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 5
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The Story of Bar Harbor
In 1696 that name was riveted on the bay even more tightly. Fighting Father Baoudin, the ex-musketeer mis- sionary who that year sailed with D'Iberville, tells in his Journal how the two Canadian sailors took their vessels past Mount Desert Rock to Pentagoet, picked up De St. Castin and his Abenakis, and then stormed Pemaquid. After this they used Frenchman's Bay as a refitting base, where they would be safe while the English recovered from the shock of defeat. D'Iberville somehow had a sixth sense of what the other man was thinking-the next year he was to show that sense when he sank the Hampshire in Hudson Bay with one broadside-and he slipped out of Mount Desert road- stead, past the Porcupines, at seven in the morning of September 3, just in time to escape H.M.S. Sorlings in a running flight to the eastward off Schoodic Point. Lieu- tenant de Villieu, who was left behind at or near Bar Har- bor, did not fare so well. While he sent dispatches safely away to Boston and to Quebec-Pierre d'Ailleboust, Sieur de Perigny (later Lord of Grand Manan), carrying the latter to Frontenac-Villieu was himself trapped. Soon he found himself in Boston, arriving as a prisoner shortly after his letter of complaint about slowness in exchanging prisoners.
Even after 1696 the French continued to use Mount Desert and the waters off Bar Harbor as a rendezvous. In 1697 Gabaret, from the frigate Neptune, there put on shore Joseph Amyot, Sieur de Vincelotte, to carry to Quebec the operations orders for the year, which orders were canceled by the coming of peace. The next year, 1698, in peace now and not in war, Denys de Bonaventure and L'Hermite were expressly sent to Mount Desert Harbor, with sailing in- structions telling how to use it as a landfall, the latitude being very correctly stated as 44 degrees and 28 minutes.
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Feudal Acadia
After this, De Bonaventure, in his report on Acadia in general, stressed the value of Douaquet as a base and as an Indian center.19
From 1700 to 1763 Bar Harbor remained uninhabited. English expeditions attacking Port Royal effectually pre- vented any French settlement, but, conversely, the power of the St. Castin family, those who remained in Maine and did not go back to the Pyrenees, prevented English settle- ment. Based at Pentagoet, the modern Castine, and later on at an encampment high up the Penobscot River, the St. Castins and their Abenakis kept effective control of the mainland of eastern Maine. None could live there without their consent, and the half- and quarter-breed heirs of Jean Vincent and of Bernard d'Abbadie de St. Castin still felt themselves to be French officers, engaged in holding open the communications between France and Quebec.
So it was that for those sixty years, once L'Hermite had returned to France with his report on the Acadian seigneuries and Queen Anne's War had been fought, Bar Harbor had no history. Ships did slip by; Colonel West- brook was at Mount Desert in 1723, Benjamin Church found a message there in 1704, but they merely passed, to leave no permanent mark on Bar Harbor history. English naval surveyors sailed by, and made charts that were not too accurate, together with easily recognizable profiles of land masses. From one such profile, of Winscale Head, the pres- ent Schooner Head, Captain S. E. Morison was able to deduce the mistake the Arbella had made in confusing the Gouldsboro Hills with Mount Desert Island, Mount Desert Island with the Camden Hills. Perhaps fur traders bargained with the Indians. It has been conjectured that Frenchmen tried to build houses at Southwest Harbor. In the 1780's Nicholas Thomas, of Bar Harbor, then a young child, saw
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The Story of Bar Harbor
a cellar hole at Southwest Harbor, and was told that Frenchmen had for a time lived there, in 1757. On this has been built a superstructure of tradition that Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord spent his childhood there. This tale may be true-if Talleyrand's birth records were forged, if permanent settlements existed at Southwest Harbor or Somes Sound without leaving any other trace, and if a large amount of corroborative evidence about Talleyrand's child- hood in France can be waved aside as fiction. Probably there is no more basis for the tradition than there is for James Otis Kaler's vivid novel for boys Defending the Island, A Story of Bar Harbor in 1758. But it all adds up to the fact that once the Embuscade had taken Cadillac to France and the Poli had slipped away from the Sorlings, the British navy would not let the French live at Bar Har- bor, and the Abenakis would not let the English live there, either. Forest feudalism had had a fleeting chance at Bar Harbor and had failed there, though in different circum- stances it succeeded for a while at Detroit.
