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 15
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But all this outside ownership has a tendency to pass. A survey of local business showed a remarkable degree of local ownership, from the two firms, Copp's hardware store and Hodkin's fish market, that are still held by the same families as in 1880, on through more recent establishments. Garages, the boating firms and companies-of whose varied adventures a Norse saga could be written-the construction firms, the offices of architects who maintain local addresses and keep in their attics the building plans of the 1880's, all show that same local vitality. Indeed, matters go further: Bar Harbor goes outside. The Bar Harbor Banking and Trust Company has a charter, whose terms have stood a test in court, which forbids non-resident ownership of
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stock. However, in 1937, to celebrate its half century, the company was amalgamated with the Lubec Bank, so that money which in the summer is lent to further the resort industry moves fifty miles or so east and in the winter fur- thers the fishing industry. Likewise, it was the Bar Harbor and Union River Power Company that absorbed the Bangor Power Company, as far as corporate existence goes, to be- come the Union River Power and Light Company, and then the Bangor Hydro-Electric Company believed to be the only entirely hydro-electric power company in America, and in consequence a leader in the use of certain special devices to ensure constant current without having to rely upon emergency steam or other auxiliary power plants. Here, in two cases, Bar Harbor has gone out to secure control outside the town, rather than the other way around. In business, the town has a record of good Maine independence.
Not every venture in Bar Harbor has succeeded. There was, for example, the Building of Arts. It started off with a fanfare, in 1907. Supported by George B. Dorr, Henry Lane Eno, George W. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Henry F. Dimmock, and Mrs. Robert Abbe, it was to be "in this country the first conspicuous effort to crystalize the diverse elements that form the summer colony into a real society, having as its objective the highest esthetic and intellectual stimula- tion ... not only to encourage liberally the arts but to contribute to self-education and the helpful mingling of city and village life." So wrote Owen Johnson, in the Cen- tury. Some of this high aim was accomplished. Recitals were held, the Boston Symphony Orchestra often sent players for the summer, and unusual theatricals were given. But somehow the mortgage always ate up and ate up the money that should have gone to improvements in the program
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or the building, and when the Great Fire of 1947 swept the building away, few tears were shed.
In this, there is seen a marked contrast to the Abbe Museum and the Jesup Library. These were not founded with the same fanfare, but succeeded in the aims outlined by Johnson. The Abbe Museum, the fruit of Dr. Robert Abbe's interest in the Algonquin Indian which came to him toward the end of his life, had the financial misfortune to be endowed in 1929, with what seemed to be ample funds in the existing state of the stock market. After a classical rotunda for exhibits had been built next to the Sieur de Monts Spring, the financial crash came, and it was found that there was not quite so much to go round. But a local board of trustees has secured enough funds to allow a series of excavations and the publication of a series of monographs which tell the tale of the Indians who built the shell heaps in the Frenchman's Bay area.
As for the Jesup Library, it is the outgrowth of the library founded in 1875 by summer visitors who left their books for winter use, and clubbed together to get the ser- vices of a part-time librarian. In 1905 a building was put up, and endowed, and after the death of Mr. Morris K. Jesup, named for him by his widow, the principal donor.
It has since then gone on, under the control of a board of summer and winter residents, to be more than just a local public library. Its exhibition rooms have for many years afforded opportunities for artists and for collectors to have very varied shows. It houses the Bar Harbor historical col- lection, from which have come many of the photographs that illustrate this book. It exists because it is possible to raise the money needed, over and above its endowment, for keeping it going. Thus, from Professor James Bradley
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Thayer of Harvard, who guided its fortunes in 1875, to such present-day board members as Mary Roberts Rine- hart, and without any pomposity about it, in the library there has been a "mingling of city and village life," to mutual benefit.
So much for those institutions which have come to the town since 1890, and help to make up its life. There have also been accidental events which have added color to the history of the town. One such was the arrival, in August, 1914, of the German steamship, Kronprinzessin Cecilie. She sailed for Europe while peace still prevailed, but war was imminent. When she was halfway across the Atlantic, her captain was ordered by wireless to open an envelope marked "Siegfried." The Baker's Island lighthouse keeper, at dawn two days later, saw a sight he was never to forget- a liner's bow emerging, at unsafe speed, from a bank of fog. A summer resident of Bar Harbor, on board the vessel, woke up to find her own cottage opposite her porthole, when she expected to see Bremen harbor. And the United States Supreme Court had to decide whether turning a ship around in time of peace was a violation of an agreement to deliver freight.
