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 7
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Now one George Jackson appears. He was willing to take over all that the De Grégoires held, except land at Hulls Cove and a mill at North East Creek, pay off the mortgages, and give a lump sum in cash. It took some arguing. Philip Langlois's step-descendants still preserve a draft he made
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The Story of Bar Harbor
for the deed that was not acceptable; but at last, in August, 1792, the hopes of the De Grégoires of being absentee land- lords were ended, and their grant went into the hands of George Jackson.
After this there are scanty traces of the De Grégoires. They had to go to law with Colonel Cornelius Thompson over the mill at North East Creek. The local court decided against them, and there was an appeal, carried to Hallowell, where sat combined sessions for Lincoln, Hancock, and Washington Counties, to get the property. This they then turned over to Louis des Isles-a Frenchman left stranded by Madame Laval's attempt to found a colony in the present Lamoine, Maine, who seems to have replaced Langlois in their service-on a sharing basis, in a deed written in Frenchified English with a clause stating that a French original was to guide both parties. In 1798 they appear for a moment in Michigan records, trying to persuade a traveler, M. Sicard, who drops by with canoes full of Indians, to get them their rights in Detroit. This visit evoked in Marie Thérèse de la Mothe Cadillac memories of her grandfather's alleged ways with Indians. By 1800 their children had died or left them, so the census shows. Tradition states the three went back to France, though the Revolution had made their native land, for them, no place to which to return. Finally, there being no room in hardworking Maine for either nonresident proprietors or resident and nonworking proprietors, the De Grégories were reduced to turning over their remaining property to a newly arrived bachelor, Royal Gurley, in exchange for an agreement to support them for the rest of their lives.
In 1810, the end came for Barthélemy de Grégoire. The story printed by Samuel Wasson in the Ellsworth American in 1873 that De Grégoire was, as a Catholic, buried outside
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Proprietors and Settlers
the Hull's Cove cemetery has been indignantly denied. The truth seems to be that the day of the burial was too windy to allow the breaking of ground in the cemetery. So it was that Cadillac's grandson-in-law and later, next to him, Cadillac's granddaughter, were laid to rest in the island Cadillac had seen and loved and desired.
As for the title to the island, that was in truth vested in the actual settlers. But what there was of it went into better hands. The Jackson claim went to Senator William Bing- ham, of Pennsylvania. He also picked up the little corner of Bar Harbor, at High Head, that was once part of the Bernard half of the island, through purchase from the mortgagors. Then Senator Bingham went broke, and his Baring relatives set up a trust fund so deftly that to this day it survives the statute of limitations. In the course of years the trust fund has sold almost all the land of the De Grégoire grant, holding now only some fifty acres or so.
4 The Town of Eden, Maine
T HE TWO families of proprietors who tried to take over the Mount Desert Island-the Cadillac-De Grégoires and the Bernards-failed because they represented a way of life that was becoming outmoded. Settlement by one owner, who relied on subordinates to do the work, did not fit the conditions of the Maine of the 1790's. Perhaps in the 1690's, had peace lasted, the forest feudalism of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac would have succeeded. It was suitable for a fur-trading economy, and had made good profits in Maine and later at Detroit. Per- haps, too, in the 1760's, Sir Francis Bernard, using influence and capital, might have set up a great estate, with docile German tenants, if politics had not entered. The Owens ac- complished something like that on Campobello Island. But in the 1790's the future was not for proprietorship as a means of settling land. Mount Desert Island would not be planted by Sir John Bernard, baronet, without a penny to his name, or by Barthélemy and Marie Thérèse de Grégoire, who would style themselves "gentleman and lady," and try to live in Boston off the proceeds of land sales. It would be planted by the Youngs and Hamors and Rodicks and Lynams and Higginses and Lelands and Thomases who had moved in, cleared their land, and gotten down to grapple with the situation, using their arms and skills as capital, their families as labor.
