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 14
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but also with an implied feeling on everyone's part that it was a public service. Some owners used ceremoniously to close the paths on their lands once a year, on some one day, to prevent the creation of a public right of way, but they always chose a time when it would inconvenience no one.
With summer-colony public opinion of this sort tied to love of the mountains, there was support automatically in existence for any plan of preservation. Furthermore, there was a blueprint, which was appealed to by all as the basic policy to be followed for Mount Desert Island. In 1901 President Eliot of Harvard had given his Seal Harbor neigh- bors a pamphlet of good advice, The Proper Development of Mount Desert Island. This was a very able document; it consisted of statements of the obvious facts that the natural beauty of the island was a community asset and must be preserved for the financial good of the inhabitants. The statements were couched in clear, effective English, in a way that compelled attention. The prestige of a man of national authority was put behind any movement for con- servation.
Doctor Eliot did not stop with words; he acted. His son, also Charles William Eliot, whom he adored, and whose ideas of landscape architecture he always loved to further, had in Massachusetts created a body of trustees of public reservations, to hold title to land that might be given for public use. President Eliot secured the incorporation, in Maine, of another such body, the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. To this was then given the site of the Champlain monument at Seal Harbor-at a point Champlain may have twice seen, in 1604 and 1605, as he passed by the island, but where he certainly never set foot. After that the trustees slumbered, until Mrs. Charles Homans, in September, 1908, turned over to them the Bee-
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hive and the Bowl, reserving to the Beehive Mountain Aqueduct Company its water rights.
Just at that time, as the Honorable John A. Peters has truly said, the portable sawmill created the Acadia National Park. As long as saws were water driven, or steam-engine driven, saw mills stayed on low ground, and it was uneco- nomical to cut wood on high hills. For that reason, the Bar Harbor Mountains, untouched by the fire of 1848 that had ravaged the Mount Desert side of the island, could be left in private hands without fear of cutting. But gasoline power saws could be taken higher up, and the last stands of good timber were on the mountains, whose beauty was the town's asset.
The news came to Mr. Dorr and George Stebbins of Seal Harbor of plans for purchasing land, at prices the owners could not resist. Here he showed his gift for quick fund raising. There are epic tales of purchases made by minutes -Mr. Dorr was never one to spoil a story-which preserved the lands on Cadillac. That having been done, Mr. Dorr became aware, by their use, of his unusual powers as a disinterested lobbyist. He had the brilliant idea of com- bining the protection of Bar Harbor's health, which was being investigated by Dr. Robert Abbe, and of its moun- tains. He went to Augusta and there got for the trustees of public reservations the power of eminent domain, so that they might condemn land and force its sale, when needed to protect the water supply of Eagle Lake.
Naturally, there was a reaction to this. Logging interests felt suspicion of a charitable corporation of the summer colony, with its local lawyers, which could condemn exactly the lands they needed. They counterattacked with the just suggestion that the trustees of public reservation were tak- ing off the tax-collectors' books valuable sources of revenue,
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and with another, not so just, suggestion, that the property of the trustees be made subject to taxation. Who were the men behind those logging interests does not matter; Mr. Dorr does not name them, but merely states that their exist- ence was reported to him by long-distance telephone as "them fellers." Like an avenging angel, Mr. Dorr descended upon Augusta. There he borrowed the speaker's office for headquarters. With the force of a man who knew he was right, with the winning charm of a scholarly man of the world who loved Maine, he pitched in. While the admiring speaker looked on-and doubtless helped-it is the speaker who has told this tale-Mr. Dorr, in one evening's series of conferences, won the leaders of the legislature to his side. The proposal was quietly smothered in committee, and that was that.
However, it was plain to Mr. Dorr that the Hancock County trustees were at the mercy of their creator, the Maine legislature. This event made him fear that some day a pressure would come that even he could not withstand, and that the good work would be undone.