Another story of Bar Harbor in World War I was that of the experimental radio station that Allessandro Fabbri set up, on a tower at Otter Cliffs. When war broke out, he was able to din into the minds of those in Washington the fact that he had achieved what no one else in America had, a guaranteed twenty-four hour contact with European radio stations. The navy took over his station, enlarged it, made use of his radio compass, built a transmitter at Seawall which was handled by remote control, set up direct wires to Washington, and conducted most of its European traf- fic with the benefit of the radio reflection of the Mount
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Desert hills. So states the historical record that was filed away, and so indicates also the citation on the Navy Cross given to Lieutenant Fabbri, U.S.N.R. With the improve- ment of technical knowledge, the importance of Otter Creek diminished. From having over 100 officers and men on duty, the station sank to being one of many radio- compass stations, until the "Rockefeller interests," as the navy records stated, procured the moving of the compass across Frenchman's Bay to Schoodic.
It was in 1936 that the cruise steamer Iroquois climbed onto the north shore of "Wheeler's," "Fremont's," or Round Porcupine. Naturally, local legend is more explicit in telling why she went ashore than are the official records of the in- vestigation. She was pulled off, by seamanship on the part of the Coast Guard cutter that knew the trick of stopping the Iroquois' propellors, which were dragging her deeper into the water, and yanking her off as her stern rose. But she stayed on shore long enough to figure in many a snapshot collection, and to point a moral by her presence, that the steamer trade could still bring money into town.
When World War II began, the topographical position of Bar Harbor brought to it a small naval and Coast Guard base. Green Mountain, or Cadillac, was a natural point at which to establish a radar station. The Reading Room af- forded easily "winterized" quarters for navy personnel. The airport gave a jumping-off place for a detachment of the Civil Air Patrol which Captain Morison selected as exemplifying the good work of that organization. Locally, it is felt somehow significant that German spies landed the day after the Cadillac radar station was discontinued, and much speculation is heard as to what that connection was, whether a mistake or a deep-laid plan to entice the spies into a trap. As in the days of Church and D'Iberville, once
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again Frenchman's Bay became a minor staging area be- cause of its position.
All these events and occurrences may seem disconnected, yet, when looked at together with the highlights of the town's administrative history, they show what has hap- pened in the past sixty years. In those years population has remained stationary, as if the town reached its "optimum" size. So seems to think Mr. Bartholemew, the town-planner, who made a survey in 1948. During those years of living up to its capacities-which is what being of "optimum" size seems to mean-the town has seen perhaps five important administrative events. These are, in order, the seven-man- selectman-town-manager experiment; the school union district, first with Hancock, then with Trenton; the taking over of the bridge by the county; the change in name from "Eden" to "Bar Harbor," and the setting aside of a park area, paid for with bonds, at the wharf. Each of them was an attempt to meet changing conditions.
In 1915 somebody had a bright idea, and, legally enough, increased the size of the board of selectmen from three to seven, at the March meeting. On that board were put two men who were legally residents of Maine but in fact mem- bers of the summer colony, George B. Dorr and Ernesto Fabbri. The board promptly hired Harry S. McFarland as "town manager," without any vote in town meeting au- thorizing the appointment. The hope was that he would run the details of town administration, and that the select- men, including two representatives of the large taxpayers who were not voters, would be the policy-making body. But the experiment did not work. McFarland resigned to go to California, but stayed in town long enough to be defeated as a candidate for a diminished board. The seven-man board, without a manager, was kept on for some time, but without
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success. "Summer colony" representation was ineffective, since it was hard for Messrs. Dorr and Fabbri to be in the selectmen's office long enough to be properly in touch. And in due course the town cut down the number of selectmen, so that only genuine residents belonged to the board.