Those men who thus moved in formed a cross-section
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The Town of Eden, Maine
of American life. Naturally, the majority of them came from near-by places, such as the coast towns of Maine, or Cape Ann, or Cape Cod. But they were not all neighbors. They represented America on the march. Many years later, Postmaster Eben M. Hamor of Eden, Maine, discovered what a migratory family he belonged to, when he entered into correspondence with Congressman Thomas Hamor, of Idaho, and found that their genealogies could be traced back to a common ancestor in Hamorstown, Pennsylvania. Through William Lynam of St. Augustine, Florida, alleg- edly a native-born American citizen since the ship on which his French mother bore him to his Prussian army officer father was at the moment of his birth in Virginia territorial waters, Bar Harbor-Eden had a connection with the South. This reappeared as Eden-built vessels turned up in Charles- ton, South Carolina, records. From Connecticut came William Hull, of Derby, brother of the general, uncle of the navy captain, to give his name to the cove he left.
For eastern Maine, beyond the Penobscot, was just as much America's frontier as was Kentucky, or Tennessee, or Ohio. Indeed, a comparison of dates suggests that it was America's first true frontier, for Abraham Somes settled across Penobscot before Daniel Boone settled beyond the greater barrier of the Appalachians. Certainly, Rufus Putnam, who surveyed both eastern Maine and Ohio, recorded the same set of conditions in his papers.
Whether or not it is true that the frontier movement, as opposed to colonial settlement, began in Maine-for which belief there are some supporting data-" it is true
* Not only is there the earlier dating of settlement by Somes, there is also a possibility that the legislation governing the Northwest and South- west Territories was modeled on that of Massachusetts, especially the land ordinance of 1785.
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that the frontier of Maine had much in common with the frontier of the West, and that similar causes were at work in each and had similar, though not identical, results. In each case, overcrowding at home drove settlers out; and the removal of the French and Indian menace afforded new space for settlers. Transportation methods differed. To the West, settlers went with Conestoga wagons and flat- boats, to Maine they went by pinky and Chebacco boat. Essentials, however, remained the same. The younger sons, the adventurous, and the misfits, all moved out to seek new homes. If they could meet the requirements of the frontier life, they stayed; if not, they, like Sir John Bernard, moved again. When they arrived, they lived off the soil, and paid their unavoidable expenses with a cash crop. Here again there were differences in detail, and agreement in principle. In the Ohio valley, the crop was corn, sold either as corn carried by flatboat to New Orleans, or distilled into whisky and carried over the mountains. In Maine, lumber and fish were the cash crops, to be sold in Boston or, at times, in the West Indies. Some corn, too, may have been raised, for the earliest records speak of both saw mills and grist mills. But economic and social conditions were basically the same, whether a settler moved west or north. Just as much as were the men of Ohio, the men of eastern Maine were frontiers- men. They knew how to fell trees and clear the ground, bait hooks and catch fish, hoe ground and raise crops, notch logs and put up a log cabin, saw lumber and build vessels. Those were the skills needed for survival.
But the men of eastern Maine had another set of skills. They knew how to organize communities, as well as to sur- vive as individuals. When, in 1789, Mount Desert Planta- tion was ordered to take on the responsibilities and duties of being a full-fledged town, the men of eastern Maine who
From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
I Bar Harbor of the hotel era-an imaginary bird's-eye view
Photograph by R. L. Scott
2 Hull's Cove today
¥
Scenes from Cole's Sketch Book, Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum
3 Sand Beach and the Beehive as Thomas Cole saw them in 1844
Hull's Cove as Thomas Cole saw it in 1844
4
Courtesy Ben Hadley, Esq.
5 George B. Dorr and Mrs. J. P. Morgan at the Lynam farm- house where Cole stayed in 1844
From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
6 Stanwood, the home of James G. Blaine and Walter Damrosch
From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
Scene at the Bar Harbor Horse Show at Robin Hood Park
7
From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
8 Robin Hood Park from Newport-Champlain Mountain
From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
L
I
G. M. RY.
From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
9-10 Two scenes from the heyday of the tourist era-the second Rodick House and the Green Mountain Railway
Photograph by R. L. Scott
II Sand Beach and the Beehive in 1947 (see illustration 3)
Photograph by R. L. Scott
I2 The countryside chosen by the early settlers of Eden-view from Salisbury Cove, 1948
I3 "A little bit of Nor- way on the Maine Coast"-the Beehive and Frenchman's Bay
Photographs by R. L. Scott
14 A "Rockefeller Road" to- day - untouched woods near Eagle Lake
From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
IS A view of Bar Harbor in the late 1870's showing the extent of change which has occurred since then-Main Street, the row of hotels in the distance, which then had a view to the water, now has no hotels and, with shops on both sides, no view to the water. The fields are built up with resi- dences; much of the woods in the foreground is now the Athletic Field. Even St. Sylvia's Catholic Church-with its carvings from Oberammergau-from near the site of which this was taken, has been replaced by the present Church of The Holy Redeemer. Only Sheep and Bald Porcu- pine remain as they were then.
