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 12
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Consequently, the issue was presented to the town squarely, at a meeting in May, 1887. At Salisbury Cove the town voted, willingly, to issue bonds that would pay for a full-scale sewer system. By this action Eden voted, willy- nilly, to become Bar Harbor. The Maine coastal town of fishermen and farmers and ship carpenters was betting its own property that it could make a profit as a summer resort, for the default of a bond issue allows the sale of private property.
Bar Harbor, once a resort for a few friends of Thomas Cole, was now seeing many a distinguished visitor. It almost became a summer capital of the United States. In 1884, Professor Charles W. Young was almost pestered to death by office-seekers who thought he was James G. Blaine, counted on as sure to be President. In 1888 the presence of Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney, and of the wife of Daniel S. Lamont, secretary to President Cleveland, filled the town with political rumors. The legend that President Cleveland held a cabinet meeting at the Reading Room is, alas, untrue, although as ex-President he met there political supporters and probably engaged in political plan- ning. Proof that President Harrison came to Bar Harbor to visit Secretary of State Blaine is preserved in the Sawtelle Collection at Isleford. There can be found one of the cigars handed out on that auspicious occasion, complete with its printed commemorative wrapper. Blaine's presence at- tracted many an ambassador or minister to seek refuge from the Washington heat at Bar Harbor.
Certainly, the town became a social capital of the United
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States, so that the writer of a guidebook of 1890 could say, of those walking down the village street:
"Here come Peepy Marshmallow and Lina Van Rooster, Chicky Chalmers and Poodle Van Ulster, and the Hon. Hare Hare; and there in the background, in their moiré and black lace, are Mrs. Gatling Gunn and Mrs. Wellman Heis- deck, and even Mrs. Stylington Ribblehurst herself."
On the boardwalks that did duty as sidewalks, as well as in the big room of the Rodick House-known far and wide as the "Fish Pond," where young women fished for young men-a new sort of visitor to Bar Harbor led his or her social life. Rank and fashion had come to the village and had changed its ways. Some might not like it. A flower painter might say, as she moved away, "If I were to come again next year I should expect to see the rocks and trees all decorated with lace flounces and bows of ribbon." But others would come in her stead, and the economy of the town would be built around those who came and stayed. When Alpheus Hardy of Boston, in 1867, built his cottage, little did he know it, but he transformed Bar Harbor.
7 The Summer Colony
T HE SUMMER colony of cottagers had become deeply rooted in Bar Harbor by 1890, though "cot- tage" may seem a misleading description of some of the houses that had been built. One such was Mrs. Bowler's "Chatwold," that had been passed on to Joseph Pulitzer, and to which had been added his famous but not too suc- cessful "tower of silence," where the almost blind old wizard of the newspaper world could be at peace from the noises that disturbed his sensitive ears. Another such, more modest by far but still hardly a cottage, was "Stanwood," from which James G. Blaine had opened his campaign for the Presidency in 1884, and which his biographer calls a "man- sion." Yet others, built or building, were "Kennarden Lodge," first owned by John P. Kennedy and now by Mrs. John Dorrance; the Edgar Scott house, torn down after Major Scott's death in the Philippine Sea, in the tragic sink- ing of a Japanese prison ship by an American submarine; the Vanderbilt house at Point d'Acadie, still a center of hospitality, but in other hands; "Bogue Chitto," whose building by John A. Morris of Louisiana evoked a burst of applause in the Mount Desert Herald; and many another house to which the word "cottage" might not seem to apply.
Yet though it might seem, "mock humility," of which De Quincey wrote, to speak of a "cottage with a double coach house," in one sense the word "cottage" still fitted the homes of the Bar Harbor summer colony. The old free-
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and-easy spirit of the first summer visitors still hung over its life-and, for that matter, it still does. On social matters no one, not even a historian looking back, can be authorita- tive. Every social group has its own estimate of its own importance, and will, automatically, disagree with any rating or estimate; just that sort of special reason probably brings that social group together. But it is possible to say that such and such a resort has such and such general repu- tation and shows such and such general tendencies. And with that point in mind, it is possible to say that Bar Har- bor stood in the top rank in America in fashion-if that is the right word-and linked in popular estimation with Newport. Of all the summer resorts that were then fashion- able, it had perhaps the easiest and most tolerant social life.
