be given than that written by one of the boldest and most skillful of the seventeenth cen- tury navigators, the godfather of New England, Captain John Smith. " Who can desire," he wrote, " more content than to tread and plant the ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life ? If he have but the taste of virtue and magnanimity, what to such a mind can be more pleasant than planting and building a foundation for his posterity, got from the rude earth by God's blessing and his own industry? If he have any grain of faith or zeal in religion, what can he do less hurtful to any or more agreeable to God than to seek to convert those poor sav- ages to know Christ ? What so truly suits with honor as the discovering of things unknown, erecting towns, peopling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching vir- tue, and gaining to our mother country a king- dom to attend her. Then seeing we are not born for ourselves but each to help others, and our abilities are much alike at the hour of our birth and the minute of our death - seeing honor is our life's ambition and our ambition after death to have an honorable memory of our life - and seeing by no means we would be abated of the dignities and glories of our predecessors, let us
11
SAINT CROIX
imitate their virtues to be worthily their suc- cessors."
All of these motives, save missionary zeal, were of a nature to appeal to the temperament of Henry the Fourth of France. The French plans of colonization found their impulse in the grasp- ing commercialism, the patriotic pride, the chiv- alric spirit of that many-sided monarch. The origins of the St. Croix colony are connected with some of the chief events of his epoch-mak- ing reign. Never were the justice and expediency of a political measure more promptly vindicated than by the effects which followed the sign- ing of the Edict of Nantes by Henry on the thir- teenth of April, 1598. The publication of this royal decree meant nothing less than the speedy return of prosperity to France. "In one day," says Benoist, "the disasters of forty years were repaired." The civil wars had left the country in a deplorable condition. Everywhere the traces of the long and bitter struggle were to be seen in ruined villages and dismantled castles, in farms laid waste, and cities impoverished. Under the Edict, which secured to the Protestants of France the enjoyment of their civil and religious rights, public confidence revived, and trade and manu- factures began again to flourish.
For these advantages, the kingdom was largely indebted to the statesmanship of the Huguenot Duc de Sully. It was the good fortune of Henry
12
MOUNT DESERT
the Fourth to have for his trusty counselor a man of such stanch fidelity and of far-sighted wisdom. In administering the affairs of the coun- try Sully's principal concern was for the devel- opment of its internal resources. He brought a rigid economy into all the departments of gov- ernment, he rapidly reduced the enormous debt which had accumulated during the civil wars; and at the same time he sought to encourage agriculture as the most assured means of national enrichment. By establishing peace and commer- cial stability at home, he provided the essential foundation for transatlantic adventure.
Henry shared his minister's views ; but he had other plans also, into which Sully did not enter so cordially. The king favored foreign commerce and colonization. It was his ambition to possess a powerful navy, to promote adventure and dis- covery and trade with distant lands, and especially to carry out the scheme which had originated with Coligny, his early teacher and companion in arms, for the establishment of a French colony in America. The time for this undertaking had come at last.
In the year 1599, Pierre Chauvin, Seigneur de Tontuit,1 of Honfleur in Normandy, was commis- sioned by Henry to colonize America. Chauvin
1 Nouvelles Glanes historiques Normandes, puisées exclusivement dans des documents inédits. Par E. Gosselin, Greffier-Archiviste. Rouen, 1873.
13
.
SAINT CROIX
was a captain in the royal navy, "very expert and well versed in matters of navigation," says Champlain.1 Several vessels were equipped, and with a considerable force Chauvin embarked and headed for the river of St. Lawrence, which Jacques Cartier had discovered and named more than half a century before. At Tadousac, where the Saguenay enters the St. Lawrence, Chauvin established a trading post, and, leaving sixteen of his men to gather furs, returned to France.
The little colony dragged out a miserable ex- istence through the winter. Several of the men died, and the others were barely kept alive by the compassionate savages, who shared with them their slender provisions. Chauvin worked hard but unsuccessfully to make the settlement per- manent, and when about to start upon his third voyage he died. In the following year his com- mission was transferred to a Roman Catholic gentleman, Aymar de Chastes, governor of Dieppe. But before the ships he sent out for the further exploration of the country returned, De Chastes too was dead.
