USA > Maine > Hancock County > Bar Harbor > The story of Bar Harbor, an informal history recording one hundred and fifty years in the life of a community > Part 11
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These conclusions are confirmed by the census of 1880. This, taken by Eben M. Hamor, contains information miss- ing from the earlier censuses; there is an impression about the terms in which entries are made that suggests that the man who made them knew the town. This census, for the first time, makes a distinction between Eden and the "Village of Bar Harbor." Eden is still the same old coastal town. It has one hundred farmers and farm laborers, thirty-two
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sailors and eight sea captains, as well as four ship carpenters and six blacksmiths. But change is coming to it, too. The cotton mill and the woolen mills still employ, between them, five hands. Twenty-eight carpenters find work in building. One entry speaks, in terms that would befit Monsieur and Madame de Grégoire, of a "Lady" with a son "living on his income." Of the one hundred farmers one is Charles Dorr, of Oldfarm, who does not need to make money, and who has living with him a son, George Buck- nam Dorr, listed as a student,-of whom more, much more, hereafter, in this narrative. There is a harness maker, Charles B. Pineo, and one William S. Wasgatt, who moves buildings for his livelihood. There is also a well remembered character, Robertoff, the Russian coachman with an Irish wife, who lived out near Otter Creek in a house built in the sensible Russian way over a stable, thus having only one heating problem. And clearly, there are now those in Eden who make their year's income out of the summer visitors.
As one runs through the entries for the village of Bar Harbor, this impression is confirmed. Now there appear many service industries. There are two telegraph operators, Cora Higgins and George H. Grant, of the Mount Desert telegraph line that was opened in 1871, with a facetious message (so legend runs) to the "Mayor of Eden." John Harden runs a livery stable; it is he who has cleared Harden farm, that will one day be the Kebo Valley Club golf course. Twenty-three men make their living as teamsters or livery- men-showing that there is profit in driving buckboards. There are eighteen hotel keepers, all but one natives of Maine. There are three "boatmen," who row and sail the summer folks, and only one sea captain. There is a junkman, Willard S. Hamor, and three grocers, J. B. Barry, Samuel E. Reed, and, above all, H. D. Sproul. Edson Higgins runs a
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"meat market," Walter D. Hodgkins a fish market. The Copp family have already opened their hardware store- still, like the Hodgkins fish market, a going concern in the same family hands. Fayette Rowe is a carriage manufac- turer, while Bryant Bradley and Fred Wadsworth compete, one being a Photographic Artist, the other just a photog- rapher. There are a musician, and a jeweler, as well as a physician, William Rogers.
Here, where once Tobias Roberts had to petition to have a town way laid out, is now a growing center. The reason for this is to be found in four entries. William A. Jordan builds houses on contract. Everard N. Greely is a "specu- lator in houses." De Grasse Fox is a real estate agent. Charles How "oversees real estate," and lives with De Grasse Fox. Such employment classifications show that a land and con- struction boom is on, which is paying for this develop- ment.
This land and construction boom is on because the sum- mer life of Bar Harbor is changing. In 1878 Benjamin Franklin De Costa, now himself a cottage owner, could write: "There is much life and gaiety in the season at Mount Desert and the visitor will find the same varied society usually seen at watering places; the bad element excepted. There is much sociability amongst the people at the hotels and less regard is paid to the strict conventionalities that prevail at many summer resorts." This shows already a change from the earlier sort of visitor, whom Parkman described as "the wandering artist, the roving collegian bivouacked on the shore, the pilgrim from stifled cities renewing his jaded strength in the mighty life of nature." It is a change that progresses steadily. In 1881 the Boston Traveler writes of "more dressiness now than at the opening of last season," of "natty dark blue suits giving place to
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yellowish flannel for young men and maids," of "yachts vieing with mackerel" in the harbor, and of there being money in a toll road up Green Mountain, of the number of permanent boarders being greater than at similar times in previous years.