Photograph by Sargeant F. Collier
16 A shipbuilder's residence-the Benjamin Leland house-now the Mount Desert Island Biologi- cal Laboratory
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From the Bar Harbor Historical Collection
17 The harbor in the early 1900's from near the Canoe Club
Courtesy of the Bar Harbor Club
18 The harbor today from the Bar Harbor Club
IOI
The Town of Eden, Maine
form the subject of this account pitched in and took their share of town offices. They were not afraid of responsibility, though they disliked going to Bass Harbor for town meet- ing. Within three years there was agitation for division of the town. Voted down, in 1793, it was accepted in 1795. A committee drew up plans for a boundary, a simple one, from the head of tide at Otter Creek to the head of tide at Somes Sound, thence straight to High Head. A polite peti- tion was sent to the Great and General Court, asking for division. And, out of compliment to the then governor, the name of Adams was asked for the new town. The Great and General Court, accepting the petition, declined to compliment the governor, and, for some reason unknown, chose the name Eden. Why the English statesman Richard Eden was suggested as the name-giver of the town is a mystery; the idea was one of the conjectures spawned by Samuel Wasson in the 1870's. The more accepted version, published by Williamson, is that the beauties of the town gave rise to the name. But, at any rate, the deed was done, and in February, 1796, Samuel Adams signed the act creat- ing the Town of Eden. By March, news of the event had reached Frenchman's Bay, and, as the act required, Paul Dudley Sargent, J.P., issued the warrant needed to call the first town meeting. On Monday, April 4, 1796, the inhab- itants of the new town met at the house of Captain Samuel Hull-it is to be hoped promptly at ten o'clock, as the warrant instructed. The proceedings of that meeting tell the sort of place Eden had become.
The first business transacted was the choice of a presiding officer, or moderator. That was Captain Ezra Young, chosen to hold office for that meeting only. Then the vitally needed town officers were elected. At the head of the list was the recording officer, Town Clerk Thomas Paine. Then
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came the executive board, the three selectmen, Ezra Young, Levi Higgins, and Samuel Hull, the financial officer, Treas- urer David Hamor, the law-enforcement officer, Con- stable Israel Higgins of Bar Harbor proper, and four public-works officers, Thomas Wasgatt, Junior, Ebenezer Salsbury, David Hamor, and Joseph Mayo, the surveyors of highways. By these elections Eden set up the essentials of her government. With a moderator the town meeting could discuss and come to conclusions; with a clerk, per- manent records could be kept; with selectmen the town meeting's votes could be carried out; with surveyors of highways routine public works could be kept up. And to this day Bar Harbor, the successor of Eden, still has those officers.
But Eden, living in the wilderness, needed specialists, to carry out duties vital to the town's life. Ezra Young and Elisah Cousins were elected surveyors of boards, David Hig- gins surveyor of shingles, Henry Knowles surveyor of staves, Daniel Rodick and Daniel Richardson fence-viewers, Elkanah Young sealer of leather, Timothy Smullage culler of fish, Stephen Salsbury hog reeve, Joseph Mayo and Ebenezer Salsbury pound keepers (with a vote that there be one pound in the center of town), Joseph Mayo and Solomon Higgins field drivers, Ebenezer Higgins and Moses Wasgatt tythingmen. These men almost automatically knew their duties, but the hog reeve, pound keepers and field drivers were given special instructions. Neat cattle might run at large, as might swine, "being well yoked," but sheep might not.