But of it something did remain to influence Bar Harbor. At Quebec, in the intendant's register, on page 18, Volume 3, lay the grant of Douaquet to the Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac, with the significant insertion, "Together with the Island of Mount Desert." And in far-off France a little girl, Marie Thérèse de la Mothe Cadillac, named after her grandmother, Marie Thérèse de Guyon de la Mothe Cadil- lac, who was also the child's godmother, used to listen to stories of Douaquet. What those stories were and who told them we do not know. Perhaps Marie Thérèse heard them from her grandmother; perhaps, at second hand, from her Detroit-born father; perhaps her Douaquet-born aunt wrote them in letters from Quebec, preserved for a child's amusement. But listen to them she did, for in
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Feudal Acadia
later life she told others how her father had known and loved the Indians and at least once she welcomed Indians to her Hull's Cove home, for that reason. Certainly, those stories drove Marie Thérèse de la Mothe Cadillac de Grégoire to petition various English sec- retaries of state to grant her the title to the manor of Douaquet, until in 1783 Mr. Elliot, then secretary, could derive a minor consolation for the loss of the colonies by referring her to the Continental Congress. Through an ap- plication to Thomas Jefferson, Marie Thérèse de Grégoire, driven on by those memories, and finally armed with a copy of the registre d'intendance in Quebec, at last regained not Douaquet, which was already occupied by Sullivans and others, but Mount Desert Island, and thus perpetuated feudal Acadia to this day, in a way its would-be founders would never have imagined.
3 Proprietors and Settlers
1 TT HAD BECOME clear by 1760 that England had con- quered Canada, and also probable that England would hold Canada after the French and Indian War had ended. Now Yankees could look forward to making their homes east of the Penobscot, if they could secure legal titles. No longer need they fear that the rest of the St. Castins would come down upon them and drive them back to the New Hampshire border. At last, Bar Harbor could have real hopes of seeing settlers who would not only come but also stay.
But even by 1760 it was not certain that Massachusetts held sway over the lands east of the Penobscot. Just as previously they had been debatable ground between Massa- chusetts and Acadia, now they were debatable between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. As late as 1755 English commissioners had been trying to persuade the French that the grant of Acadia by the treaty of Utrecht meant the grant of the lands between the St. Croix and the Penobscot, to which the French had had the pleasure of replying by quoting English assertions that the boundary of that prov- ince was the St. Croix. It was true that the English attorney general had held, in 1740, that Massachusetts went as far as the St. Croix, but what an attorney general said he might unsay, and all sorts of claims were flying about. Not only did Nova Scotia assert it ruled up to the Penobscot; the self-titled Earl of Stirling, William Alexander, of Bask-
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Proprietors and Settlers
ingridge, New Jersey, later Major General Lord Stirling of the American army in the Revolution, was offering for sale lands he held as the heir of the original Sir William Alexander, to whom Nova Scotia had first been granted. For Massachusetts to get full possession of this land would require that its royal governor, Francis Bernard, should out-argue "Lord Stirling," and more important, Governor Lawrence of Nova Scotia. The fate of Mount Desert Island and of Bar Harbor, as well as of the rest of the present Washington and Hancock Counties, for a time rested on one man's pen.
