USA > Maine > Hancock County > Mount Desert > Mount Desert : a history > Part 16
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1 It is easy to deride the habit of summer visitors of giving fancy names to points of interest, and the names thus given are often inappropriate and sentimental. Not a few of the local and traditional names at Mount Desert are thoroughly good. Hull's Cove and Town Hill have a good colonial ring. Ironbound Island, Otter Creek, and Seal Cove are obviously appropriate. Pretty Marsh Harbor and Dram Island and Rum Key and Junk of Pork have a local flavor which commends them. It must, however, be acknowledged that the names of too many of the hills and streams and coves are very commonplace. It might still be well to substitute for such names as Green, Brown, and Robinson, Dog, Goose, and Ox, some of the historic names asso- ciated with the island, such as Champlain, Cadillac, Iberville, Westbrook, Bernard. These might even be as appropriate for post-offices as Tremont or Mckinley or Sorrento. (See page 309.)
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interesting as did their comrades of an earlier school. It lacks "atmosphere." The typical Mount Desert day has a dry brilliancy which banishes the charm of mystery. The northwest wind is a tonic and the sunshine is vivifying, but on these characteristic days there are no soft horizons or shadowy distances such as the mod- ern artists prefer. Every outline is sharp and de- fined, every hue is emphasized. Never was there such a blue sea or such white sails or such spar- kling whitecaps or such bright green trees. Only when the fog wreaths sail in from the sea, or a soft southerly haze occasionally shrouds the sharp horizons, do objects attain the relative values which nowadays tempt a painter.
It was certainly at a fortunate time for the Mount Desert people that the summer business began. The local occupations were declining, and no new industries, like the granite business which developed later, had appeared to help solve the problem of making a living. The her- ring fisheries were becoming less and less profit- able, the coasting trade was slack, the hills had been stripped of the last trees suitable for saw- ing, the thin soil of the farms was practically exhausted. With the coming of the new popula- tion that arrived with the roses and disappeared with the first frosts, the whole aspect of affairs changed. The summer business meant for the people of the island towns an outward prosperity
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such as they had never imagined. The necessities of the summer people meant not only the open- ing of boarding-houses and hotels, it meant, too, employment throughout the year for carpenters, housebuilders, road-builders, caretakers, dress- makers, and mechanics of every kind; it meant demand for milk, eggs, vegetables, chickens, and the farm products that were easily raised on the
island ; it meant steadily increasing traffic for the local fishermen and lobstermen; it meant employment in the summer for a host of young women in the hotels, and for young men in the sailing of pleasure boats and the driving of buckboards and carriages ; it meant the intro- duction of new industries, the dealing in coal and ice and hay, the raising of shrubs and flowers, and shopkeeping to an extent in variety and quality far in excess of the needs of the perma- nent population. More than this, the demands of the summer population meant rapid increase in means of transportation, and improvement in the size and speed and convenience of the steam- ers. In 1870 the only means of reaching the island was by stage from Bangor or by steam- boat twice a week from Portland. Soon there came in the summer months daily steamers of two or more lines, then the Maine Central Rail- road built to Mount Desert Ferry and ran its ferries first to Bar Harbor and later to all the principal landings. The sale of land for cot-
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tages meant vastly increased resources for land- holders, and the increased income of the towns from taxation meant better schools and roads and bridges. The summer residents helped too, as we have seen, in the support of churches ; they raised the standards of living, and if they introduced some undesirable luxuries, empha- sized some unfortunate class distinctions, and were responsible for some vices formerly un- known, yet on the whole their influence was healthy in matters sanitary and social and reli- gious.
The development of popular summer resorts on the New England coast has followed a curi- ously uniform law. Some beautiful place on the rugged shore, by beach or headland, or by shel- tered harbor, has first been discovered by artists in search of the picturesque or inspiring, or by adventurous sportsmen or campers or college students, or by families of moderate means in search of a change of scene and a fortnight's lib- erty. The development of the summer resort then begins by some farmer or fisherman taking these wanderers into his house to board, a thing which he has never done before and a responsi- bility that he is unwilling to assume and usually very incompetent to discharge. He finds, how- ever, that the venture is highly profitable, and after a few seasons of very modest and some- what reluctant entertainment he begins to dis-
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FIRST HOTEL AT BAR HARBOR
FIRST COTTAGE AT BAR HARBOR
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cover the possibilities of the business. He adds new chambers and enlarges the dining-room of his house and perhaps puts an advertisement in a city paper. In a few years he relieves his wife of the cooking by hiring some neighbor or a woman from another town, and little by little the farmer or fisherman grows into the proprie- tor of a summer hotel. Gradually his neighbors, emboldened by his success, follow his example, and soon their scattered village becomes a town with a main street and a steamboat landing, in- creased facilities of transportation, a livery sta- ble, perhaps a new church and places of amuse- ment.
