Location

Location

Table of Contents

This table of contents summarizes a 6-part narrative and photographic  description of the location of the Oceansedge property

1. Part I: The Subject Property
   1. General Location of the Property
   2. Oceanfront property
      1. Hulls Cove
      2. Lookout Point
      3. Frenchman’s Bay
      4. Penobscot Bay
   3. The Oceansedge property and the enclave within the Hulls Cove neighborhood
      1. Lookout Point
      2. Lookout Point Road
         1. Historical development of Lookout Point Road and the enclave in Hulls Cove
         2. Present
      3. Private location of Oceansedge on Lookout Point Road
         1. Driveway
         2. Nature Preserve
   4. