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 13
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There are other ways for taking a somewhat objective look at the summer colony. One is through real-estate transactions. Now that deeds no longer tell the price of land but run "for one dollar and other valuable considerations," the Hancock County registry of deeds no longer tells at which price who moved in and who moved out. But an eager follower of the real-estate transactions on the Bar Harbor Times can learn the steady flow of new personalities into the Bar Harbor summer colony. Former owners died, and the next generation had, perhaps, other ideas. Yet in their places came new buyers, bringing new life to the com- munity. As long as fluctuations in value are not too ex- treme, either a rise or a fall in property can be helpful. When good houses are cheap, new owners move in, induced by bargains to settle permanently. When houses are hard to get, building takes place, and higher standards are set as
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modern improvements come in. But though there has been a flow of new blood into the summer colony, there has been a surprising loyalty to it. Families come year after year, generation after generation. They will cling to their prop- erty, renting instead of settling, and pay flying visits off season. Then, suddenly, they will reappear. Naturally, many things attract them; one is the special character of the life. This serves to bring in new blood as well as to keep loyal the old supporters of the colony.
Here again, there is another means for observing the summer colony with some objectivity, this time through the fiction of the past that has dealt with the cottagers. It shows that Bar Harbor, for all the high standards it sets, accepts newcomers readily. The ways in which new blood comes in vary. Usually it is a matter of introduction by visiting friends, or residence at a hotel, then gaining a liking for Bar Harbor and buying. Bar Harbor's social ease has done its work again. (This does not mean that John Doe can walk into Bar Harbor, ring anyone's doorbell, and be invited in to make himself at home; it does mean that John Doe, when he has made proper contact, will feel at home quickly.) Francis Marion Crawford, the novelist, in the 1890's wrote not one but two books about this cordiality. One was Number Three, of Harper's summer resort series. It tells the usual stories about boardwalks and buckboards and canoes and flirtations. The other was a pot-boiler novel, Maidens Call it Love in Idleness, which winds up with the lady accepting the gentleman in a canoe. In both, one can see how Bar Harbor of the 1890's led the social world in ease-or, as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon put it, in effect Bar Harbor was a place where nice Philadelphia girls taught slowgoing Bostonians how to flirt. It is noteworthy
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that Crawford, as did Robert Grant, made it perfectly clear that the standards of behavior were high. Similar evi- dence, though of an earlier time, is to be found in Henrietta Rowe's A Maid of Bar Harbor, with its thumbnail sketch of the cordial little dandy who explains life to the returning Civil War veteran, after a chance introduction. A different slant, but the same basic idea, is to be found in a letter which Professor Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, wrote to the Boston Transcript in 1896; in it he asserted that Bar Harbor was the place in America where the best conversation was to be found. A similar-though not, in that case, unprejudiced statement-is to be found in the writings of Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane, after a visit to George B. Dorr made in 1918.
All this adds up to the fact that several keen observers saw that in the early cottage days Bar Harbor had a cata- lytic effect on people, and made it easy for them to get to- gether. This is just as true for the period after World War I. Much of the summer population changed. The names of Astor and Vanderbilt drop out of the cottage directory, to be replaced by others as prominent. But the cottage direc- tory that records the names has the same general effect. An American social historian could consult it and say: "Here is a paradox; here are the owners of very varied industries, some highly competitive, the managers of certain great fortunes, who come from cities a thousand miles apart, living cheek by jowl." He could then expatiate, if he wanted to get away from the point, on the curious combinations that were neighbors. But in doing so he would go wide of the mark. What the cottage directory shows is a social and not an economic process at work. And to understand the meaning of neighbors living beside neighbors, emphasis
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should not be put on wealth of some, but on the mingling by all. The names in the directory that do not have eco- nomic importance have equal social importance.
Here it might not be amiss to put in a paragraph or two of philosophical reflection, which may be skipped by those who care not for such things, and read by those who want a few words on "social significance," in the other sense of "social," in the Bar Harbor summer colony. For Bar Harbor is a national phenomenon, even an international one, and the name is sometimes used as a by-word for wealth at ease, such is the reputation it has acquired. What does such a reputation mean to a community, what effect does it have on the community?