Promptly, with Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, Mr. Dorr went to Washington to learn the lay of the land. There he found a political situation ready to fit his needs. Maine was a debatable state. It had shown in the election of 1910 that "as goes Maine so goes the nation," by electing a Democratic legislature which in turn had elected a Demo- cratic senator. As is well realized, states where elections are in doubt get preferences in the distribution of federal favors. So, when Mr. Dorr returned to Washington, a year later, he could rely on getting help for the simple proposal that the Federal government accept as a gift the lands he had had put together. Surely if a Democratic senator would not help him a Republican one would. Further-
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more, behind Mr. Dorr was the Honorable John A. Peters of Ellsworth, now congressman from the third district, who wholeheartedly supported his aim of preserving the island's beauties.
To get the gift accepted, Mr. Dorr found, needed only executive action. Under the national monuments act, the President was authorized, to accept gifts, if the proper cabinet officer made the recommendation. The next task was to find the proper cabinet officer. The story of how this was done has been written down by Mr. Dorr in a privately printed book. In this he tells how he persuaded the Depart- ment of the Interior to help, how a feud between Interior and Agriculture blocked his way, and how, by meeting the right friend of Secretary of Agriculture Houston the block was melted away. And at long last President Wilson was persuaded to accept the Sieur de Monts National Monu- ment, on July 27, 1916.
In the intervening time Mr. Dorr and his lawyer, Harry Lynam, had gone again over the land titles of the properties to be conveyed. Those land titles, now printed in part by the trustees of public reservation, tell the story of the town's life. Among them are deeds from the Green Mountain Carriage Road, the corporation whose property Frank H. Clergue had had dynamited, and which wound up as did some other local property-holding bodies, with George B. Dorr as sole stockholder. There was a deed from the estate of John S. Kennedy, implementing a whis- pered death-bed promise to his wife-"Remember . that I promised Mr. Dorr to help him get that land." There was a tiny strip around the edge of Eagle Lake, condemned by the trustees under the powers they had secured to protect the local water supply. There was, back of these, the usual complexity of country land titles, which
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has been a constant stumbling-block to those who try to put deeds in order to fit Department of Justice standards. Oral wills, undivided property passed on through varied subdivisions, unrecorded deeds, warranties given by men long dead, all complicated matters in tracing back title through woodsmen like Walter Dunton, Daniel Brewer, and John D. Gilmore to the Bingham estate and the De Grégoire grant, with its connection with the Bernard grant through the partition suit of 1788-94. Then, back of all that lay the original grant of Douaquet to Cadillac, and all the complexities of the ownership of Acadia. So fas- cinated was Mr. Dorr by the insight this gave into the island's history that he had republished, by a photographic process, the grant of Acadia to the Sieur de Monts, and thus justified the giving of that nobleman's name to the National Monument.
However, a national monument needed support, and the federal government was not inclined to pay out money. The sum of $5,000 usually covered the costs of all national monuments. Now that in 1916 the National Park Service had been set up, under the Department of the Interior, there was a further chance to get funds. If a national monu- ment could not get real support, why could not a national park? Certainly, the Maine delegation in congress-Senator Johnson was running for re-election in 1918-would be back of any plan for justifiable expenditures in Maine.
Here was a chance for Mr. Dorr's special abilities. He persuaded Secretary of the Interior Lane to come to visit him at Old Farm, and gave him the time of his life. Mr. Dorr could do this because he was a hospitable, old-fashioned gentleman, with no personal ax to grind. He delighted in having guests at Old Farm, and when he and Henry Lane Eno were finished with the secretary, Mr. Lane had had the
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kind of relaxation at Sieur de Monts National Monument that he would wish others to have. After so pleasant a stay in the company of the best sort of person that was attracted to the beauties of the monument, he needed no urging to feel that the beauties he had enjoyed should be properly preserved for the nation. All Mr. Dorr had to do was to leave in his lap the question of naming a sum for which to ask congress, and to keep a straight face when Secretary Lane said $ 50,000.
With that success behind him, Mr. Dorr's next task was to get his congressional friends to push a measure through in the 1918-1919 session. This was no easy task, with a President away in Europe and busy with world peace, and smarting under the political defeat that had taken from him and his party the control of congress, after March 4, 1919. But gladly the Maine delegation put the necessary bills in the legislative hopper. Shrewdly, Senator Hale tacked the name "Lafayette" to the park. And in a wave of Francophile feeling, similar to that which had ensured the granting of Douaquet to the De Grégoires, the Sieur de Monts National Monument became a national park, the first and only one which was given as a free gift to the federal government.
