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 9
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Mr. Thomas's other adventures, as told in his autobiog- raphy, show how the builders of Eden went at their work. His verse tells of three vessels-which seem to have been the schooner Victory, later wrecked on Nantucket Shoals, after which, for some reason probably connected with the rescue of the crew, her papers were surrendered at Pas- samoquoddy Bay; the brig Nestor, a joint venture with the Spurlings of Cranberry Islands, which was wrecked on Martinique; and the above-mentioned Royal Arch. Mr. Thomas seems to have had bad luck at sea; he also wrote
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a verse about a brig driven into St. Thomas, Danish West Indies; it sailed from New York with him aboard. He was compelled, however, by the exigencies of verse, or faults of memory (he composed the poem, legend states, on his eightieth birthday) to neglect several other ships he built or shared in owning, one hailing from as far afield as Machias.
Part ownership of a vessel was a common custom of those days. When the painting of the schooner Katherine by John S. Sargent caused a search into the vessel's title, out of curiosity, it was discovered that the divorced Mrs. Jack London, the former Charmian Kitteredge of Eden, owned an undivided thirty-second part of her. So it was that many a young man took his wages, for working on a vessel, in a share of her, or invested savings in that way. For part owner- ship of a vessel was a means of spurring activity in the build- ers. Nicholas Thomas remembered the reverse of that, to his cost. That same Royal Arch that brought him in not a penny was built by paying a daily wage, and getting slow work in consequence, even though he stimulated his workmen with rum and beer. This last was a shock to Mr. Thomas to remember, as he ended his life as a temperance stalwart, and deeply regretted having kept a "tippling shop" in early days. But he was always an unrepentant Democrat.
No famous ships were built in Eden-most Eden vessels were schooners, of about 100 tons burden-but two builders who moved from Eden built a very famous vessel on the other side of Frenchman's Bay. Jeremiah and Joseph Stevens of Hull's Cove succeeded in confusing the records by first building a schooner named Pilgrim, of 196 tons, and selling her to William Thompson, who sailed her to New York and changed her into a brig. Then they spent the winter on Stave Island and there built a brig, also named
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Pilgrim, of about the same tonnage, also sold in New York, and also captained by a William Thompson. The latter was of so much the same tonnage as to seem the same as the former, remeasured after the change in rig, but it was prov- ably different. It was this brig Pilgrim, that carried Richard Henry Dana, for the first one of his Two Years Before the Mast.
Of the shipbuilders of Eden, one attracts attention by reason of an anatomical peculiarity. William M. Richards of Bar Harbor had two thumbs on one hand. Information goes no further, and does not record which hand it was; nor does it tell whether the double thumb helped him in his trade. The great builders seem to have been the Hamors of Hull's Cove, who built more, finally, than did their com- petitors the Higginses. In the early days there were the two Stevens brothers, the Thompson family, who had their fingers in every pie, John McFarland, who launched his ships into the deep water that in later years attracted the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory to the same site, and, above all, Edward Brewer, known far and wide as Master Brewer. He built the biggest vessels; his full-rigged ship Cornelia was just a little bigger than the Hamors' St. Helena, the only other Eden ship properly so called. Master Brewer built the most vessels and kept on building for the longest time; then he most profitably turned from ship- building to logging, buying from the Bingham estate much of the mountain land including the top of what is now called Cadillac Mountain. But the glories of shipbuilding ended here, as elsewhere in America, with the coming of the Civil War.
It is true that the Jordans built in 1863 a schooner, named so soon after Gettysburg as to be perhaps the first American vessel named General Meade. And whenever there seemed
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a market for it, the Brewer yard launched another vessel, right up to the E. T. Hamor of 1889. It is also true that as late as 1946 one Eden-built schooner was still afloat, but that year it was abandoned on a reef. However, Eden re- mained ship-minded for many years. When the Eden Baptist Church moved from Hull's Cove to its present lovely spired meeting house in Salisbury Cove, the new pew plan was drawn up on the back of a ship-registration form. As late as 1871 the Dodge directory lists in Eden's trades twelve "builders and ship carpenters."
But that very title tells its tale. By 1871 the men of Eden had turned from building ships to building hotels and cot- tages. A new industry had reached town.