The reasons for this go back into the early history of the summer colony. As has been told, originally it had been a colony of artists and their friends, and of scientists and hunters. The pleasures of early days had been "rocking," sketching, and canoeing. The more permanent summer residents, as contrasted with those who came for short week-end trips, had first lived in hotels or near hotels, before moving into cottages that were true cottages. They had built up their social life on the assumption that anyone who took the trouble to make the then long trip to Mount Desert Island shared common interests and could be trusted to live up to common standards. Consequently, when whole fami- lies took to coming to Bar Harbor, the chaperonage rules of the Victorian era were relaxed, though still formally in force. Girls were allowed to walk, drive, and canoe with young men far more readily than at home. For, as Robert Grant pointed out, in his "Plea for Bar Harbor" a tippy canoe was in itself a chaperone, which automatically pre- vented a young man from being too forward. Naturally
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enough, marriageable young women passed the word around, so that to Bar Harbor came the sort of person who wanted the combination of freedom and decorum to be found there. As the summer colony made itself permanent, it set up institutions that furthered this combination of decorum and ease. In their turn, those institutions preserved the old atmosphere for later times.
Prominent among those institutions were the old Oasis Club, which grew into the Reading Room, the Canoe Club, the Kebo Valley Club, the Pot and Kettle Club, and, later, the Swimming Club. Institutions-in another sense-were certain private houses, such as that of "Aunt Sue" Dimmock (Mrs. Henry F. Dimmock of Washington), where parties were traditional. Such houses, and the last three of the five clubs mentioned above, exist today, and the life of the summer colony can perhaps best be told in terms of the clubs, whose history is a matter of public record. But it should be realized that these were outward manifestations of an inward social life that cannot yet be recorded. Perhaps, when in the future some diarist publishes his or her Bar Harbor memories, or some novelist sets down the life of the present, we shall have such written record to go on. But until then, the story of the summer colony can be most fittingly told in terms of the institutions that have already directly or indirectly published accounts of themselves.
The Reading Room, historically the oldest of the meeting places, since it stems from the Oasis Club, was in its heyday much what the Reading Room at York Harbor is today. Originally, as the Oasis Club, it was a place where the men of the summer colony could be free from women's con- trol and find newspapers and, in circumstances winked at by the county enforcement officials, liquid refreshment. In 1881 it moved from its original brown cottage to a new
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and more splendid building, designed by the Boston archi- tect, William R. Emerson. This building has had an inter- esting subsequent history, having been taken over by the Maine Central Railroad and used first as a yacht club, then as the "Shore Club," and, finally, after a period as United States naval quarters in World War II, it now forms the base of the new hotel. In front of it stood a steel lattice- work pier, at which yachts could land their passengers, and on the upper level of which tea could be served. In front also stood a flag pole, that once, to the horror of all but one concerned, flew a Boer flag. The horror came from the presence, during the Boer War, of a visiting British squad- ron, mingling cordially with an American squadron. The flying of that flag, the angry representations of the Ameri- can admiral, the indignation of the members of the "Gen- tleman's Club," and the expulsion of the offender, naturally became a front-page story in the press. And for many years, from 188 1 to its collapse for financial reasons in 1921, the Reading Room served a useful purpose.
The economics of the Reading Room-all social institu- tions have an economic side-were simple. In days of low costs and plenty of visitors to Bar Harbor, the average summer resident of social standing was glad to pay ten dollars a year or so for a masculine hide-out, to which he could give his house guests a card, and which could contain a locker into which the sheriff might not inquire. And as long as these conditions existed, the Reading Room flour- ished. But when Maine's prohibition law was differently enforced, and when costs went up, the Reading Room was not worth the dues, and slowly sank away.
In the matter of prohibition and temperance Bar Harbor has seen fluctuations of opinion. In 1825 Elder Hunting founded the Mutual Temperance Society of Eden, with only
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fourteen members, against "much opposition even by Deacons and members of the church." By 1835, after the Elder had left town, it had 202 members. In the 1880's the Templars were strong, so strong that once, outraged by a drunken driving carriage accident they stormed through town forcing all liquor dealers to spill their stocks on the ground. Yet Sproul's Restaurant became nationally famous for the way it served wine in defiance of the "Maine Law," and by 1916 the Bar Harbor Times could editorially attack the appointment of sheriff's deputies as a waste of money since it was clear that they had no intention of earning their pay by enforcing the law.