The change in the town's name was another matter. It was becoming more and more of a nuisance to have a na- tionally known village, Bar Harbor, go under another name, in legal use. Naturally, the voters of Eden did not want to change their century-old name, but the force of events finally secured, in 1917, the enactment of permissive legislation, allowing the town to change its name if it wanted to. And in 1918 it so chose, recognizing thus how its life had changed, too.
In 1917 Hancock County finally took up the powers it had had since 1836, of taking over the Mount Desert bridge. The arrangement of 1836 was naturally remade, con- ditions of 1836 no longer prevailed in 1917. It was necessary to issue bonds to pay for a modern bridge, that would carry auto traffic, and to set up a Mount Desert bridge district, to pay off those bonds. The bonds were floated, the bridge was built, it was ceremoniously opened, a movie film of it is still held in town, and in due course of time the bond issue was paid off. Now the Town of Bar Harbor has in its safe the canceled stubs of the bonds, and sees going through its streets the tourist who has come by motor.
In 1913 the Towns of Eden and Hancock formed a per- missive school union, which union was renewed for a second three-year term in 1916. Then, in 1918, the school union act of 1917 caused the joining of Bar Harbor and Trenton into Union Number 97. Behind those simple statements are the stories of two changes in the town, as well as of the change in its name.
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The first change is one of transportation. Eden and Han- cock, when Mount Desert ferry was the terminus of daily steamer trips, were closely connected. Bar Harbor and Trenton, once the motor-car had come in and the Narrows bridge had been made toll free, were brought closer, by 1918, whereas World War I, as had the Civil War, had taken steamers away from Frenchman's Bay, and had started the long decline of steamer transportation in favor of the automobile.
More important, the formation of the school union marked a climax in a long evolution. The typical school of Eden's sixteen school districts of 1796 was a one-room house which saw a teacher perhaps one month a year. By 1865, the consolidation of districts had begun, with teachers for all the year round. By 1870, a private school existed, going beyond the 3 R's, and an experiment had reached the country dis- tricts of Hancock County, the idea of the high school. Eden tried it in 1878 and liked it. Although in 1879 State aid was cut off, as an economy move, the town continued to vote the money for enough more teachers to give education to those whose families wanted them to go on. After experiments with a "free high school" at Salisbury Cove, a recalcitrant chairman of the school committee was outflanked by an appeal to Augusta, and from 1891 on Bar Harbor village saw a high school, its first building being the present Masonic Hall. Summer visitors admired the spirit shown, and gave scholarship money to help boys and girls to go to college; among such was the annually awarded Jesup Fund. Finally, for administrative convenience, education spread outside of the town, with the formation of the union as related above.
More and more tourists kept on coming by auto. In 1930 the Maine Central ran its last trains to Mount Desert
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ferry, whose pier was then turned over to the Standard Oil Company for use as a tanker dock, so that today oil trucks from as far off as Fort Fairfield fill up where the Bar Harbor Express Pullmans used to discharge their passengers. In 1934 the Eastern Steamship line, the lineal successor of Captain Deering's Lewiston, gave up its Frenchman's Bay runs. That took out of the picture any organization inter- ested in keeping the waterfront in proper shape. The results were inevitable, and the citizens of the town, after thinking the matter over, came to the conclusion that it was worth a bond issue to get the sore spot cleaned up. So another bond issue was made, and the town was made more attractive, thus going back, in a sense, to the outlook that had been so charming when Tobias Roberts opened his Agamont House and Alpheus Hardy built his cottage, both overlooking the site of the new park.
It was said, just above, that the citizens thought the mat- ter over. In fact, that was how every one of the successful actions mentioned in this chapter was handled, except for the founding of the two laboratories. Most of what is done in Bar Harbor is a community effort. The methods are not those of 1796, but the spirit seems to be the same. If some- thing has to be done, people get together and do it. Just how successful they have been cannot be said. Enough time has not passed to allow judgment. But it can be said that the record of recent years proves that the old democratic town way of doing things still flourishes.
9 The Great Fire, and After
N OCTOBER, 1947, the Town of Bar Harbor was sud- denly faced with a test, to prove whether its methods of community action were sufficient to meet the emer- gency of the Great Fire. What happened then has, most certainly, a place in the town history. However, this account should be prefaced with a few words of explanation. There is no need of repeating details, vital as those details were to people at the time. What is here told is how the community as a whole reacted to the call of the emergency. Further- more, as this account is written with a hope for its reading in the distant future, it concerns itself with the reasons for the things that happened, and for what was done after- wards, and especially with the background of forest-fire fighting in Maine as a community problem.