5
Artists and Boarders-with a Military Interlude
u NTIL SOMEONE comes along with a better date, September 3, 1844, will go down in the records as the day on which the Bar Harbor summer colony was founded. For on that day Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River school of painting, drove across Mount Desert Island to stay at Lynam's at Schooner Head. He had been painting in Penobscot Bay and at Castine, had visited Beech Mountain, and had come to the conclusion that the best place in which to find fitting subjects for his pencil and brush was the northeast shore of Mount Desert Island. So he filled his sketchbook, still to be seen in the Princeton University Art Museum, with drawings of "Sand Beach Mountain," "Hull's Cove," "Islands in Frenchman's Bay" and other Bar Harbor subjects, and went off, by way of Ellsworth, to New York, where he told his friends and his patrons of the beauties he had seen.
Bar Harbor was fortunate in its first publicist. Thomas Cole was an unusual man. A native of England, but brought up in up-state New York, he was a pioneer of a new artistic movement. He loved the beauties of the Hudson Valley, he had a gift for accurate drawing, and by sheer persistence and independent pride in America he taught those who were becoming patrons of art to like American subjects faithfully depicted. He also taught the rising generation
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of young artists to follow in his footsteps. So it was that in a later year he brought to Bar Harbor his friend and pupil, Frederick Edwin Church. Gradually, Schooner Head and the Lynam farmhouse, Bar Harbor, and the houses of Tobias Roberts and Albert Higgins, became frequented by certain leaders in American art-Robert Gifford, Thomas Birch, Albert Bierstedt, Parsons, Warren, Brown, and Colman- and in later years by William Morris Hunt. These men drew and painted, and, what was most important, sold their paintings. By doing this they told just that group which could afford long summer vacations of the beauties of Mount Desert in general and of the ocean side of Bar Har- bor in particular. After the artists came the scientists, the yachtsmen, the sportsmen, and simple vacationers or "rusti- cators," and a new industry came to the Town of Eden.
It is possible to picture to oneself the sort of life these artists led, because Miss Henrietta Rowe, in her Maid of Bar Harbor, published in 1902, wrote a few pages of nostalgic description of the Bar Harbor that had gone. There she told how the young men with their easels had come to the shores of Frenchman's Bay and made friends with the men and women of Eden with whom they took lodging. It was a happy sort of life, since the young artists-Cole, their leader, was only in his thirties when he died in 1848- enjoyed the real Maine life. They liked to have their meals at hours that fitted a farmer, not them; they liked to sleep in hot attics-or, at least, to tell about it later on. And they liked to be treated as slightly mad human beings who were all right as long as one left them alone. Because it was such a happy life, the artists spoke of Mount Desert as a heavenly spot in which to rest and enjoy oneself.
So it was that the idea spread that Bar Harbor, in particu- lar, was a good place to which to go. Nor was New York the
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1
only place in which this gospel was preached. There were those in Bangor who had the money and the leisure for some weeks or a month or more in the complete quiet of the "plateau extending from Cromwell's Harbor to Duck Brook," where stood open fields and one or two farmhouses. This Bangor tradition in the summer colony lasted long, even after the form of those fields had utterly changed. It was in 1852, so a photograph records, that Albert Higgins of Bar Harbor took in the first long-term summer visitors. Bar Harbor's reputation was extending.
Then another cause put Bar Harbor-in this case literally -on the map. Professor Alexander Dallas Bache, superin- tendent of the United States Coast Survey, was, in the 1850's, alternating his time between mapping the coast at Charleston, South Carolina, and the coast of Maine. In 1854 the time came to set up triangulation points eastward of the Kennebec. He therefore journeyed "down East" to see what mountains would be most helpful. Obviously, "Mount Desert" as he called it-Green or Newport Moun- tain as the islanders called it, "Adam's Grave" as his assistants facetiously called it, Cadillac as the National Park now calls it-was the right place for a station. C. O. Boutelle, of a Maine family, on August 6, 1853, put up the signal on "Mt. Desert" which was in steady use until 1860. Every year, some use or other was made of it. The Tracy family, of whom more anon, found a surveyor at the top, not too happy, when they made their visit in 1855. In 1856 there was a large party, including Superintendent Bache himself, who worked from August to October at basic observations, from which the coastal charts, to this day, are drawn. In order to secure enough angular measurements, a fifty-six- foot scaffold was built at New London by Lieutenant James Totten, so that observers on Mount Harris, near Augusta,
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could receive heliograph messages from Mt. Desert over the top of Mount Waldo. It took much correspondence to arrange this, and to estimate the height needed to be sure of crossing Mount Waldo. As late as 1865 Assistant George Fairfield was engaged in secondary triangulation, from "Mt. Desert," of the waters of Frenchman's Bay and the Nar- rows.