An answer is, recreation can be considered just as much an industry as any other. To the extent to which Bar Harbor is a one-industry town, which it is not, or a town with one major industry, which it is, the circumstances of that industry control the town. Since many citizens of Bar Har- bor sell their services during a short period of the year, they tend to provide in the summer for the winter's income. Or, conversely, they follow their clients from summer resort to winter resort. Because there is much purchasing power in town, it has become a shopping center. These tendencies are what might be expected.
There is, however, another tendency. The cottage trade, compared with the hotel trade, is a long-term one, and long- term businesses demand a reputation for integrity. There are constant arguments as to costs, but, generally speaking, the free-market economy of the United States in general and Maine in particular sees to it that the customers stay satisfied and the suppliers of recreation stay in business. For so long as there is no monopoly or monopsomy-all one
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seller or all one buyer-the workings of competition will go on.
Now, in a competitive market, quality goods must be distinctive. What, then, does Bar Harbor have to offer as high-quality recreation? There the argument turns full circle, for what is offered is ease and relaxation, caused by and combined with natural beauty. So Bar Harbor sells a double brand of goods. On the one hand it sells fashion. It has its houses with butlers and footmen, where the young guests are awed by splendor-or amused, as the case may be. On the other hand, it has simplicity, so that a society maga- zine could jest that the custom of Bar Harbor was to have a big house and then a camp to get away from the house, and that soon the leaders of society would have camps in which to get away from their camps. Bar Harbor's essential quali- ties are still those which attracted to it the artists of the 18 50's. And the "cottage economy" of Bar Harbor, distant as it is from sources of wealth such as New York and Chi- cago, can attract the owners of wealth only as long as the type of freedom and ease marked by, say, the Pot and Kettle Club, sets the tone of the resort. Such a tone of freedom and high standards will remain as long as the purveyors of recreation keep their high Maine standards of integrity, and as long as the summer residents continue, through public opinion and the management of their special institutions, to uphold lofty standards of social behavior.
These thoughts, as applied to the present, are of course, the author's own interpretation. They are based on personal observation over a period of years, and the close parallel of what goes on today with what writers have seen in the past. They also fit in with the facts of the summer colony's institutions, as recently made public.
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Within two years, Major George McMurtry, who has since become the president of the Bar Harbor Club, com- piled an interesting history of its first fifteen years. Since he has used names, the owners of those names may not mind their being used again. That history tells how certain men-be it noted, many of them newcomers to Bar Harbor-decided to put the bankrupt Swimming Club on its financial feet. One of them, the late E. T. Stotesbury, purchased the majority of the stock of the Swimming Club. As a partner in a Morgan affiliate, it was doubtless not the first time he had bought a working control to put his ideas across. This was done in the summer of 1929. Subscriptions were obtained from various members of the summer colony who could afford to make them, an opportunity being given to the former members to "get in on the ground floor." With Mr. Stotesbury were associated, among others, a newcomer to Bar Harbor, A. Atwater Kent, of radio manufacturing fame, and the late Potter Palmer, of Chi- cago, a member of a family that was returning to Bar Harbor after an intermission; the family had founded the famous firm of Palmer and Leiter, and the Palmer House hotel, and had been legendary figures in Chicago society. This group floated a loan and proceeded to build a club- house as quickly as might be, wisely not waiting for bids, in the knowledge that they had better spend their construc- tion money fast while it was still available, before the stock market misbehaved further. It might be suggested, in passing, that this action may explain the good showing made by Bar Harbor in the study of relief made in 1939 (see Thorndike and Thorndike, Survey of the Town Relief Situation, 1939.) It seems a good description to say that the kind of clubhouse that was built was the kind that Messrs. Stotesbury and Kent and Palmer wanted and could afford.