Henry then turned to one of his most loyal friends and commissioned a Huguenot gentleman Pierre Du Guast, Sieur de Monts, to possess and settle that part of North America lying between
1 " Homme très expert et entendu au faict de la navigation, qui avoit servi sa majesté aux guerres passées, quoi qu'il fust de la religion prétendue reformée."
14
MOUNT DESERT
the 40th and the 46th degrees of north latitude, granting him the title of lieutenant-general in New France with vice-regal powers, and giving him a monopoly of trade. The king's commis- sion was a characteristic document.1 It began by setting forth the king's favorite project for the enlargement of his dominions. "It has ever been," reads the preamble, "our principal con- cern and endeavor, since our accession to this crown, to maintain and preserve it in its ancient dignity, greatness, and splendor, and to spread and augment, so far as may be legitimately done, the bounds and limits thereof." But there was an object of still higher importance to be sought in the present enterprise. The king, " having long since informed himself of the situation and condition of the country and territory of Acadia," professed to be "moved above all things by a singular zeal, and by a devout and firm resolu- tion " which he had taken, "with the help and assistance of God, who is the author, distributor, and protector of all kingdoms and states, to seek the conversion, guidance, and instruction of the races that inhabit that country, from their bar- barous and godless condition, and to rescue them from the ignorance and unbelief in which they now lie." For these purposes, secular as well as
1 This commission is printed in the French with an English version in the Appendix of Baird's Huguenot Emigration to America, i, 341-347.
215
COMMISSIONS DV Roy &t) de Monfeigneur l' Admiral, au fieur de Monts, pour l'habi- tation és terres de Lacadie Canada, er autres en- droits en la nouvelle France.
Enfemble les defenfes premieres & fecon- des à tous autres , de trafiquer auec les Sauuages defdites terres.
Avec la verification en la Cour de Partement à paris.
A PARIS.
16 05.
TITLE OF DE MONTS'S " COMMISSIONS "
15
SAINT CROIX
spiritual, Henry appointed the Sieur de Monts his viceroy and authorized him "to subject all the peoples of that country and of the surrounding parts to our authority ; and by all lawful means to lead them to the knowledge of God and to the light of the Christian faith and religion, and to establish them therein." All other inhabitants were to be maintained and protected in the exer- cise and profession of the same Christian faith and religion, and in peace and tranquillity. Thus the foundations of New France were to be laid in religious freedom and toleration. If the plan was impracticable, it did honor, nevertheless, to the heart and mind that prompted and devised the Edict of Nantes.
De Monts associated with himself the members of the company which had been organized for the conduct of the previous unsuccessful expedi- tions ; and they added to their number other merchants of the principal seaports of the king- dom who engaged in the adventure chiefly in hope of gain in the fur-trade. De Monts him- self was well fitted to be the leader of the enter- prise. He had fought bravely under Henry in the late wars, and the king had made him one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber, and later appointed him governor of Pons in his native province of Saintonge. All the early chroniclers agree in characterizing him as a man of integrity and the purest patriotism. In courage, energy,
16
MOUNT DESERT
perseverance, in tact and firmness, he was ad- mirably qualified for his mission.1
De Monts had accompanied Chauvin " for his own pleasure " on his first visit to the St. Law- rence, and his impressions of the country watered by the great river were not favorable. His mind turned to the region lying farther to the south to which the name of Acadie was first given in the king's commission. The winter months were spent in getting vessels and stores in readiness. De Monts embarked in the larger of his two lit- tle ships, one of one hundred and fifty tons, the other of one hundred and twenty tons. The smaller vessel, commanded by the Sieur du Pont- gravé, one of the merchant partners who had made a voyage to the coast the previous summer, followed soon after. The band of adventurers numbered about one hundred and twenty per- sons. De Monts's commission authorized him to impress for his expedition any "vagabonds, idlers, or vagrants," as well as any criminals condemned to banishment from the realm, whom he might see fit to employ. A like permission had been given to preceding adventurers, and more than
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