It might rest there safely. Governor Bernard poured out arguments again and again. They are to be found in the Sparks manuscripts at Harvard, some of which have been printed. He told of the old charter of Massachusetts, of 1691, that gave even Nova Scotia to Massachusetts; he told of the enforcing of that claim by Phips's expedition of 1690, which took effective control of Mount Desert Island, as shown by a journal of that expedition. In due course, the Lords of Trade and Plantation admitted that they agreed with him, and so notified both Massachusetts and Nova Scotia.1
As realization grew that Massachusetts would have con- trol east of the Penobscot, legal steps were taken to enable settlement. As early as 1760 Massachusetts set up a new county, Lincoln, with Pownallborough (now Wiscassett) , as its seat. This brought a court house to hold trials, a reg- istry for deeds and wills, to within a hundred miles of Bar Harbor. The next step was to arrange for governmental areas within the new country. It was agreed that thirteen townships should be laid out, six east of the Penobscot River but west of the Union River, seven east of the Union River, which new name, wet by a bottle of rum, had been given
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The Story of Bar Harbor
to the old Mount Desert River. Promptly, would-be settlers organized into groups of potential township proprietors, as various speculators in Maine combined forces. The result was that the townships between the Penobscot and the Union Rivers became known as the David Marsh Town- ships, named for the leader of the speculators there who got the grant. But, as a similar group worked out plans for the next set of townships, they received a rude jolt. It appeared that His Excellency Governor Bernard had cast his eyes upon Township Number 2, Mount Desert Island. He had frankly come to America in the hope of building up a fortune, was engaged throughout the northeastern English colonies in speculation, and had a particular reason for wanting Mount Desert Island. Here, at once, was a conflict between two ideas of settlement-the Yankee township-plantation-town system, and what corresponded to the southern system of handing out large tracts. The Yankee system of settlement is known to its full extent only in New England. It began to evolve when the Arbella's passengers decided to move from their first home on the Charlestown peninsula and cross the Charles River to found Boston, on the Shawmut peninsula, since this was perhaps the first of the moves by which New England expanded to the west and to the northeast. In the course of a century and a quarter a set of basic principles was worked out, by which new settlers could fill the frontiers, and yet remain both self- governing and under at least theoretically close govern- mental control. First came the survey, without which no settlement was legal. Land so surveyed was divided into "townships," which in New England means areas planned for development into full-fledged towns. Then certain proprietors-who might be a religious congregation, a group of speculators, or a group of would-be settlers-
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bought the "township," "planted it" with settlers, and saw to it that land was reserved for a church and a school. When enough settlers had been planted, limited self-government was granted, and the township was raised in status to a "plantation." When the population of the "plantation" should have grown large enough, another step forward was taken, the area received full civil rights, the full town organization came into force, and in those early days, one representative in the legislature or "General Court" was automatically allotted to the new town.
Such a system still holds good in Maine. Elsewhere in New England, since all unsettled land has been taken up, towns are the units of government, except where cities have been created, and the words "township" and "plantation" are forgotten or have new meanings. But Maine remains frontier, in some ways. To this day one can go thirty miles northeast from Bar Harbor and find, still unsettled, Town- ship Number 7, just back of Gouldsboro and Sullivan, and then go twenty miles southeast-in each case as the crow flies-and find Swan's Island Plantation, where to this day there is not enough population for the full complement of town officials. This was the New England system which the settlers of western Maine wanted to bring to Mount Desert Island, and which Governor Bernard was blocking.2
On his side the governor had not only official position- that was something that the General Court of Massachusetts took delight in ignoring-but genuine gratitude. In the first flush of enthusiasm on arriving in Boston, before he had caught on to the vexations of his position as royal governor of a province with a charter, Bernard had paid out of his own pocket for the repairs to the Province House, the old State House at the corner of State and Court Streets, Boston. Now, as a matter of constitutional principle, the
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The Story of Bar Harbor
were to do his duty. He got into more trouble than most English governors, since he had Sam Adams against him and since he was not blessed with too much tact or perspicacity. Newspaper writers found the grant of Mount Desert Island an easy mark at which to shoot, since it was improper on the face of it. That, or other reasons, caused the privy council in England to delay confirming it, thus adding to Bernard's troubles. When it finally came to a showdown between him and Sam Adams over the question of the new duties and the Massachusetts Remonstrance, the English government summoned him home, made him a baronet to ease the blow, and after keeping him away from Boston in England two years replaced him as governor of Massachu- setts.3
So Sir Francis Bernard, Baronet, left Bar Harbor. He impinged on its history only slightly and indirectly, being interested primarily in the other half of the island. He left behind him doubtful deeds to lands, the sites of one or two mills, and a potential claim to the island. But while he was proposing, the plain people of the coast were disposing. Others copied Abraham Somes and James Richardson ;- took to their Chebbaco boats, those sturdy Ipswich-built sloops that carried our ancestors up and down the coasts; steered "down East"; picked out likely spots; cleared ground; and went back to pick up their families and bring them to their new homes. Most of these men came from places in western Maine such as Arundel or Harpswell, while Cape Ann and Cape Cod provided their shares, and there were those who sailed across Fundy from Nova Scotia. These men moved away from the side of the island where Bernard had planned settlement-the rough sea side-to the fertile, or more fertile, northeast shores. It was they who at last made a true settlement, that would stick no matter
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what happened in Paris or London or Quebec. The marsh meadows bordering the Mount Desert Narrows, having first attracted cattle, now attracted human beings.