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That club became what they intended it to be, the social center of Bar Harbor. For dances, swimming meets, and tennis tournaments, they extended its facilities on a broad basis, throughout the summer colony. The control they kept in the hands of those who were paying the bills, being perfectly willing to let who would do so join them. (Any- one who wishes to confirm these statements need only go to Major McMurtry's well written brochure and a copy of the published club rules.)
The Bar Harbor Club, as the brochure shows, has been managed as a club of rich, shrewd business men would be managed, when its directors aim at a balanced budget and their money's worth of comfort. It has slowly but steadily retired its bonded debt, and has served to make Bar Harbor a more enjoyable place, even for those who grumbled at the scale on which it was run. The published facts about the club suggest that the same social spirit as that of the 1890's is still at work. And a little genealogical research into the connections and interconnections of the old families of the summer colony will show that both new blood and old blood share in the management.
Again, take the Kebo Valley Club and its adventures. Captain John J. O'Brien, of the Hudson Motor Company, recently published its history, to celebrate its fiftieth an- niversary and its second rebuilding after fire. That history tells much the same story as in the case of the Swimming Club. Again and again those who loved the club made good its deficit. It was discovered, that, speaking in terms of economics, Bar Harbor could not support a public golf links. In 1916 there was a genuine attempt to start a public course, in which the management of the Kebo Valley Club heartily joined. George B. Dorr provided much of the needed land, from his purchase of the Harden farm. T. De
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Witt Cuyler put up the funds, amply, and persuaded the Town of Eden-as it still was-to share in the investment, in order to keep the course public. But the venture did not succeed, and the Kebo Valley Club bought the land to make its second nine holes.
In all the account that Captain O'Brien has given, what stands out is that after every "down" of the club there has been an "up," because its members were so fond of it. It is an unusual sign of vitality to have funds raised by dedicating holes to former members and have all the holes endowed, including one hole dedicated to the manager, who has been made an honorary member.
The Yacht Club, or clubs, show another side of Bar Harbor's life. Here a meteorological phenonemon comes into the picture. Ever since the days when Benjamin Church came to one side of Mount Desert Island with his whaleboats, while Le Moyne d'Iberville and his frigates and Father Thury and his canoes came to the other, sailors have known that the two sides of the island favored different types of vessels. At what used to be called Mount Desert South Harbor, between the Cranberries and the main island, there was always enough wind and not too much, thus affording the type of conditions needed for open-boat sailing, whether whaleboats in 1690 or the A and B boats of the North East Harbor Fleet. To the north, in the road- stead of Mount Desert, as Cadillac truly pointed out, a whole fleet could lie as if in a box, and canoes could safely ply their way, whether with Father Thury and his Indians or with Robert Grant's young lady safely chaperoned by the tippiness of the craft into which her swain had put her. Off Bar Harbor winds have tended to be lighter, but the swell has come in from the mouth of the bay. Sailing there has demanded the qualities that length gives a vessel, of
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higher speed and ability to keep moving when waves roll.
Consequently, for two reasons, one meteorological, one financial, Bar Harbor has favored large-size yachts. There was one period, of the Mount Desert Racing Association, when the Bar Harbor Thirties, a very sound type, as their subsequent owners realized, raced regularly. These were big enough to move through the water as did D'Iberville's frigates. Legend has it that the fleet broke up in a law suit, when an irate competitor discovered that the rules of the road for racing and the rules of the road under United States law were different, and that, in one set of circum- stances, you could ram a man who was winning a race from you, and collect damages. Unfortunately, the source of this legend is no longer alive, and it can be set down only as an example of what good legends exist. Anyway, after 1913 the association died a lingering death, the Thirties were dispersed to serve as cruisers, and, finally, no one could be found to pay the annual corporation fees; the association was listed in the secretary of state's files as a "dead corpo- ration."