This stage of development usually lasts for several years, and the hotels, cheaply furnished, setting but a simple table, and maintained for short seasons, attract as a rule the same people year after year, who are on familiar terms of friendship with the proprietor and his "help," and who get well acquainted with one another. That period of development is brought to a close by the appearance of the cottager. In nine cases out of ten the cottager is at first a guest at the farmhouse or the hotel, who gets to love the place of his summer rest and some day quietly buys a lot of land, usually near the hotel, so that he need not be troubled with housekeeping. The next year he builds a cottage on his lot and gradually there grows up, almost imperceptibly,
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a separation between him and his family and those who were his fellow-boarders. The sum- mer community, at first homogeneous, is di- vided ; more cottages are built, housekeeping becomes the rule rather than the exception, new luxuries appear, the liberty of dress is more and more diminished, private entertainments take the place of the jolly expeditions in which every one joined; then come servants, private carriages, and perhaps an exclusive club or casino. The original farmers and fishermen have probably by this time sold enough land to cottagers to enable them to give up taking boarders, and they either sell out to a hotel syndicate or retire to ease and luxury. Gradually the boarders find themselves more and more excluded from the social life of the place. They are unable or they do not wish to compete with the increasing luxury of the cottage life, so they withdraw silently from the scenes they have enjoyed, to plant the begin- nings of some new watering-place and repeat the process. This progressive dislodgment of the summer boarder along the New England shore and among the New England hills is, as a keen observer said, " the summer tragedy of American life." 1
This rule of development has been conspicu- ously illustrated on Mount Desert island. In the years just before the war a few artists, seeking 1 E. L. Godkin, Recollections and Comments.
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beauty of scenery, found their way thither ; then slowly, in the years between 1860 and 1875, families began to come. The modest houses of the farming and fishing folk who welcomed, or rather reluctantly received, these explorers, grew rapidly into little boarding-houses and then into bigger boarding-houses. The callings of the steamer from Portland grew more frequent. At first Southwest Harbor was almost exclusively the place of resort, then Bar Harbor went through the same stages of development, then Northeast Harbor, and Seal Harbor. From the first the boarding contingent was largely made up of people of moderate means and of simple tastes. Probably the island was the scene of more plain living and high thinking than any other summer resort on the coast. It is recorded that even in the early days there was one distinction between boarders, but not one which caused ill-will. Some were "mealers," which meant people eating in the hotel where they slept, and others were " hauled mealers," or people who lived in neigh- boring farmhouses, and who were brought to their food at a central house in buckboards. It was a happy, easy, free summer life, and still maintains itself with a certain degree of success in some of the villages on the island. It has entirely disappeared at Bar Harbor, and main- tains only a precarious existence at Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor.
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The first summer cottages were very plain structures in which the owners simply slept and had a living-room, while they went to the hotels or to a neighboring " cookhouse " for meals. This practice for a time excited neither suspicion nor alarm, but as prices of land advanced, things changed. Gradually cottagers came into posses- sion of almost all the desirable shore sites from Hull's Cove to Somes Sound, and more and more they surrounded themselves with the luxuries of life. More and more the boarders found them- selves excluded from their favorite walks along the shore and from the finest points of view. The regular boarders of old are now either cot- tagers, or else they have wandered on to some re- sort which, if it lacks the charm of Mount Desert scenery, permits of a less artificial summer life.