Unfortunately, forest fires are nothing new in Maine. Every summer, from one cause or another, a fire breaks out. All hands turn out to fight it. Therefore, from July on, in front of the Bar Harbor firehouse hangs a placard, telling the degree of fire danger. This custom was suspended during World War II, as giving out information that might aid the enemy, but it was promptly resumed in 1945, after VE Day. During the period of danger, the needle-covered forest ground, and the dry grass in the fields, can become tinder. Only one thing can bring this period of danger to an end, and that is rain, drenching rain. Fools can be stopped, sometimes, from throwing lighted cigarettes away
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indiscriminately. The rare lunatic who sets fires inten- tionally can sometimes be caught and sent to an asylum, although he is far rarer a bird than excited people think. But nothing can stop acts of God. Lightning can strike a tree. A wind can fell a tree across a high-tension line; that was what caused the Richmond fire of October, 1947. Far more often than people realize, a discarded bottle, acting as a burning lens in the sun, can kindle a little blaze that a brisk wind can spread into roaring flames in a matter of minutes. Chief Forest Warden Barnes of Hancock County estimates that for each cigarette fire there are fifty bottle fires. (The author, when given, on a hot August day, this- to him-unusual piece of information, within ten minutes picked up in the woods two bottles almost too hot to han- dle.) And once a fire has started, under these conditions, it will spread and spread. The fir and pine needles on the ground seem to suck it in, the roots of trees and peat bogs can carry it underground, the prevailing southwest wind fans it and blows embers from tree top to tree top, over firefighters' heads. When such a fire really gets going, it is extraordinarily hard to stop it from in front, except by making a stand at some open clearing, or perhaps creating a clearing by making a "backfire" or plowing a field. These facts are part of the knowledge of the people of Maine, and have been, even before the great fires of 1762 swept across what was then the District of Maine.
Since Maine people know all this, they have worked out a set of customs to solve the problems of their forest fires. Firefighting is a civic duty incumbent on the whole avail- able population. If one sees a fire, and has spare time, one fights it without being asked, or without asking for any but the most general directions. Firefighting pay may be given under the law, but is low-for there have been those who
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did not work too hard at putting out a fire when doing so would take money out of their pockets, and stories float about New England communities of fires not so much set as allowed to continue. On the other hand, when fires are fought, prudence is used. There is a willingness to let a fire burn until it comes to a spot where it can easily be stopped, that to a city-bred person may seem callous neglect of prop- erty. But any one who has spent an hour or so in front of even a small forest fire that is being urged on by a capricious wind knows why this is done. It is foolish to waste scanty man-power in useless effort, and then see the fire get past what should have been a barrier. The strategy of fighting a forest fire is to fight it where it is at a disadvantage, not where you are at a disadvantage.
The usual equipment-and scanty enough it seems-is brushes, axes, and shovels. By the use of such hand tools a fire that is not moving rapidly can be hemmed in and beaten out. Here the whole community must do the work. Active boys can do things, and will find more incentive in fire- fighting pay, which their elders cannot do. Men with past experience, cannot, perhaps, carry equipment on the run and then use it, but they can give directions and use the tools that others bring. As for the women, there is, with a long-drawn-out fire, plenty of work in feeding the fire- fighters. The Hancock County Red Cross has an excellent mobile canteen that unfortunately finds only too much to do every summer.
Not only with the canteen, but in others ways, Bar Har- bor is fortunate. Compared with other Maine towns of the same population, it has more fire engines and also more available water. Not only does the gravity-fed Eagle Lake system give all the hydrants in the village all the water that they can pour out, there are many water holes all over the
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area of the town. That area, comparatively, is more cut up by roads than is true of most wooded towns. Therefore, ever since, in 1882, the town's first fire engine, pumping from the Otter Creek road, stopped the fire that was raging over Strawberry Hill and saved the woods of Newport Mountain, Bar Harbor has relied, whenever possible, on water rather than on hand tools, to stop fires. A hose line, if one can get it to the fire, will allow three men to do the work of forty with brushes and axes and picks and shovels, and will allow those three to do the same work better.