The simple customs of Bar Harbor began to change under this prosperity, and how they changed can be re- corded here, for Joseph W. Wood, a business man who had run various stores, now began publishing the Mount Desert Herald. From it can be learned that Mr. R. H. Mehesey actually put an awning over the buckboard that ran to his Eagle Lake House. Here pride came before a fall, because a "liquor violation" was pinned upon him, and others took over the Eagle Lake House, which had grown from the pier and rowboats of 1874. Still, prosperity increased, and a Village Improvement Association was founded, in the win- ter of 1881, after the summer folks had gone. But it was short-lived.
Other improvements-if they were such-came in 1881. By August there were five telephone circuits in operation and "a system of additional bells now so arranged that calls are not heard by others, save in case several subscribers are on the same circuit." So it was that four hotels, a livery stable, Bee's Store, and Dr. Amory were linked together.
The town might feel safe too, as it saw "our new steam fire engine" throw a stream of water a hundred and sixty feet through an inch-and-three-quarters nozzle, at the end of five hundred feet of hose. After a trial, at the March meeting, the town formally bought the engine, and that winter Fountain Rodick organized the official volunteer fire department, whose records lie to this day in the fire- house. Two years later the engine more than justified its purchase, by stopping the Strawberry Hill fire from cross-
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ing the Otter Creek Road and destroying the woods on Newport Mountain.
Another invention came to town, the next year, when enthusiasts founded an electric light company, which by 1887 could take over the Phoenix roller-skating rink, and could look forward to handling not only the one thousand lamps contracted for, but, if need be, four thousand more. Indeed, by 1889 such was the advance in illumination that the selectmen installed twelve street lights, ten of which, interestingly enough, are at intersections now controlled by traffic lights. In electricity competition arose, and Mr. Rodick of Hancock, in the State senate, could introduce a petition in the session of 1883 for another telegraph line, which in 1889 joined up with the Postal Telegraph system. In 1883 the Casino skating rink opened, vaunted at the time to be the largest rink in New England, just as the Rodick House was the largest hotel.
There were, too, creature comforts. A Mr. Morse sug- gested to the Rodicks that salt-water bathing would be pleasant if the water were not so cold, and, in due course, bath houses were installed on the newly opened West Street. Their existence reflects on an age when Bar Harbor hotels could limit the number of candles used by guests, and a hotel keeper could fly in a rage when a bridegroom cut can- dles into small pieces to increase illumination for his wife. Even in the 1880's Bar Harbor was still primitive. That, however, was why it was growing. It was a low-cost town, where ship carpenters built hotels quickly, where money came from a big turnover rather than a few high-priced deals, where quantity rather than quality was the secret of success, where there was much money in transportation.
Here it was that the struggle was joined against an outside invader, who sought to make money in mass transportation.
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In 1881 Frank Clergue, of Bangor, wrote to Walter H. Dunton, the owner of the side of Green, now Cadillac, Mountain, asking permission to use his land. Mr. Clergue was a good, old-fashioned Yankee capitalist, willing to make money on whatever line seemed good, whether a fertilizer factory or the Persian empire. He had an idea that if it paid small boys to collect informal toll on the road up Green Mountain it would pay to haul people up to see the sunset and stay the night for the sunrise. He knew how to get measures through. Quietly, but legally, the offi- cial notices necessary for opening a railway were published. Before anyone knew it, the time for objections had come and gone, and the railroad commissioners held a "public hearing" on February 2, 1883. In the meantime, the survey had been made. A. F. Hilton, who later that year built the Megantic Railway by which the Canadian Pacific got access to salt water at Portland, spent the months of December, 1882, and January, 1883, prowling over the sides of Green Mountain. Of several suggested routes, the one chosen first proved best, and was duly reported as such.
The actual construction of the road was simple. When the snow cleared enough to permit work, rails were when possible bolted to the rock, being laid on ties cut a few feet from the roadbed, and hauled by oxen to where they were needed. To keep a good grade, occasionally, trestles were set up. Meanwhile, the hotel at the top of the mountain was transformed first into a boarding house for workmen, later into a combination hotel and restaurant that would sleep fifty and dine one hundred.
Naturally, with a man like Clergue at the helm, there was plenty of advertising of the Green Mountain Railway. The Bangor Mining Journal carried a laudatory account comparing the proposed road with that up Mount Vesuvius
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and that at the Rigi-with, of course, a puff for the con- struction car and the two passenger cars that were being built at Hinckley & Edgery's, in Bangor. Meanwhile, until the cars and the locomotive came, gravity furnished at least a one-way route down the mountain. The record for slide- board travel was one and one-eighth miles in one and one- quarter minutes.