The real beginning of the summer life on the island began with the building of Deacon Clark's wharf at Southwest Harbor which made possible regular landings of the Portland steamer. Mr. Clark's boarding-house grew into the consider- able hotel that he called the Island House. To this there were soon added the Castle and the Dirigo and the Claremont on Clark's Point, while at the head of the harbor Mr. Freeman built the Freeman House and on the southern shore Mr. Teague built the Ocean House and Mr. Stanley the Stanley. The cottage growth at Southwest Harbor was much slower. It did not begin until
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about 1885, and has never assumed the propor- tions attained at the other island resorts. The place still retains a large boarding element in the summer population, and, unlike Bar Harbor, the hotels continue to do a good business.
The leading people at or near Bar Harbor in the days before the Civil War were the Higgins, Hamor, Rodick, and Roberts families. The land was thin and poor, the harbor was open to the roll of the sea, and the comparatively flat brush-clad point on which the town afterwards grew was not attractive to people looking primarily for a livelihood. The Rodicks had a good farm and fishing stand on Bar Island, but only a few fam- ilies tried to wrest a scanty living from the rocky soil of the point opposite. Between Duck Brook and Eddy's Brook there were only two houses. Below the bar Tobias Roberts had a boat landing and kept a small store, and in the sixties he began to take boarders, most of them artists or explor- ers, who, like Mr. Carter, wandered over from Southwest Harbor. The greater part of the pre- sent village north of Main Street is built on what was Captain James Hamor's farm. The Higgins homestead, where Church, the artist, boarded, stood near what is now the corner of Main and Cottage streets, and the present Mount Desert Block covers the site of the barn. Another Hig- gins family lived in what is now the Wayman Lane district near Cromwell's Harbor.
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In twenty years, from a desolate tract of rough pasture land, bearing a few humble farm dwell- ings, Bar Harbor grew to be one of the most popular resorts on the New England coast. Gradually the exquisite beauty of the position of Bar Harbor, backed by the great hills and look- ing out on the island-gemmed bay and across to the Gouldsboro' hills, began to be talked about.1 In 1867 Tobias Roberts built a primitive little
1 " No one would venture to describe the main street of Bar Harbor as handsome or attractive. It rises steeply from the steamboat wharf, and its lower part is adorned ' by a mushroom group of tents and shanties, the summer home of the almond- eyed laundryman, the itinerant photographer with a specialty of tintypes, and the seller of weary looking fruit, of sandwiches that have seen better days, and temperance drinks of gorgeous hues.' Farther up, bordering the board walk, there is a row of stores 'the proprietors of which perch, like birds of passage, pluming themselves in the sunshine of the brief season, and tak- ing flight again before the autumn gales.' In one window a lot of Turkish finery looks curiously exotic, especially the little slip- pers, gay with tassels and embroidery, turning up their pointed toes as if scorning the stouter footgear which tramps along out- side. Another shop is bright with the crude colors of Spanish scarfs and pottery ; in another, Japanese wares manage to keep their faint smell of the East in spite of the salt northern air, and farther on you may wonder at the misplaced ingenuity of Florida shell jewelry, and be fascinated by the rakish leer of the var- nished alligator. By one of the contrasts which make Bar Har- bor peculiarly attractive, next door to these cosmopolitan shops there still thrives one of the indigenous general stores, where salt fish are sold, and household furniture and crockery, and the candy peculiar to New England stores and New York peanut stands, which keeps through all vicissitudes a vague odor of saw- dust, and where you may also buy, as was once advertised by the ingenuous dealer, 'baby carriages, butter, and paint.'" F. Marion Crawford, Bar Harbor, 1896.
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hotel called the Agamont, and the next year, backed by Captain Deering and the steamboat company, built a wharf, and Captain Deering, who had heretofore called only at Southwest Harbor, began to make landings with the steamer Lewiston at Bar Harbor, too, and the village began to grow. The wharf was later acquired by the railroad company, and, greatly enlarged, is still the principal landing-place.
Daniel Rodick, whose ancestors had settled on Bar Island a hundred years before, built the nu- cleus of the later Rodick House very early. The Bay View House followed in 1869. This was later vastly enlarged into the Grand Central and finally removed. The Atlantic was built in 1870, burned and rebuilt in 1873, and later became the Louisburg. The first part of the Newport was built in 1871, the Saint Sauveur was rebuilt after being burned in 1873, the Rockaway in 1873, the Deering, afterwards enlarged into the Malbor- ough, in 1873, the Ocean House in 1874, the Bel- mont in 1879, the West End in 1880, and so on.