It seems pretty clear who were the first settlers in Eden- Bar Harbor, since three sources of information corroborate one another. Some time before 1880 someone told George Varney who was compiling a gazetteer of Maine, that the first families in Eden were the Thomases and the Higginses, who came in 1763-which, of course, could be a misprint or misspelling for 1768. That might be called the "Thomas version." Then Uncle Eben Hamor painstakingly collected genealogies and wrote them down. From evidence from family Bibles, and from the Eden and Mount Desert record books, he came to the conclusion that there were eleven families in Eden before 1770. According to this, which may be called the "Hamor version," there were at Bar Harbor proper Israel Higgins, Daniel Rodick, and "old Uncle Ebenezer Salsbury," the last named an immigrant from Nova Scotia who "settled in a log house where the Newport Hotel now stands" before moving to Salsbury's Cove. At Duck Brook were Ezra Young and his wife Con- stant. At Hull's Cove were Elisha Cousins, Levi Higgins, whose name still sticks to Cape Levi at the northern en- trance to the Cove, and John Hamor, all of whom had moved to Hull's Cove directly from their homes. There too were Simon "Hadly" and Timothy "Smallege," who had come to Hull's Cove as a second choice, Hadley coming to the Kowl, the little hill south of the "old town road" from Otter Creek, Smullidge moving across Blue Hill Bay from Naskeag. At Leland's Cove was Amariah Leland. Less perma- nent settlers were Burrell at Cromwell's Harbor, and Parker at Hull Cove. Now, this list of names is interestingly con- firmed. In 1772 Samuel Holland, the surveyor for His
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The Story of Bar Harbor
Majesty's Northern District of North America, made a map of the Maine coast that gives soundings in Somes Sound and between the Cranberries, and shows houses up and down Somes Sound, and up and down Frenchman's Bay. It was this map that Captain J. F. W. Des Barres copied -lock, stock, and barrel-for his Atlantic Neptune in 1776, even to the entire omission of Northeast Harbor. Now, this 1772 map shows a building at Cromwell's Harbor -presumably either the Jones sawmill or Burrell's house- two at Bar Harbor, one at Duck Brook, and three at Hull's Cove. Considering that this was an off-hand survey, and that only those houses which were visible from the sea would be put in, this seems to confirm the Hamor list com- pletely.4
What is left unexplained, however, is where the Thomas family was, and what chance there is that the date 1763 can still be proudly kept as the official date of first settle- ment. The answer would seem to be that the Thomases, who were such good friends of the Somes's as to have Nicholas Senior marry Lucy Somes under what may be called frontier circumstances, lived inland, in the Thomas District, in a house not visible from the sea. As, for the dating, it should first be noticed that Nicholas Thomas Junior's autobio- graphical poem tells us that his family came in 1773, not 1763. Then it should be pointed out that many a settler probably began clearing land and living down East one year, and then returned to fetch his wife and family the next. The fact that a wife was having a child in Eastham or Harpswell-as was true of almost all the families named in the Hamor list-did not mean that the husband and elder sons would not be on Mount Desert Island, getting the new home ready. Voyages back and forth were common enough, to sell lumber and fish or transact other business,
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and get supplies. It was on such a voyage that John Hamor was drowned, leaving his wife and five children to grow up into leaders in the town of Eden that was to be.