By its establishment it brought national parks east of the Mississippi, serving as an inspiration to those who founded the Great Smoky Mountains Park in 1930.
Now the National Park Service found on its hands a park that did not obey the rules. There had been some puz- zling correspondence, during World War I, when "dollar- a-year rangers" of the Sieur de Monts Monument were asked to protect the coast against submarines. Now such puzzles were multiplied, for the Lafayette Park had at its head a "dollar-a-year" superintendent, who at the flick of
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a hand could command his friends' wealth, and who was too broad-gauge a scholar to understand government rou- tine. The national archives contain humorous reading, es- pecially the official requests for budget estimates and Mr. Dorr's charming personal letters in reply. Somehow, mat- ters were straightened out, although it was necessary to sug- gest to Mr. Dorr that the sum to be spent for incidental expenses was not a bookkeeping convenience to cover items that ought to have been included but had been forgotten. But to the park service the advantages of Mr. Dorr must have far outweighed the disadvantages. The national ar- chives still has the letter of thrilled pleasure written on November 29, 1918 by Miss Mary E. Daly, in which she described the new world of beauty and pleasure to which Mr. Dorr had introduced her. What if some busybody found that Superintendent George B. Dorr of the Lafayette National Park had signed a contract with George B. Dorr, president of the Wild Gardens of Acadia, Inc .? That sort of thing could be arranged. What mattered was that the Lafayette National Park was making a great success. It had been publicized, when only a national monument, by an article in the National Geographic Magazine. It had at once attracted visitors, Miss Huldah Z. Kelley of 2115 Twenty-Fourth Avenue, North, Nashville, Tennessee, being the first to write in to ask permission to camp. The first year, if Mr. Dorr's figures were correct, by October 2, 1916, 15,361 automobiles and 101,255 persons had visited the monument.
What the Lafayette National Park needed was develop- ment. However, these were the days of postwar economy, and, furthermore, it was hard to persuade congress to vote money for what might look like a rich man's park, no mat- ter what the attendance figures were.
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Here private enterprise stepped into the breach. John D. Rockefeller, Junior, had loved horseback riding and driv- ing, and had been displeased when the automobile came to the island in 1913. He wished to preserve, on special roads, what had been lost on the town roads, and expressed himself as willing to pay for roads for horses only, in the national park. Senator Fernald of Maine saw to it that the necessary arrangements were made, and roadbuilding was begun. One official prophetically suggested that a small amount of money for roads might save a great deal of money's worth of trees in a forest fire.
Naturally, such roadbuilding aroused opposition. The very group which had, as walkers, supported the national monument and the park, now as conservationists turned around and attacked the roads. Criticism of them rose to such a point, especially as a United States senator, Pepper of Pennsylvania, belonged to the North East Harbor summer colony, that on March 26, 1924, Senator Hale arranged for a hearing in the Interior Department, before Secretary Work. The Maine delegation in congress was enthusiastic for the road work, for Mr. Rockefeller had promised to put up the Cadillac Mountain Road for automobiles. Senator Pepper put the case for preserving the woods, and a com- promise was reached. One road would be taken out of Mr. Rockefeller's program, the rest would go through.
For a new factor had come to Bar Harbor's life, the automobile tourist. As early as June 17, 1922, Arno B. Cammerer, assistant director of the park service had sug- gested an auto camp for the park. Two sites were chosen, one near Morell Park, one, later on, at Otter Cliffs. The results were most successful, winning the praise of the Vermont commissioner of forestry, Robert M. Ross. The Lafayette Park was proving itself of genuine service to
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the nation, not merely as preserving a beauty spot but as making that beauty spot genuinely available to everyone.