Probably it did Bar Harbor no harm to have "Mount Desert" spoken of by these men as they traveled all over the United States. Almost certainly the visits of Professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the great Harvard geologist, were stimulated by the existence of Bache's surveys. But the importance of all this lay not only in arousing interest and putting Bar Harbor on the map, much as Champlain had done in 1605. There was a more direct result. For in 1853, when it was planned to erect a survey station on the top of Green Mountain, Richard Hamor of Eden was com- missioned to build "in a sheltered place near the top" a "house 10 X 12 square & 9 feet high of boards battened with 3 x I inch battens on the roof and sides, floored with table & 2 bunks inside, to have one window with 8 lights and a sliding shutter or deadlight outside to secure it." For this Deputy Collector of Customs Daniel E. Somes, of Mount Desert, Maine, was instructed to pay Mr. Hamor $so. Like- wise, Artificer Thomas McDonnell, of the Coast Survey, hacked out a usable road, up which a team could drag the survey instruments to the top of Green Mountain. So it was that a Federal subsidy unconsciously built the first Green Mountain Hotel, the predecessor of the present Mountain Tavern, the fourth in succession of such build- ings.
After the scientists, who left behind them the hotel, came the sportsmen, the yachtsmen, and the plain and simple
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visitors. Some of them left records, some did not. One such record comes from Frederick Edwin Church's friend, Charles Tracy, who brought his whole family and his piano to Mount Desert Island at the artist's suggestion, and then kept a diary. From that diary, now preserved in the Jesup Library in Bar Harbor, one can learn the problems involved in moving a family from New York to Mount Desert Island. The route was via the old Fall River Line to Boston, with breakfast at the Revere House, then the steamer Penobscot to Rockland and the steamer Rockland to Tremont, where, after a meal at Deacon Clark's tavern, the Tracy party moved by wagon and sailboat to the house of Abraham Somes at Somesville. After this arduous journey the party idled away a month, the highlights of the sojourn being climbing what they called Newport Mountain, to find the surveyor on top, one trip to Bar Harbor, and two trips to Schooner Head. There such a friendship was struck up with the Lynam family-Mrs. Lynam having been a Tracey (with an "e"), that the younger Miss Tracy was left behind for her health. When this had been done, father Tracy was rowed sixteen miles from Schooner Head to the mainland, where a wagon took him to Bucksport. Then, after three nights spent at Bucksport, Boston, and Hartford, he ar- rived in New York in mid-morning, in time to do a half day's work at the office. Such were the rigors of travel in Maine in those days. His daughter, later Mrs. J. P. Morgan, for many years returned to Schooner Head. There is still in the possession of the historical collection a photograph of her and the late George B. Dorr at the Lynam farmhouse.
Mrs. Morgan brought her husband, and those who in their youth were choirboys at St. Saviour's Episcopal Church have not forgotten J. P. Morgan as he sat in a front pew; his face caught their eyes. In local tradition
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Artists, Boarders, and Military Interlude
the Tracy party founded the summer colony, since with it was linked the Morgan family. The records, however, show that no such single line of attraction existed. It was in 1850, by one account, that Church took to staying with Albert Higgins. It was, as has been said, in 1852 that a whole farmhouse at Bar Harbor was filled by one party. By 1857 Bar Harbor had become a spot frequented by all sorts of people. In 1855 Tobias Roberts opened his Agamont House, at the foot of the present Main Street, where in 1935 the Town of Bar Harbor built a park. In 1857 the Washing- ton newspaper correspondent Robert Carter chartered a schooner and took with him, naturally enough, a scientist and an artist, to sail the Maine coast. It was an obvious terminus to the trip to land at Southwest Harbor, and take a wagon to Bar Harbor. There the party divided, and its busy members rode by stagecoach over the Mount Desert bridge, to catch a train at Bangor. It was equally natural for the Harvard member of the party to find a classmate fishing at Eagle Lake, which name Frederick Edwin Church had succeeded in fastening upon Great Pond, because he saw an eagle fly over it. By 1857 another change had come. Captain Charles Deering began taking the steamer Rock- land up Frenchman's Bay, on its route from Southwest Harbor to Machias. The next year he opened the Deering House, as a second hotel. Meanwhile Daniel Rodick con- verted to summer occupancy two cottages, the precursors of his hotel.