Perhaps Bar Harbor's most typical club was the Canoe Club. For some reason unknown to present-day yachtsmen, men and girls who feared with reason the cold waters of Frenchman's Bay, and who refused to sail, confidently em- barked in canoes, which cannot have been too safe, and paddled around among the Porcupines. Of course, it soon became a minor local industry to rove among the Porcu- pines in rowboats, rescuing those who had fallen overboard or who had forgotten that the tide rises and had left their canoes to float away while they explored an island. Just the same, it is amazing to look back at the years in which ladies now less young and never of the reckless type had their swains paddle them about Frenchman's Bay, and never thought it out of the ordinary. Such is the effect of fashion. It was the thing to paddle a canoe, and one did so. Almost the only legend left is not a canoeing but a boating one, of how X landed on what is now called Bald Rock-but was then known by three other names, Smullidges', from time immemorial, "Isola Bella" to the lady who had bought it to preserve it from the desecration of that name, and -'s Rock to those who could not quite see "Isola Bella"
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as the name for a piece of granite off the Maine coast. Many a dinner party has been regaled by the story of how X's boat and his clothes floated away on the tide, and how he struggled after it, fearing telescopic observation and shiver- ing every time a gust of a light norther blew the gunwale out of his grasp. The informal boating of those days soon became formalized. The ever-useful Rodick family had a site on Bar Island on which was established a canoe house, safely away from the waterfront of West Street and to be reached at low tide by a walk or carriage ride, at high tide by a fee and a ride in a hired boat. At the Club House were established the ever-present Indians of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes, who would give instruction in the fine art of paddling or themselves furnish propulsive power. And at least thrice a year, the ladies of the Canoe Club would entertain at tea, sending out engraved cards to an- nounce the event.
This club, too, flourished as long as it served a need. When there was still a large visiting population, some of which came by yacht, the full harbor offered a great inducement to canoeing. When the New York Yacht Club fleet was in, one could in one afternoon easily see a large number of one's friends from New York and the rest of the Atlantic sea board, by lazily paddling around Bar Harbor from Bar Island to Sheep Porcupine. Then, as the hotel life lessened, and as the Passamoquoddy and Penobscot Indians found other things to do, the Canoe Club died away, being re- placed in the scheme of things by the Swimming Club. For the Canoe Club depended on young men who wanted to paddle canoes, and in these days young men either drive cars or go to the north woods. And so Bar Island saw less and less social life. As late as the 1920's, there was still one cottage on the island, but the daughter of the house found,
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after one sad experience, that her swains did not like to drive her home through the rising tide on the bar, even in a car with a high clearance.
Perhaps the most colorful Bar Harbor institution is the Pot and Kettle Club. It was founded in 1888 by members of the so-called Fishhouse Club of Philadelphia, and their friends. In the winters they had been accustomed, of a Sunday, to retire to the freedom of an island in the Schuyl- kill River. There, in their "State in the Schuylkill," free from the outside world, they would cook their own meals, to their own taste, and then, stimulating their appetite with "Fishhouse Punch," in which brandy, rum, tea, and certain secret ingredients are so mixed as to be comparatively harmless, they would enjoy the food they had cooked and each other's company. In such company, with men of affairs who knew one another well, talk is frank and free. In the summers, on another day in the week, the members of the Pot and Kettle enjoyed the same pleasures, in similar ways.
The customs of the Pot and Kettle resemble those that the Fishhouse has allowed the Saturday Evening Post to describe. The presiding officer for the day is the "Caterer," who is responsible for both physical and mental entertain- ment. He settles questions of menus and sees to it that there is a member or a guest who has something to say that is worth hearing. What is there and then said is "off the record." What has been said can be inferred, after the passage of time, from the guest book, where are to be found, among others, names of William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. (There was some to-do about adding Mr. Truman's name. He visited the club as Senator Truman of the war investigating committee, when on a semi-secret
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trip with his colleague Senator Brewster, and happened not to sign as a guest. It later occurred to the club secretary that this omission was a huge mistake, when such a tradition of Presidential visits had been built up, and the book was, for once in the club's history, taken from the clubhouse; then, in the White House, the President added his signature.)