Bar Harbor was at first a primitive place, and those who lived at the hotels and boarding-houses of the earlier days had to exist largely on climate and scenery. The village was an unkempt ag- glomeration of big wooden shanties, and the life of the "rusticators " was altogether of an out- of-door character, easy-going as to costume, and informal as to manners and customs. Gradually,
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following slowly and hesitatingly the increasing demand for comforts and luxuries, the hotels grew larger, and the bill of fare took on novel- ties and French names. The decade from 1875 to 1885 was the period of the prosperity of the hotel life, the "Fish Pond " at Rodick's was famous all over the country, and the name of Bar Harbor was synonymous with a gay, uncon- ventional, out-of-door existence, with merry court- ships and happy, irresponsible days. The first " cottage " was built in 1867 when Mr. Alpheus Hardy bought Birch Point of Stephen Higgins for $300, and other simple homes for summer occupancy followed, but not till about 1880 did the rapid change from hotel to cottage life begin. Then the value of land rose by the hundred per cent., superb houses began to be built, streets were laid out, sewers constructed, water and elec- tric lights introduced, beautiful estates painfully developed from the rocky pastures, clubs and churches organized, and in ten years the whole social life and atmosphere of the rapidly increas- ing summer colony was transformed. Now the great hotels stand empty and desolate, though some of the smaller houses maintain a prosper- ous existence. An agreeable luxury, for the most part refined, though occasionally ostentatious, has replaced the earlier rudeness of board and lodg- ing, and "the season " is a matter of dinner dances, musicales, yachting parties, and balls, in
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the place of "hops," buckboard rides, and pic- nics.
In 1880 Northeast Harbor was a scattered community of farming and fishing folk living in small houses along the shore. There were two families, the Savages and Robertses, at the head of the harbor, one farmhouse on the eastern shore, and the Frazier place on the western shore. There were no houses at all where the " village " now clusters thickly, and one walked through thick woods to Squire Kimball's home- stead where the Kimball House now stands. On the shore of the harbor, to the south of the pre- sent wharf, stood the store where Mr. Kimball had once carried on a considerable trade with the coasters and fishermen who came in for shelter. Along the road leading up the sound were the houses of the Smallidge, Gilpatrick, Manchester, and Fennelly families, and the rough road ended at the Corson farm near the present golf club. The unpainted schoolhouse stood to the north of where the Schoolhouse Ledge road joins the town road. There was no church. The Gilpatricks kept a little store in connection with the post- office, and Mr. Corson drove the mail down from Somesville twice a week. The nearest steamboat connection and telegraph office were at South- west Harbor. People taking the twenty-two mile drive from Bar Harbor passed along the eastern
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side of the harbor, but never came down the western side. "The little hamlet," writes Bishop Doane, " was entirely without the modern con- veniences and comforts ... the roads were very poor, there was no sufficient water supply, there was hardly a vehicle of any kind to be had at this end of the island, it was reached only by rowing or sailing from Southwest Harbor and it lay really unrecognized and unknown."
In 1880 a company of Harvard students, under the lead of Charles Eliot, pitched camp on the eastern shore of Somes Sound just above the house of Mr. Asa Smallidge, and there pursued some amateur scientific studies for two summers.1 In 1882 this camp of the Champlain Society was transferred to the head of Northeast Harbor near Captain A. C. Savage's house, and remained there two years. After the camp of 1880, Charles Eliot advised his father, President Eliot of Harvard College, to seek a site for a summer home some- where on the coast between "our camp ground on Somes Sound and Seal Harbor. Somewhere on that line you will find a site that will suit you - a site with beautiful views of sea and hills, good anchorage, fine rocks and beach and no flats." President and Mrs. Eliot accordingly ex- plored that shore, - on which at that time not a
1 For description of the Champlain Society and picture of its camp, see Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, pp. 25-28, and the Introduction of Rand and Redfield's Flora of Mount Desert.