The locomotive, when it finally arrived at Portland and was put on the wharf, proved too large for the City of Richmond to carry, and had to wait until the schooner Stella Lee could pick it up. Once brought to Bar Harbor, the locomotive had to struggle to reach its destination. It took fourteen horses to pull it from the wharf to a point between West and Cottage Streets. Then wheels were sub- stituted for the runners on which it had been slid, and by April 21, three days after the landing, it had reached Eagle Lake, having been, apparently, winched along the road. But there its troubles were not over. That was a bad winter on that lake; and in May, Alexander Cameron was ship- wrecked as he carried track material across it. So it was only when the snow melted, at the end of the month, that the scow of Richard Hamor-the builder of the original inn on the top of the mountain was still connected with things-carried the locomotive to the base of the tracks.
Locomotive and cars were all "high-behinds." They rode level, with tiny front wheels and large rear wheels, and backed down after they had gone up. The gauge was four feet, seven and a half inches, that of the Mount Washington cog railway, in which a legal change had been made on January 30, 1883, by a special legislative act. In the center was a cog rail, which engaged the locomotive's driving wheel, and allowed the locomotive to act as a brake going down. With the locomotive in place, and burning the wood
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that lay by the roadside, the completion of the work was easy. On May 10, two of Bar Harbor's professional photog- raphers, Bryant Bradley and a newcomer, C. A. Paul, were able to take shots of the new engine in motion. By May 30 a party of ladies, Mrs. F. J. Alley and the Misses Alley, and Mrs. W. P. Dickey and her daughter, of Bangor, were able to ride to the top of the mountain. On June 23 the great day came. The railroad commissioners were invited to make their formal inspection. The steamship Cimbria was chartered for the use of guests of the Green Mountain Railway, starting at 7 a.m., to arrive at Bar Harbor at 2 p.m., then to return the next day, while the more convivial guests were to return the day after, using the same tickets on the Queen City. These passengers were the first to follow the regular route set up, by horse-drawn "barge" from Bar Harbor to Eagle Lake, by the steamer Wauwinnet from Eagle Lake to the foot of the mountain, and then up the cog railway.
The venture proved a great success, winning praise from the highest circles. Did not Senator Hale, of Ellsworth, bring his friend and fellow senator, the great John Sherman of Ohio, who had just restored gold and demonetized silver, to the top of the mountain? In good Republican circles, what higher praise could be found than that? Or that the railway paid six per cent dividends, the first year, in spite of its expenses in fighting forest fires? Indeed, the Green Mountain Railway got "too big for its boots," and used methods not customary, it is to be hoped, in the State of Maine. For fear of competition by the carriage road, it blocked traffic by putting gates across the roadway. Naturally, these gates were pulled down. Then it sent to Bangor for sixteen men, who worked all night setting dynamite, and that dawn blew the charges and destroyed
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the road. This, however, was the last such effort, for when the carriage road was rebuilt, it was left alone.
The Green Mountain Railway had other plans at that time, and wanted public support. Clergue felt that if he got money from one railway, he could from another. One attempt at a railway on the island had failed, when he had tried to slip a clause into the special act about the railway gauge, to allow spur lines to go to "Bar Harbor, the top of Newport Mountain, Seal Harbor, Northeast Harbor, Somesville, Greening's Island, Bass Harbor, and Southwest Harbor." This trick Section 2 had been dropped in com- mittee. Now, in November, 1883 Clergue revived his plans. A "blurb" appeared in the Mount Desert Herald, announc- ing that the Green Mountain Railway wished to open the first electric railway in America to replace the "barge" line that carried passengers to Eagle Lake. Here, however, Clergue met his match; the summer colony swung into action, and showed what it could do to protect the island.