There are many ways to reach the Pot and Kettle-when invited. In the old days many a yacht managed somehow to drop anchor off its pier, and the Bar Harbor Yacht has been known to call off a race at Googin's Ledge when a majority of the race committee belonged to the Pot and Kettle. Or so the legend goes-and who would stop a good legend for want of facts? And on days of the meeting many a member managed to sail up, no matter how rough the seas. Buckboards drove others up, as today automobiles. During all this time the Pot and Kettle has preserved its combina- tion of privacy and hospitality, and should be left in that privacy. In the strictness of its membership rules and the cordiality of its welcome to visitors, it typifies the aspects of the social life of Bar Harbor which are part of the history of the town.
Another club that survives is the Kebo Valley Club. Today this is a golf club, though in 1889 it began, at Arcadia Park, as a racing club. Then, as golf grew in favor -this was in the days of America's only seven-hole course, which Herbert Jacques laid out at Schooner Head, where three holes were dangerously close to the tees of the opposite pairs of holes-the Kebo Valley Club left to Edward Morrell the patronage of racing. It built a nine-hole course on the slopes under Cadillac Mountain, survived a fire in 1898, and flourished steadily. The racing that was otherwise organized evolved into the well remembered Bar Harbor horse shows. Year after year, until 1922, the horse show
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was one of the great events of the season. Many a house shows with pride the cups won in competition; many a fine handler of the "ribbons" showed his or her skill at that August event. It drew together many who would not other- wise enter into the social whirl, and made a focus for local life. It was only to the horse show that the children in Helen Train's Mile of Freedom went, in that happy summer she described, of idyllic peace away from the gay life of the resort. And, in a sense, it was the horse show that caused the great automobile war, whose story is a part of the history of the summer colony.
Bar Harbor, like Detroit, the other place that Cadillac founded, early saw automobile building. In the days when daring people put engines in buggies, took off the shafts, and smoked their way about, Paul Hunt, who is still among the living, varied his interests in architecture by build- ing an automobile; this was in 1896. In due course of time, automobiles increased in number, and consequently in disturbance to the horse-loving public. Men and women who came to Mount Desert Island for peace and quiet were vexed by this. They arose, being people of influence, and secured legislation to keep automobiles off the island. Just how this was done is not known, as the participants in the effort are now dead, and did not write down what hap- pened. Presumably, all sorts of influence was used. By that time Bar Harbor had established good connections at Augusta, and the legislation that was drafted had about it the marks of deft political handling. But this was not a purely Bar Harbor venture; the island summer colony was almost unanimous for it, under the leadership of such men as President Eliot of Harvard. And so it was that while much of the rest of Maine had cars, the horse lovers of Bar Harbor could drive on their roads in peace, confident
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that no "gasoline buggies" would frighten their favorite steeds.
This state of affairs did not meet with complete approval. The people of Bar Harbor were divided in mind. Some wanted to do as their customers wished. If summer folks wanted a haven for equines, and would pay for it, why not let them have the haven, and pocket their money? Others felt that the automobiles had rights, and that they, too, had money. Those it was who sniped at the law.
The first draft of the law had been softened, to ease its passage, by having a limit on the roads which could be used, those roads being the only ones by which the island could be reached. Obviously, the thing to do was to bring cars in by boat-and, of course, all that that meant was a legal change. No automobiles on wharves. At that challenge Leslie Brewer, in the spring of 1907, built a car locally, with a motorboat engine for power, but without a differential. This moved legally about the unrestricted streets, with some difficulty in steering, until the law was changed again. Mr. Brewer prizes the photograph he made of his automo- bile; the engine has long since returned to the sea whence it came. In 1909 a New York honeymooner took his turn and had his Oldsmobile towed by horses over the hills, keep- ing the motor running as he did so. The testimony, as given before Judge Clark in the municipal court was amusing, the result inevitable.