NORTHEAST HARBOR
FROM SARGENT'S MOUNTAIN
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single summer residence had been built, - bought the hundred acre lot which includes the ridge of Asticou Hill and some other shore frontage, and built the house which they still occupy. In the same year Mr. J. H. Curtis of Boston bought the farm on the eastern bank of the harbor with the western slope of Asticou, and built a lodge on the hillside. It was also in the summer of 1880 that Bishop Doane of Albany came to board at Squire Kimball's. " After spending August," he writes, "here in the most exquisite climate, with a delicious temperature and never a drop of rain or breath of fog, I was so captivated with the place that I bought a small bit of land." His house was built in the following winter and spring. It came about naturally that friends coming to visit one or another of these first summer resi- dents " were attracted by the beauty of the place, and one by one a bit of land was bought and a house was built by people who were all of the one mind, seeking real rest and the quiet, simple outdoor natural life which was all that the place then offered to any one, - because there was not even a hotel; and for the purchase of the very smallest necessities of life, barring the little old store by the harbor which had pretty much gone out of business, one had to go to Somesville or to Bar Harbor as best one could, over rough roads and in rickety wagons. The postal com- munication was twice a week, the mails being
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brought from Somesville, and the only telegraphic communication could be had by rowing over to Southwest Harbor. I remember well, in the ear- lier days here, so startling a thing as the assas- sination of President Garfield reaching us by the verbal statement of the mail carrier that it was said that the President had been shot, and nobody knew whether he was killed or not ; and we could get no news for at least four days as to what the real facts of the tragedy were. The only access to the island at that time was by boat from Port- land or Rockland, the railroad not having been completed at all to Mount Desert Ferry, or else by driving, as we often did, by stage from Ban- gor across country here."
" The character of this whole end of the island," continues Bishop Doane, "as it was represented by its prominent people, was very attractive. If there were time and room, it would be matter of much interest to tell of the lives of old Squire Kimball, of old Captain Whittemore and Mr. Corson, all of them men of marked characteristics ; and I recall to-day with infinite pleasure the leisure that I had of making the acquaintance of those old people, representing the sturdiest stock of the settlers and founders of this characteristic bit of New England. Many of them had lived lives of real adventure on the sea in long and perilous voyages. Some of them had won honors in their patriotic service of their
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country in the Civil War. The competency on which they lived simple and unspoiled lives, of home comfort and neighborly companionship, was gained by honest toil and careful frugality. They were quick-witted in their intercourse with one another and with us, fond of dwelling upon the old times, and full of reminiscences of the island in its early condition, intelligently interested in public questions of the time, and with a fresh and original way of putting things, which gave the zest of real raciness to their talk. And they were kind and cordial in all their attitude to us who came from the outside.
" There were certain difficulties and disadvan- tages in the remoteness of the place, but on the whole the life of constant contact with nature, untouched and unspoiled, in this marvelous at- mosphere, and the relations established with the people who lived here, more than compensated for whatever privations one had to bear.
"I remember a remark made in those days by one of the first of the visitors from the outside who came here, Dr. Gilman, then president of Johns Hopkins University, that as he recalled Northeast Harbor, there were three things of which he always thought, -the air that he breathed, the views that he looked at, and the people that he met, and he added, in his gracious way, 'whichever way I put them they make an ascending climax.'"
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In the early '60's James Clement and his sons and E. T. Lynam, his brother's son-in-law, were the only people living at Seal Harbor. They were engaged in fishing. At Jordan's Pond two lum- bermen, George N. Jordan and J. S. Jordan, had a more or less permanent camp. A rough trail for hauling out logs ran from the pond to the beach at Seal Harbor. Communication along the shore was wholly by water. There were then big trees growing on Pemetic and Jordan's moun- tains, but the great forest fire of 1864 swept all the southern slopes of the hills, burning not only the standing timber but the soil as well. The business of the Jordans was utterly destroyed. It was after the fire that Daniel Brewer, who had taken title from the Bingham heirs to most of the wild land between Seal Harbor and Otter Creek, began to sell it off at a dollar an acre. John Bracy, who lived at Bracy's Cove, bought a considerable tract, John Smallidge another tract, Gideon P. Dodge bought Ox Hill, selling it later to James Clement, 2d, and James Clement bought the slopes adjoining the original Clement land on the eastern side of the harbor. He then fenced his tract and raised sheep. His sons found the porgy business less and less profitable as the fish disappeared, and finally all agreed to try for summer boarders. An extra story was built on to the old house standing where the Seaside Inn now is, and "rusticators " began to discover the
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