It was in these years that the manners and customs of Bar Harbor must have developed, though the stories told are dated, at present, from the period after the Civil War. Mount Desert Island is a biologist's paradise, for it is on the edge of Acadia, botanically as well as legally. There the com- mon Atlantic region flora and fauna meet the specialized
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The Story of Bar Harbor
flora and fauna of the northeast, hence such plants as the Bar Harbor juniper. For those interested in sea life, too, it affords unusual opportunities, especially for young, would- be scientists who roam the shores, poking into rocky pools to identify the mollusca living therein. The law of supply and demand being what it is, and the supply of young men being less than the demand for them, the young ladies also who came to this distant open field soon discovered a fas- cination in the study of biology. And so the sport of "rock- ing" arose, wherein pairs or groups roamed the shores, studying something or other. Natural physical limitations cut down the range of "rocking parties." They seem to have gone by foot about as far as the "Assyrian's Head" on the shore at Sol's Cliff, to the south, and perhaps to Duck Brook on the north, when traveling by foot, and to Schooner Head or Great Head to the south, to the Ovens to the north when traveling by buckboard. Such expeditions naturally avoided human habitations; that was why the fishing village of Southwest Harbor was shunned, except as a means of ar- rival by steamer, and why the built-up centers of Hull's Cove and Eden proper were left alone.
Meanwhile, the life of the town of Eden went on much as usual. Probably there was the beginning of an economic down-swing. Shipbuilding dropped, also the amount of fishing bounties granted in Frenchman's Bay. Seagoing America no longer saw the lush days of the California trade, and when that ended the lumber boom ended, too. Further- more, by that time Mount Desert Island was largely cut over, as far as accessible lumber went. And so a supply of labor was being unconsciously freed for the new industry that was to come into the town, the tourist trade.
Suddenly, a knife stroke cut across American life. Demo- cratic Maine saw the rise of a new political party, that was
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Artists, Boarders, and Military Interlude
to gain its allegiance, the Republican Party. Political lines changed, and the next thing America knew, Hannibal Hamlin of Ellsworth was elected Vice-President of the United States, and the "Rebellion" had broken out. And Maine, under the leadership of Representative James G. Blaine, enthusiastically supported the Federal cause in the Civil War.
Perhaps the first effect that the Civil War had upon Bar Harbor was to cut down transportation. The navy needed ships as it never had before, and, in one sense, even in 1940 never did again. Anything that could float and move was wanted for the blockade of the South. And so the Rockland found herself off the Bar Harbor run, re- placed for a short time by the aging T. F. Secor, the pioneer steamer of the coastal trade. Then even the Secor went to help to win the war, and Bar Harbor was cut off from sea transportation except for the ubiquitous lumber schooners. However, the Civil War was not, judged by modern standards, an intensive war, even though it was a bloodily fought one. And still the summer visitors came to Lar Harbor, though in reduced numbers.
As for the Town of Eden, the war came to it, as it did to the rest of America. A very creditable number of Eden seamen went to the navy, nine in all, for the seamen's register at Ellsworth shows that Eden did not normally send men to sea, even if she did send captains to deliver vessels. Eden's contributions were to the army, and chiefly to two regiments, the Eleventh and Twenty-sixth Infantry, and the First Maine Heavy Artillery. This was a natural result of the recruiting methods of the times, when volun- teers were gathered by recruiting parties; and each com- pany of each regiment had a special local connection, often electing to command the officer who had raised it. So it
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was that the men of Eden saw service on the comparatively dull fronts of the war, the landing at Beaufort, and the Red River campaign. By a freak of fate, only one Eden man was in a regiment that served so heroically at Gettysburg, and he was absent on special assignment the day of the battle.