Since then, these specialists have disappeared from the life of Bar Harbor. In 1927, a squabble caused the appoint- ment of fence viewers as arbitrators. Legend has it that sometimes a hog reeve finds himself automatically appointed
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The Town of Eden, Maine
-as the newest married man in town-and learns of his appointment by finding a hog to deal with when he least expects it. But these specialists were needed for a life that has gone, when Eden earned its living from lumber and livestock. Should a coasting trader, buying lumber, fall into dispute over the quality of what he bought, he would know to whom to apply for a decision as to the merits of boards, shingles, or staves. Likewise, should he have suspicion as to his hides or his fish, there was a local expert who could give at least a quick answer, if not a just one. Again, should animals run wild, there was official responsibility. Cows that had been identified as owned in Eden might run at large, untethered. Each family recorded its cattle mark with the town clerk. But woe betide any outsiders, such as a Bartlett from Bartlett's Island, who tried to leave his cows to fatten in the lush meadow grass of North East Creek. Off-island cattle, unyoked or ill yoked swine, and untethered or un- fenced sheep, would be driven to the pound, by Joseph Mayo and Solomon Higgins and there tended by Mayo or Uncle Ebenezer Salsbury. Should a dispute come as to the quality and strength of a boundary fence supposed to keep sheep in, it would be turned over for arbitration to Jesse Higgins and William Mason. (Daniel Richardson and Daniel Rodick refused to qualify). These men might not feel it their duty to see that all fences were horse-high, bull- strong, and pig-tight, but they would have the power to make both parties to a dispute build a fence that met the official views.
It took time to make these decisions-so much time that an adjourned meeting was called on April 18, 1796. For this meeting a special warrant was issued, lest any feel that the adjournment had been insufficiently legal. This time the town met further up the rudimentary road along the top of
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The Story of Bar Harbor
the island, at Uncle Ebenezer Salsbury's house, following the old New England custom of rotating meeting places in order to make attendance easier. At this meeting money was voted, the great sum of $288-$60 for town expenses, $168 for a bridge over North East Creek, and $60 for a town school. It was voted that four shillings a day be the price of labor on the roads, which is where the $168 would be worked out, and that Ezra Young, David Hamor, and Joseph Hopkins would be a committee to settle accounts with the Town of Mount Desert. And so enough was done to provide for Eden's government until the following March.
When the male inhabitants of Eden thus met to settle their affairs, they probably did not give a thought to the tradition that lay back of this. They knew, from long, practical experience, how to handle their affairs. And if they were in any doubt, probably someone had a justice of the peace's instruction book, which could be used to settle any difficulty. Yet if anything can explain why these men made a success of their settlement, when others had failed, it is just that tradition back of them. There is much truth in the old, almost trite, suggestion that the most precious cargo the Arbella carried to Massachusetts, or the Mayflower to Plymouth, or the Sarah Constant to James- town, was the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Whole books have been written pro and con, discussing the extent to which New England imported her institu- tions from old England, and what it mattered, anyway. Into that long and acrimonious discussion it is useless to probe here, though a defensive footnote will be left behind, to cover one possibly contentious point. What is clear is that the combination of institutions that existed in eastern Maine in 1796 was well suited to meet the problems of the
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The Town of Eden, Maine
day. Locally, the machinery of the English self-governing parish, imported by the Puritans of Massachusetts, had blossomed into the great machinery of self-government described above. This was an inheritance from the demo- cratic congregations that had come to Massachusetts in the 1630's, and that carried on their business as had their fore- fathers in Elizabethan England, in those parishes where democracy had come uppermost .*
This pedigree of the New England town could be pursued further back. If the officials are those of the English parish, with modifications in name, the idea of government by assembly may go back further, to the Anglo-Saxon meet- ings, or "moots," to the German gatherings in the forest of which Tacitus wrote. Perhaps there is a parallel with the Icelandic public meetings, the "things" for the quarters of Iceland, the "Althing" for all Iceland, which Eric the Red attended, and which exiled him to Greenland. Here, again, there is a hornet's nest to be avoided, of ardent dis- cussion pro and con, and here, also there is a point to be made. Frontier communities, from the time of ancient Germany, of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, and of the settlement of Iceland, down to the settlement of Eden, Maine, have succeeded in being democratic. Certainly, Captain Ezra Young and Josiah Black did not run the Eden town meeting as a conscious copy of a meeting presided over by Lief Ericson, of whom they had never heard. But with equal certainty, both Icelanders and Yankees knew the value of frontier democracy, and both succeeded in ap-
* As late as 1848, in the parish of Highgate, Joshua Toulmin Smith proved what the legal powers of a parish organization could accomplish when activated by an energetic man. His specific uses of laws going back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth proved what extent of New England democracy could have been practiced by the founders of New England before they crossed the Atlantic.
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The Story of Bar Harbor
plying democracy in the frontier because it was ingrained in them.