Gradually the park grew. One temporary obstacle to growth was Mr. Dorr's decision to keep in the possession of the Trustees of Public Reservation any land where road- building was taking place, that he might have direct con- trol, free from Washington and government regulations. Another reason was Mr. Rockefeller's desire not to remove from the tax rolls large areas of the Mount Desert Island towns, and thus throw a greater burden on others. But steadily the trustees transferred land, once it had been built upon. By intervention of Mr. Rockefeller, the Otter Cliffs radio station, which had sunk from being the chief means of communication with Europe to being a compass-direction station, was moved to Moose Island, at the end of Schoodic Point, Mr. Dorr seeing to it that part of that headland also came into the park. That gave the woods of Otter Cliffs to the safety of the park. It took a little courtesy to Congress- man Cramton of Michigan to secure this, since the donors of Schoodic objected to the name "Lafayette." What could be easier-just change it to Acadia, and give Congressman Cramton a word-picture of the romance of early Acadia, to whet his enthusiasm.
Along with this addition came the gift from the Homans heirs, of their house at Oak Bluffs. The same legislation that changed the name of the park also accepted what Mr. Dorr calls its "guest house," what some who paid the Homans heirs thought would be a superintendent's house, and what has been known in the press as the "Ickes House."
Thereby hangs a Bar Harbor tale that should be recorded in print. It was the belief of some, who did not wish at the time to be quoted, that the raising of the money for the Homans house had implied a moral pledge that it would
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be used only as a superintendent's residence, once Mr. Dorr had retired. There was a certain amount of consterna- tion when Harold L. Ickes appeared there, and lived rent- free during what seemed a rather prolonged inspection trip of a minor park. During this inspection-vacation Mr. Ickes had the access to Anemone Cave blocked off and guarded by a park ranger, to ensure his privacy. As might be ex- pected, correspondence ensued, between the late Richard W. Hale, of Schooner Head, and Mr. Ickes. The next year Benjamin V. Cohen and Thomas G. Corcoran, then at the height of their eminence as advisers to the President, also occupied the Homans house. Here there was no pretext that they were there on park business. Therefore, the Beehive Mountain Aqueduct Company, the private water company of Great Head, Oak Bluffs, and Schooner Head, which runs one of the few siphons in the world as a water supply, glee- fully demanded that either Mr. Ickes or Mr. Corcoran pay the water bill in person, lest it be accused of embezzling government funds by accepting a park check. For some years the corporation carried on its books a bad debt which gave its directors immense pleasure, and a Hale-Ickes cor- respondence was carried on which was finally printed and sent to every congressman, the point at issue being the moral right of the secretary of the interior to have free lodging at government expense. Those who have read the corre- spondence in full will probably agree that the two antago- nists had a good time writing, and covered quite a bit of ground. Finally, Mr. Ickes sent a personal check to pay the Corcoran water bill, thus removing a cause of secret delight, and the Homans house was declared renting quarters by the secretary of the interior for which Mr. Secretary Ickes, on his last visit, paid rent in due form.
The more recent history of the park is not directly that
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of the town, but what the park has done has affected the town. It has provided services, naturalists' programs, fire watching, and the like, and it has preserved the beauties of the island; in both ways it has served the town. It has at- tracted a more varied summer population than that which came in the years of the cottage colony's first heyday, and has thus added new service enterprises such as over-night camps, and it has increased the importance of Bar Harbor as a shopping center. Thus, the work of George Bucknam Dorr, as is commemorated at Sieur de Monts Spring, pre- served and enhanced the town's greatest asset.
Similar impulses, of other persons and groups, have led to the growth of other institutions of Bar Harbor. Take, for example, the Maine Seacoast Mission, the outgrowth of an inspired idea of a clergyman who surveyed the wealth of islands to be seen from the summit of Cadillac. Since it was founded in 1901, the Seacoast Mission has had three Sun- beams, becoming increasingly larger and has carried medical comfort to the islands, along with religious ministrations. Basically, the idea that makes the Seacoast Mission work is that there is a common denominator in Protestantism in Maine that allows co-operation, just as in 1796 it was pos- sible to have the Baptists established in Eden, the Methodists in Mount Desert, and all go on smoothly enough. "God's tugboat," as it has been affectionately called, sails out of Bar Harbor to the islands, which have not been fortunate enough to be able to change their economy, as Bar Harbor has done, from fishing to tourists, and are thus stranded in economics, unable to keep up the life that was led in the 1850's, or to attract the missionaries of the trustees of the Eastern Mission or fledgling ministers such as those who served there in those days.