In the late 1920's a new club arose. It hoped to have two boat classes, one for learners, one for the older and more expert sailors. The late Edsel Ford subsidized the design and construction of the very safe Mount Desert Island class for the smaller size. These, too, were good boats. In a light wind and no sail at all, they had surprising speed, and would then overhaul vessels of reputedly swifter and larger classes. But this happened about once every two years. Usually, since they had no overhang to speak of they just bobbed up and down safely, while other boats knifed ahead and left them far behind. And enough of the young sailors had enough money behind them so that when they were not interested in a docile learning period they either started out
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with the S. class or moved into it quickly. Thus, when the depression came, the Yacht Club gave up its lease of the old Reading Room and the hopes of building up younger sailors by small boats was given up. The Yacht Club had a surprisingly successful life when it consisted of a few enthusiasts, some buoys for courses, and a rented mark boat.
This Yacht Club was an accidental casualty of World War II. Its officials went off to fight and forgot where they put the club's records. So it automatically expired. Then, aided by a town subsidy a new organization, humorously insisting that it was the Bar Harbor Yacht Club, Inc., was created; it took no responsibility for the loss of the records, and incurred no legal penalties for not making an annual report. This new club hopes it has found the answer to the meteorological-financial problem of yacht racing, with its new Luders class that is both safe in sea and has a long overhang to make it move, with ability to carry sufficient sail, and yet small enough for amateurs to sail-in short, a combination of the virtues of canoe and frigate.
Here again, present events show something typical of Bar Harbor throughout the years. Here a combination of wealth and weather has hampered small-boat sailing and the sporting pleasures of yachtsmen. Wealth and weather have brought the use of a type of boat that is too expensive to allow a big sailing group, and lack of that group has weakened racing. But twice the demand for yachting has come to the fore, in spite of these handicaps; Bar Harbor, not thought of as a sportsman's resort, still has a yacht club in full activity.
Each of these accounts seems to have the same moral: The Bar Harbor summer colony, as seen through its active in- stitutions, has had true vitality, and keeps to this day the
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special characteristics that were created in the 1880's and 1890's.
This whole account is a generalization of the story of the summer colony. It has avoided personalities, except where names are already in print. There is another story of the summer colony-indeed, several other stories-contain- ing personalities whose rich flavor has made the summer colony what it is. That story can be obtained, or part of it can, from any summer resident who, not bound by the laws of libel, will talk "off the record." Indeed, if it be assumed that there are about 19,500 living summer residents, of the present or the past, it may be assumed also that a re- searcher or team of researchers could in the course of time get about 19,500 different stories. All would have a flavor that can only be hinted at here. Perhaps some day, fifty years or so from now, one or two of them will be set down. And then future readers will know why it is that people have continued to buy land at Bar Harbor.
8 Recent Events
T HE OLD Town of Eden, as its founders knew it, had in one sense come to the end of its life by 1890. There, as elsewhere, in a few years a change would take place that would alter Maine's nickname from "Pine Tree State" to "Vacationland." There were still loggers, but they would soon use portable power-saw mills. There were still farmers, but they would now be market gardeners rather than subsistence farmers growing their own food. There would be fishermen, but they would catch lobsters for the local markets, or for shipping in smacks to Portland or Boston. Foodstuffs would come in from outside and upset the town's economy, so that no longer would the typical resident of Eden be the logger-shipbuilder-farmer who had flourished up to the late 1850's, but a man engaged in some "service enterprise" connected with the resort business.
Naturally, there was lamentation for the passing of so attractive a type of person. Writers such as Charles W. Eliot in his John Gilley, and Edwin Day Sibley, in his Still- man Gott, pictured the "half farmer, half fisherman who lives in the towns along the shores in the neighborhood of Mount Desert ... industrious, law-abiding, and patri- otic, the three things which go to make the best citizen of the best country on God's green footstool." But while it was easy for an outsider to sit by and praise the real John Gilley and the fictional Stillman Gott for virtues that were rare because they fitted an age that was gone, those on the
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spot had to recognize that a change had come, and had to do something about it. Thus, the task of the story of the past sixty years of Bar Harbor is telling how well it adapted itself to an altered world. It is worth noting that the democ- racy that the founders of Eden brought with them from Western Maine and Cape Cod flourished and developed further as the problems of these years were met.