So far, with Francis Bernard a baronet and distant in England, there was little real government on the island. How little, is revealed by the Journal of Captain David Owen, R.N., who in 1772 touched at the Cranberry Islands. He tells the story of an irate brother, angry and confounded by the results of the custom of "bundling," demanding that his sister be married to the young man in question- which result, it appears, neither the sister nor certainly the young man desired. The young man tried to evade the issue by declaring that legal marriage was impossible, there being no justice of the peace available. Promptly Captain Owen, who was on the way to found the Owen estate on Campobello Island that later fell, in part, into the hands of the Franklin D. Roosevelt family, intervened. He pointed out that he was a justice of the peace for Nova Scotia, and without further regard for Governor Bernard's rulings as to the boundary of Nova Scotia justice was done, the wrong righted, and the brother made content as to the moral status of his sister. But, as this story reveals, even though there was not much government about, the settlers on the coast needed little of it. They were, as were their descendents, self-reliant men and women, who could handle their own affairs. In the township, or unorganized, stage of govern- mental development, they needed no more than to be left alone, with occasional visits by a justice of the peace using the great legal powers then held by such officials.5
However, events were brewing that were to raise Mount Desert Island from "Township Number 2" to "Mount Desert Plantation." The storm of revolution that had driven Bernard home to his eventful baronetcy was blowing up
The Story of Bar Harbor
stronger and stronger. Now, in 1775, it broke, when red- coats and minutemen fired on each other at Lexington and Concord. With those shots, English government ended everywhere outside the range of English guns, in Massa- chusetts and Maine, and a new government came slowly to birth.
East of the Penobscot, the American Revolution began in June, 1775, when the Margaretta affair took place at Machias. It both caused and typified the revolution in eastern Maine. It started because Nathan Jones of Goulds- boro made a deal with the English garrison in Boston. They held his relatives prisoners, and they needed lumber for building barracks. He was told that if he would go to Machias, under guard of the English armed vessel Marga- retta, and bring back some lumber, his relatives could go free. The idea was that his friends there, themselves under the guns of the Margaretta, could not blame him for not being on their side, since both he and they would be acting under duress. This was a formula for trading in war time long known to Acadia. In the 1690's the habitants and even the Baron de St. Castin were not above reporting that they had been forced to trade at the point of a gun. In the 1770's, as can be learned from the pages of Professor Brebner's Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia, the American Colonel John Allen got supplies from his technical enemies. The normal thing would have been for the men of Machias to knuckle under, and let the lumber go to Boston.
But there were those at Machias who were above such prudent self-preservation. Quietly, in the Yankee com- munity way, the men of Machias met in an open field to discuss what should be done. Two patriots, Jeremiah O'Brien and Captain Foster, urged their fellow-townsmen to the brave course. The discussion waxed warm. Finally,
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Proprietors and Settlers
O'Brien challenged his friends. If they were brave, they would signalize their bravery by stepping across a brook that ran through the field and would then divide the patriots from the cowards. The challenge succeeded. Every man crossed the brook. The next morning O'Brien and his fol- lowers captured the Margaretta, and-so Maine claims- won the first naval action of the American Revolution. 6
This move was both brave and shrewd. It had its effect in helping the American cause, for the lack of that lumber and of the barracks that might have been built with it, intensified the British sufferings in Washington's siege of Boston. Yet, as O'Brien may not have foreseen, Machias was in little danger of reprisal, for if the town should be taken and sacked, the saw-mills would be destroyed and would be unable to supply lumber. The population, dis- contented, would go away, and would leave the woods without workers. But England, to survive, had to have lumber. Masts cut on the spot were what enabled her ships to keep the sea; it was lack of masts, among other things, that prevented the British navy from rescuing Cornwallis at Yorktown. So it was that though the English blustered they preferred to use "measures short of war," and did not act in the Margaretta incident. Maine peacefully followed Massachusetts, its dominant partner, into the Revolution.
Since at the time of the Revolution Bar Harbor was the northeastern half of Township Number 2, east of the Union River, commonly called the Township of Mount Desert, its governmental history was that of Mount Desert. As such, its local government began, when in February, 1776, the Massachusetts convention-that is the provincial legisla- ture or General Court, sitting in defiance of Governor Gage -ordered all townships large enough to be plantations to act as such. This was the natural course for a demo-
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cratic revolutionary body to take, since it extended self- government. In compliance with this order, Alexander Campbell, justice of the peace, "at my dwelling house at Narraguagus, this twelfth day of March, in the sixteenth year of his Majestie's reign, Anno Dominie 1776," issued a warrant to Stephen Richardson of Bass Harbor to call a plantation meeting. The wording of this warrant shows that, in the mind of the Americans, King George-in name, at least-ruled the thirteen colonies. That was why his theoretically loyal subjects marched against him under the "Cambridge flag," of thirteen stripes, with the Union Jack where the stars now are.
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