Eden, even in the hardest times of recruiting, could hold its head up. The town did vote money for bounties, but that was an informal form of selective service. If so-and-so could volunteer if his family were helped out, a bounty was given. And when the draft came, the town voted to pay for substitutes, and used such payments as a way of getting the right men to the front. That, in one case, kept at home a Mexican War veteran, Orient H. Carpenter, though another such veteran went to the war, and died. And, as was natural in an army that was pretty genuinely a volun- teer army, with some compulsion to volunteer, most of the men were either eighteen and single or thirty-five and married, when they went in. Any recruiting sergeant will explain why that is so.
All this service was important in the growth of Eden- Bar Harbor; it had, however, largely a negative value. Eden did what the rest of Maine did, and eventually, when the population grew, there were enough veterans in town to set up a G.A.R. Post, the James A. Parker Post. The Civil War did not affect Eden directly, through the service of its men. Most of them came home afterwards, particularly those who were mustered out in August, 1863, when the Army of the Potomac was reconstituted into regiments that would stay in until the war was over. But there was one piece of service that more directly affected Bar Harbor, even though the man who served was not a Bar Harbor man. That was the time Captain Charles Deering, of Rock- land, spent at the war, for he came out of the navy with
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Artists, Boarders, and Military Interlude 135
a new steamer, City of Richmond, that had been well built for the purpose of taking troops up the James River. When Deering came back he persuaded the Eastern Railway, run- ning from Portland to Rockland, that there would be money in the passenger traffic through to Bar Harbor if a wharf were built. Tobias Roberts, interested in getting customers for his Agamont Hotel, built his wharf, which the Eastern Railway took over. And so the steamers came to Frenchman's Bay, and suddenly the few houses at Bar Harbor proper blossomed into a village.
The result was not too prepossessing. Here is what was written in William Cullen Bryant's Picturesque America:
The Village of East Eden, while possessing a charming look- out over the bay, is without one feature of beauty. It is built upon a treeless plain, and consists for the most part of a group of small white houses, rapidly extemporized for the accom- modation of summer boarders. Every structure, with the exception of a few cottages erected by wealthy gentlemen of Boston, stands without trees, garden or any other pleas- ant surroundings.
What was happening was that Bar Harbor was beginning to boom. The sportsmen and scientists and artists and simple vacationists who had come there were now returning, and bringing their families with them. The ship carpenters of Eden stopped building schooners, and built what passed for hotels. And in five years the open field was transformed into the village so unflatteringly described by Bryant. In 1866 Tobias Roberts was able to put through the construc- tion of Main Street by ending his petition to the selectmen with, "And your petitioner will ever repeat his request until it is granted." By 1871 there were eleven hotels, most of them along Main Street, so that the open, grassy area
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The Story of Bar Harbor
that stretched down to the bay earned the two names it still bears, "Albert Meadow" and "The Field." John S. Lynam came in from Schooner Head to build his Lynam House. Captain Deering ran his hotel in conjunction with his steamer. Daniel Rodick expanded his cottages into an ever-growing hotel that occupied the area, eventually, from Cottage Street up to the entrance to the open parking lot, half way to the village green. Above all, the Higgins family built itself hotels, so that a summer legend arose that no hotel existed without a Higgins.
Both a cause and a result of all this was a steady flow of guidebooks. The first one was some short paragraphs that Mrs. Clara Barnes Martin, a contributor to The Nation, of New York, put together and later had Brown & Thurston reprint. Loring, Short & Harmon, who still sell books in Portland, took over the reproduction of this guidebook which expanded from thirty-six pages in the original edition to one hundred and fifteen in the final one of 1885. At first just a pleasant account of the author's travels, it soon became padded out with ever-changing details of means of travel and comments on the change in the Island. Benjamin Franklin De Costa followed the next year with his Scenes in the Isle of Mount Desert, which appeared also in expanded form, and juggled around in the earlier chap- ters to drag in the Jesuits more effectively. It, too, was a travel book, narrating how a group took a yacht to South- west Harbor and found Mount Desert Island the perfect place to stay. There also exists, but hard to discover, an account printed by some Quaker families, of how they took their schooner to the place of which everyone seemed to be speaking, and of how they enjoyed the trip that ended at Bar Harbor. From it, perhaps more than from any other document-except, perhaps, Dr. Derby's diary or the
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