Since 1890, much has stood the test of time, much has been added, and surprisingly little has been swept away. Since that year there have come to town the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, the Acadia Na- tional Park, the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, the Mount Desert Island Hospital, the Seacoast Mission, and Morrell Park. Into the town's life, and out again, have come and have gone the Otter Cliff Radio Station, the Cadillac Moun- tain Radar Station, the Building of Arts, the two steamships Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Iroquois. When the story of these has been told, most of the story of the past sixty years will have been told with it.
The outstanding new element in the town's life is the Acadia National Park, the creation-if it was the creation of one man-of George Bucknam Dorr. Whenever a crisis came in the fortunes of the mountains that became the park, it was he who saw to it that something was done. Consequently, to this day, the park reflects his personality.
A very unusual personality it was. He was a great scholar, in the old sense of the world, a true amateur lover of the classics. When past the age of eighty he read Homer, in the original, for pleasure, he inquired of his younger friends, to their embarrassment, which texts they preferred. He had a fund of that sort of available and illuminating knowledge that can be so impressive. In person he was impressive, too
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-a tall, big man, with a striking, down-sweeping mous- tache. He had a gift for arousing friendship that verged on the remarkable. In the published letters of Franklin K. Lane can be found what that secretary of the interior wrote to a newly made acquaintance after meeting Mr. Dorr. It seems almost out of character that a member of Woodrow Wilson's cabinet, presumably a pretty hard-boiled practical politician, who had had ample experience in judging char- acter when he was a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, should be so "bowled over." The friendships Dorr thus gained benefited not himself, but what was truly his park. (For example, that conquest of Secretary Lane meant a recommended budget of $50,000 for the newly fledged park, when Mr. Dorr had planned to ask for $ 10,000 -in the hopes of getting $4,000.)
Circumstances placed George Bucknam Dorr in a stra- tegic position for founding the park to which he really gave his life. Son of a renowned hostess, and scion of an old Massachusetts family, he was already known to exactly the persons who could do the most for making the mountains into a park. A moneyed bachelor, he was free to give his full time to his plans. And, being himself, he could influence all he met.
But though George Bucknam Dorr was the man who made the park, he could not have done what he did, had he not had other human forces working with him, as well as great natural beauties to work for. The mobilization of these forces began when Parke Godwin, a New York reformer, with others, did some summer reforming by founding the Village Improvement Society. This was not the abortive movement begun by Joseph Woods in 1881 but a sturdier plant, that was the work of the summer colony. As such, the Village Improvement Society did what village
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improvement societies do all over the country-vexed the town fathers until street lights were put in, and concrete sidewalks, and then turned around and complained of in- creased taxes. The Bar Harbor society also provided ex- cellent public-health advice. Besides forming a useful taxpayers' opposition, the society set up a path committee, which to this day supervises the marking and clearing needed on the Bar Harbor side of the island. An outgrowth of that was the Bates, Rand, and Jacques path maps, con- tinued also to this day on the basis of Professor Shaler's surveys. Another outgrowth was the painting of various colors on the Newport Mountain paths. Legend still dwells on what Herbert Jacques said the time he fell down just below the Bowl, with assorted paints girded about him. Dispute has risen as to how far his voice carried in objurga- tion, and for twenty years the paints were to be seen on the rocks. But Mr. Jacques persisted, and, thanks to him and to Rudolph E. Brunnow, the beauties of Newport- Champlain, in the park nomenclature, were made accessible. Mr. Brunnow even succeeded in combining safety with the thrills of mountaineering, with his skilfully designed "lad- der path" or "precipice path," that allows one to cling to iron rungs and look out over impressive cliffs which have been neatly skirted in the ascent. This path work ended, in part, that Bar Harbor classic excuse couples sometimes gave for disappearing until dinner time, that they had been lost on Newport. A large body of walkers grew up, deter- mined to keep the beauties of the hills, and acting in much the spirit in which a hunt club preserves trails and easy jumps in farming country. For the path committee, like the committees of hunt clubs, assumed, successfully, the right to enter upon other person's lands, in order to main- tain its paths. Naturally, this was done with due courtesy,
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