A similar joint effort is the Mount Desert Larger Parish,
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which concerns chiefly the other side of the island, but now includes Salisbury Cove and Town Hill, which were re- spectively included in the services it gave in 1928 and 1927.
For fifty years the Mount Desert Island Hospital, orig- inally the Bar Harbor Hospital, has given good service to the island and the nearby mainland. The Village of Bar Harbor had some hospitalization early. The census of 1880 found some children boarded out at maternity homes. As late as 1930 Dr. Carl Buck, doctor of public health, making a survey at the request of the Village Improvement Associa- tion, found six unlicensed maternity hospitals-which was natural enough, since the hospital could not, in the summer, add maternity cases to its usual load. But what has made the difference in the health showings found both by Dr. Buck in 1930 and Dr. Fremont Smith in 1916 has been the existence in the town of hospital facilities better than average. This has been a locally managed affair, for Bar Harbor's charities, like its businesses, are home-owned. The hospital has also been an organization that has enlisted the following of the island. When, in 1948, the hospital was faced with the need for raising over $100,000 to meet its wants in a time of rising costs, it was able to get more than was asked for. Such a record speaks for itself.
The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory was originally the Harpswell Laboratory, when it also was founded in 1897. In 1917 the friends of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, wishing to erect a practical memorial of their affection for him, purchased the Benjamin Emery farm, near Leland's Cove, in the hope that a study of the marine life of Frenchman's Bay might be made there. In 1921 the Harpswell Laboratory, for internal management rea- sons, gave up its home on the west side of the Penobscot and moved to the shore of the deep water into which
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Benjamin Emery had launched his schooners. There, ever since, research has been conducted in the summer time.
The biological laboratory must not be confused with what is the largest corporate employer of labor in Bar Har- bor, the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, which came to Bar Harbor a year later. That is the home of a series of strains of inbred mice and rats which are hereditarily susceptible to cancer. From research done on them, at Bar Harbor and in laboratories the world over to which these pedigreed animals are shipped, precision has come to the understanding of cancer. For with animals of known characteristics it is possible to determine how, though not yet why, cancer strikes.
The laboratory is at Bar Harbor for several reasons. Its founder, Roscoe B. Jackson, was a summer resident; its head, Dr. Clarence Cook Little, is a native of Maine. But, above all, Bar Harbor affords conditions for work that are far better than in most sites. The climate is such that year- round scientific research is possible. The hard rock base of the building makes it possible to mount microscopes with- out fear of any tremor shaking them out of their very delicate adjustment. The population of Maine, accustomed to hunting, make keen observers, whose record is high for accuracy in spotting significant small variations from the normal. In other words, those who conduct routine ob- servations can be trusted to detect something unusual about a mouse or a microscopic slide and bring to it a researcher's attention. And absence from an urban site makes for quiet concentration on work. Thus, much the same sort of special quality of the town that attracted Thomas Cole and his friends has attracted scientists, too.
With growing interest in trotting races in Maine, Morell Park, next to the laboratory, has recently been revived. Of
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it there is not yet enough information to allow a judgment, except to point out that in this case, as in others, there seems to be much vitality in the town's institutions. Here is some- thing that so struck into the memories of the people of Bar Harbor that of their own initiative they revived what had been Edward Morell's cherished summer pleasure.
The business records point to similar conclusions about the Town's initiative. Bar Harbor owns itself to an unusual degree, for a town which has in it such wealthy outsiders. There are examples of summer residents owning important properties. William Pierson Hamilton's farms, the real- estate ownership of A. Atwater Kent, both are extensive. The late John S. Kennedy put large sums into revising the management of the Bar Harbor Water Company, just as Edward Morell put much money into paying for the race track. There are also examples of stores with outside owner- ship; one can go up and down Main Street and see signs that read "New York and Bar Harbor," "Palm Beach and Bar Harbor." At one time Jordan, Marsh and Company of Boston had a Bar Harbor branch.
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