This strategy of firefighting has high sanction. In May, 1947, the National Park Service conducted a firefighting school in Acadia Park. It was attended by the staff of the Bar Harbor fire department. Experienced firefighters, used to conditions in areas such as the Yellowstone Park, ex- plained, in discussions of local problems, just how to use hand tools. But as the discussion wore on, and as they learned more of local conditions, they reversed their opinion and agreed that at Bar Harbor reliance should be placed on water and on engines, whenever possible, as affording far more logical methods to use.
This, then, was the situation in October, 1947. All the town-or by far the largest portion of the population- knew from past experience how to fight ordinary forest fires. They knew that those on the spot should rally when the whistle blew the signal to announce a fire in that dis- trict. They knew that when things were really bad there were two calls to listen for, the chief's call for assistance by all hands, and the evacuation signal to take persons and property out of an area that was threatened. And if they read the papers, or looked at the placard on the firehouse- or even if they laid their hands on the ground-they knew that the woods were in the "fifth degree of danger." As for
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the fire department, it had consulted with the highest authorities in the nation on methods, and had worked out with them the methods to use in case of a fire. They had had also, in the Hull's Cove fire in August, a dress rehearsal, which had given department, volunteers, and canteen workers experience once more. Yet, in those months of September and October, 1947, when no rain fell and the period of danger extended longer and longer, there was, almost miraculously, no fire, up to October 17.
Here the fire record book brings out a fact not generally realized. In the days from October 16 to October 21, the outbreak of the Great Fire, two other fires were discovered and put out. Both originated within one hundred yards of the spot where the Great Fire broke out. Each was near but not at "Dolliver's Dump." One was a fire caused by hunters that broke out on the south side of the "Crooked Road" in the morning of October 16. It was put out before more than an acre had caught fire, because it had been reported promptly and because, by good fortune, there was a ditch full of water near by which was not exhausted by pumping until the fire had been brought under control. Had this fire not been stopped, it would have raged, under the pressure of the north wind then blowing, past Town Hill to Somesville. Then the whole island might have gone.
The second fire broke out next day on "the Heath"- that is, on the grassy meadows where North East Creek meanders between the Crooked Road and the village of Salisbury Cove. The cause of this fire is unknown, whether it was brought about by cranberry pickers, hunters, or the focusing of the sun's rays through the windshield of an abandoned car. The spot in which it started is known with certainty; it was outside Dolliver's Dump, where through- out all the period of fire there were paper and other com-
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bustibles. The fire began forty feet outside what was then the edge of the dump, near one or two abandoned auto- mobiles, which have since been buried in other refuse. It swept northeast, the wind now being from the southwest. Fortunately, a passing motorist reported it promptly. The engine sent out emptied its tank to localize the blaze, hur- ried to the nearest telephone, at Jim Shea's farm at the corner of the Crooked Road and the Norway Drive, there to telephone for aid and refill and return to fight again. For a moment the fire seemed to have gotten out of control, because no engine could proceed on the soft ground of the heath, and conditions were such that the use of hand tools was impossible. Fortunately, a wood road ran from the corner of Norway Drive and the Crooked Road to the bluff over the heath and the creek. Road Surveyor Leslie Ha- mor-"crossing his fingers," as the narrator described it- drove a truck with a portable pump and hose, through the blazing woods to the creek. An active young crew rushed the hose to the top of the bluff, and just caught the fire as it was crossing the crest of the bluff. The fire was checked twenty yards from the crest, with no other place where it could have been stopped, in that wind, short of Salisbury Cove. The fire, having been checked, was then ringed with hose, from which ring lines were pushed in towards the center of the fire, and the hundred acres of burning ground were put under control. This fire was carefully watched; at one point a boat carrying a pump was rowed up and down North East Creek, as a precaution. Finally, after a week- end's hard work supervised by Chief Sleeper, the fire area was sufficiently damped down so that it was considered safe to stop the pumping and let the water out of the hose. The hose and the pump were still left in position, however, because the fire was technically not out, there being a mass
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