The struggle took place in front of the railroad com- missioners, who held a public hearing in the autumn, on November 3. For the proposed Mount Desert Railway Company, Clergue appeared. Against it were two lawyers, A. P. Wiswell, and Hannibal Hamlin himself. Whatever hopes Clergue had had must have been squelched when he saw the caliber of the opposition. If men affluent enough to pay for such representation opposed him, a man with a case as doubtful as his had no chance-as he doubtless knew from having been shouted down in a public meeting in Bar Har- bor, when he had tried to lessen opposition by suggesting a railway station near the Belmont Hotel in place of the wharf. Clergue was down, but not out. The records of the commissioners show that, with the utmost ingenuity, he kept the Mount Desert Railway Company legally alive until
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1890. However, he had other interests. His Mount Desert Fertilizer Company he transformed into the Bar Harbor Packing Company, a more genteel name. He founded a Mount Desert Land Company. And finally, as has been told, he quietly moved around the world, and exercised on the Shah of Persia his talents for salesmanship, to which en- deavor he went with the blessings of his local enemies.
His Green Mountain Railway soon fell on evil days. Its first dividend was its best. Soon it did not pay the railway to run large barges to Eagle Lake, since buckboards could take all the traffic. The transportation and land boom broke, and the railway quietly stopped running. In 1893 the end came. The Wauwinnet's boiler was taken out of her, with all her other fittings, and she was scuttled in Eagle Lake. A notice was given of a sheriff's sale, and the fittings of the railway were sold to pay its final debts. If the stock- holders put up the $ 100,000 Walter Dunton's daughter says they spent, they got remarkably little for their money.
Though the railway tracks were torn up, and the corpora- tion no longer existed, its engine still puffed on. In 1895, there was a disaster on Mount Washington. In desperation, the managers of that cog railway bethought themselves of the only other one of the same gauge, and sent for the Green Mountain Railway Company's engine.
If the Green Mountain Railway failed, and the Mount Desert Island Railway died aborning, a somewhat different fate befell the Shore Line. This was just older than the Green Mountain Railway, or just younger, depending on the basis of measurement. In January, 1882, a conference was held at Cherryfield. Delegates from towns in Washing- ton and Hancock Counties interested in the project of a shore-line railroad from Calais to Bangor were summoned to meet "a gentlemen, having full power to speak for an
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association of capitalists." A "liberal proposition" was presented to the convention-which in actuality turned out to be that if a town paid the railroad enough the railroad would be kind enough to build some tracks in it. It all started with the fanfare of a petition to congress to allow the building of an international bridge at Calais, and a mere request for the citizens of Bangor to subscribe, not pay, $12,000. Without more than the usual hitches, the road- bed was completed from Bangor to Ellsworth, in December, 1883, and in the spring of 1884 the Mount Desert Ferry was opened. Now by rail, and by the steamer Sebenoa, Bar Harbor had a direct connection with the outside world. Things had changed greatly since Thomas Cole made his slow visit to the island, taking a week to get there from Bar Harbor from Castine. Forty years had brought a differ- ence.
If the Gouldsborough Development Company is to be believed-which is, of course, optional-the shore line to Mount Desert Ferry and Hancock Point carried a phenom- enal amount of traffic. It is highly likely that it did, since this was the heyday, until the coming of motor traffic, of visits to Bar Harbor. But the rest of the shore line was another matter. This seems to have been fairly close to a "racket." In 1888 Russell Sage pumped some money into it, to enable it to go on, but the Mount Desert Herald re- ported an ugly story of building two miles of track at Calais, at one stage, to get a guarantee, and then quitting. At last the line did reach Calais, and it is now the Calais sleeper that in winter brings passengers to Bar Harbor.
This new facility, by means of which Bar Harbor and Frenchman's Bay could be reached, changed land values. As early as 1883, the Bar Harbor Land Company had been formed. The year 1887, which saw the coming of the day-
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time all-Pullman Bar Harbor Express, also saw a rash of land companies breaking out. The Mount Desert Herald listed the values of the stocks of six: The Frenchman's Bay, the Sullivan Harbor, the Lamoine and Mount Desert, the Lamoine and Bar Harbor, and the Penobscot. It could have listed seven more: The Mount Desert and Tremont, the Mount Desert (in which Frank Clergue was a leader) , the Mount Desert and Eastern Shore, the Mount Desert Real Estate Company, the Mount Desert Land and Im- provement Company, the Mount Desert and Maine Coast Land Company, and the Mount Desert and Penobscot Bay Real Estate Company, all of whose names can be found on the list of deceased corporations in the secretary of state's office in Augusta. There was something in all this, for these were the days when the Vanderbilts bought Ogden Point for $100,000. However, much of this land activity was sheer gambling, as is shown by the fact that only the French- man's Bay Land Company was selling its stock above par in 1888.