Now, this frontier democracy of eastern Maine had not only a past, but also a future. Be it noted that it began to develop about 1770, and was properly organized when in 1783 the commonwealth of Massachusetts set up the committee on eastern lands. Be it also noted that Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts and of the committee on eastern lands, was a member of congress when Thomas Jefferson drew up the land ordinance of 1785. That ordinance fol- lows the basic Massachusetts principles of survey before settlement, and of reserved plots for school and church, rather than the Virginia system of settlement before survey, and church supported by tithes. Dane is said to have been the moving factor in keeping slavery out of the Northwest Territory, in legislation written by Jefferson. Was he the moving factor here, too?
This may seem a wandering from the history of Bar Harbor. But is it? Is not the important point about the town that was Eden and became Bar Harbor that it had an ingrained democracy that was an unconscious part of a great democratic tradition and part of a great frontier tradition?
In its economics, Eden was a frontier town. The tax bill of 1796, preserved in copy, tells what conditions were. There were eighty-eight polls-that is, male taxpayers of voting age-who lived in thirty-five dwelling houses to which were attached twenty-four barns. In those barns were kept fourteen horses and sixty-two oxen, the horses valued at $30 to $40 apiece, while the oxen were valued at $25. In all, the town possessed two hundred and twenty- two cows and steers, and one hundred and three swine. That works out at about two men and two oxen to each house,
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The Town of Eden, Maine
with only two-fifths of the houses having horses, though two-thirds of the houses had barns. Those are figures for a lumbering town, not a farming town. The assessors agreed to that point, for they assumed that less than half the town's area, 11,665 acres, was improvable, and that of that acreage only 756 acres had been improved. The greater part of the land, those Mount Desert Hills which play such a large part in the town's life, was, 12,320 acres of it, unimprovable. The means to wealth was sawing; the town had six saw mills, and only four warehouses, three shops, and one grist mill. It also transported its own produce. The way the 202 tons of shipping, valued at $12 a ton, is listed, suggests that the Wasgatts owned a sixty-two-ton vessel, the Hamors one of one hundred and twenty-six tons, and that either Andrew Monarch had a six-ton boat and Samuel Hull an eight-ton one, or that these two men shared a fourteen-ton boat. There, in a nutshell, is the economic life of Eden, Maine.1
In one sense, the problems this frontier democracy had to solve were tiny ones. But that was only natural; Eden was a small town. This is the important point-it is by solving their tiny problems that the citizens of a Maine town get the training in self-government that makes them what they are. The town meeting over which Captain Ezra Young or Samuel Hull presided was a microcosm of Amer- ican democracy, a little bit of America handling its prob- lems for itself. No narrow specialists, they took on all prob- lems as they came. When they built a bridge over North East Creek, to connect the two sides of the town, and when they persuaded the Justices of the Hancock County court to set ferry rates, they were doing their share in building up the country. It was a real community project, the assem- bling of the timbers for the bridge, and the bringing
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The Story of Bar Harbor
together of the whole town, Monday, June 2, 1797, to provide labor. When they divided the town into twelve school districts, each, turn by turn, to have its one-room schoolhouse built at town expense, the turns to be chosen by lot, they were advancing America's educational system, even if only by setting up one-month schools to teach the three R's. When they built their pound, and thereby pre- vented cattle from straying, they were doing their share in building up America's agriculture. When, in February, 1798, they settled their debts with the parent town of Mount Desert and saw to a revaluation of the property of the two towns, they were doing their practical bit towards procuring the "equitable tax base" of which so many talk. Those problems were just as real as the larger national problems of which they were a part, and far more im- mediate.
Of course, there was plenty of self-interest in all this. Samuel Hull, before he left town, tried unsuccessfully to have islands in Frenchman's Bay granted to him, so as to get free stumpage. Joseph Mayo secured the relocation of the Narrows ferry so that people would not walk through his garden, and the county Court ordered Mark Shepard, John Somes, and Peter Haynes to take care of the matter.2 When Colonel Cornelius Thompson grew irritated by the rate at which his neighbors assessed his property, he in turn went to the legislature and had Thompson's Island taken out of Eden and put in Trenton, with a clause in the act stating just how much the valuation of the two towns had been changed. That is why the Trenton boundary comes on to the Bar Harbor side of the Narrows bridge, to this day.
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