However, change had to come. It was perfectly easy to take a selected poll of summer residents and find them ninety-five per cent against cars. It was fun for Arthur Train to take time off from more serious fiction to write a futuristic skit about the death and destruction that would ensue when cars raged about the streets of Bar Harbor. It was feasible, when Mr. Sherman presented a petition for
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cars, to employ the late Luere B. Deasy as counsel in the hearing, and have him tie Mr. Sherman up with quotations from his own guidebook. But the fact was that a growing number of the people of Bar Harbor wanted two things- the automobile tourist trade and the chance for local doctors to get to their patients in time. Pressure grew. It was, for a time, held back by influence. This time it is known how- for the late George B. Dorr wrote down the story-by money used in the legislature; it was, to use President Arthur's indiscreet phrase, "spent where it would do the most good." Here it was, Mr. Dorr relates, that he stepped in. In his many schemes for the island, he had secured a route for an electric railway, never built; this he offered now as a potential automobile road, to allow access to the town. He persuaded the anti-auto group in the summer colony to drop their more drastic methods and adopt the plan for a special road. By the quick action that was Dorr's characteristic in any lobbying he did, he secured partial consent from the group, and had the bill submitted before a recalcitrant element could talk their fellows into renewed stubbornness. In effect, this plan for a special road kept automobiles out for another year, for the road was never built. Though the Town of Eden voted its share of the cost, the expected contributions did not materialize. And the next year, permissive legislation allowed the towns of Mount Desert Island to vote for or against automobiles, and Eden voted for them. Soon the rest of the island fol- lowed, after a death had occurred because a doctor had had to drive by buggy from the town line. And, not unnat- urally, the horse show withered and died.
To return to the change in the summer colony in general: As the 1900's came on, both the cottage colony and Ameri- can life altered. As canoes went out, and as hotel after hotel
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closed, the summer life acquired a more permanent basis. A substitute was needed for "the Fish Pond" as a natural meeting place, and a substitute was needed for the old and not too good swimming baths. The natural answer was the Swimming Club, metamorphosed in 1929 into the present Bar Harbor Club. Its original purpose was to provide good salt-water swimming, at bearable temperatures, and tennis courts. Using the site to which the Oasis Club house had moved, when the Reading Room was founded, it put up a brown clubhouse, dug a pool, and became the equivalent of a local country club.
Having built such institutions as these, the summer colony by 1910 had established itself as a permanent ele- ment in the Town of Eden-so permanent an element that Eden soon changed its name to Bar Harbor. And, as a result, there are many who look back to the 1900's as the "golden age" of Bar Harbor's social life. Such a retrospect is natural. That was the time when there were still enough hotels to afford prosperity and extra sales for local market gardeners and shopkeepers, so that the cottagers could have their cake and eat it too, could have the advantages of an exclusive colony and of a populous resort. In retrospect, too, it is surprising to note how long the old service indus- tries held on. The Rodick House lasted on past 1900, to come down only because the successor to Daniel Rodick did not have either his personal touch or his clientele. Sproul's restaurant, still defying the Maine law-hung on, too, until it also went the way of all service enterprises that rely on the touch of one aging person. And so, one by one, went the landmarks of the old pre-cottage era.
Meanwhile, the cottage era bloomed. Tales are still told of how an ambassador of a country now seeking a loan from the United States (this should be inclusive enough for con-
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cealment) put lights all over Bar Island for a party to honor the young lady he was courting but did not succeed in marrying. The fire of 1947 destroyed a dining table made in that golden era, whose center used to sink through the floor to the kitchen, and, usually, rise again with another course; legend happily dwells on an occasion when it al- legedly sank not to rise again, leaving guests eating while looking into a void. It was in Bar Harbor that Mrs. John Jacob Astor, widowed by the sinking of the Titanic, chose for the scene of her remarriage. Rightly, she felt that she thus could escape publicity, and succeeded in doing so, thanks to excellent co-operation by the authorities of St. Saviour's Church. The waiting camera men, hoping for one of the first motion-pictures of news events, were foiled, deftly, by the use of an alternative door. Such are randomly chosen stories of that era that may help illustrate the back- ground of the summer colony.
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