The rivalry of the business men of the town was intense. On July 24, 1887, the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe -or, rather, their local agents-went so far as to charter rival vessels for a race for the Sunday paper, Sunday being the day on which the Rockland steamship lay over in Frenchman's Bay. But as all hands knew the reputation for speed the Mount Desert had achieved, and was to keep till the old J. T. Morse replaced her, the race was thought to be a joke and an advertising trick. Indeed, so obviously was there something "fishy" about the whole build-up of the usual Sunday sail around the bay that Mr. Bee cagily realized that something was wrong. He therefore took his excur- sionists to Hancock Point, loaded on the Heralds, returned to Bar Harbor, unloaded them, and then put off again, to
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spend half an hour cruising in Frenchman's Bay with his somewhat puzzled shipload of sightseers. Among those sightseers, as he had shrewdly suspected, was a "secret agent" of the Globe, who had had hopes of sneaking his wares down to the wharf in the crowd, but had to fume and fret at sea while his competitor cornered the market.
What was happening was that Eden-Bar Harbor was growing up, in the field of economics. In 1887 the Bar Harbor Banking and Trust Company was formed, the firm of Grant & Little having become tired of cashing checks and seeing the banking business go out of town. In 1885 competition came in the water business. Charles How, then engaged in development, secured the incorporation of the competing Eden Water Company. The Rodick interests, at the same time, secured the right to enlarge the capital stock of the Bar Harbor Water Company to $250,000. A showdown between the two water companies came in 1887. How employed the services of Maine's "Grand Old Man," James G. Blaine, of Augusta and Bar Harbor, to present his case before the judiciary committee at Augusta. But the Rodick interests fought back. They showed that whatever profits they had made had been counterbalanced by the cost of replacing Edwin Des Isles' open flumes with iron pipe, and that they were giving Bar Harbor full service.
Quite rightly, the Mount Desert Herald gave full space to this piece of news, and to the Portland paper's comments on it. For here was epitomized the struggle that must take place if the Town of Eden, rapidly being overshadowed by Bar Harbor, was to call its soul its own. Either Bar Harbor would own itself, or outsiders would own it. On one side was a man who failed only by chance to become President of the United States, the year he opened his campaign from his Bar Harbor summer home; on the other side were a
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boarding-house keeper whose boarding house had grown and a fisherman whose fortunes had risen. Behind the great statesman were outsiders from New York and Philadelphia; behind the local business men were their fellow residents of Eden. And when it appeared that the local business men could manage their own affairs, and it was so proved in spite of Blaine's silver tongue, it was clear that Bar Harbor was a summer resort that would preserve its independence.
This was not the only issue where outside pressure had benefited the town. The Eden Water Company-which, in fact, never supplied any water-had acted as a spur to the Bar Harbor Water Company, to improve its service. In another case, but in a different way, pressure from out- side caused the Town of Eden to consider the problem of sewers. What had been done in 1873 and the years after- wards was adequate enough for the care of hotels in the village of Bar Harbor, and they were successfully made typhoid-free. But the problem of taking care of homes now came up. As was shown by the formation of the Mount Desert Construction Company and the Mount Desert Building and Improvement Company, a new form of wealth was coming to Bar Harbor, the "cottage" trade. If the many visitors who had come to know and love the village were to stay, they must have permanent homes, and if they were to have permanent homes they must have sanitation geared to a different set of needs. It was all right for the individual cottages at Schooner Head, that had been built near the Lynam farmhouse to have their own private sewers; such short sections of pipe running to the sea were not expensive. But for any growth of houses within "car- riage-drive" distance of Bar Harbor there must be more than that. And such growth was pressing fast. These were the days when the Ocean Side became comparatively
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deserted, when Schooner Head sank back to its present un- importance, and when the long rows of houses on the Bay Side grew up to make their impression of splendor on travelers by land and on yachtsmen anchored in the Bay.
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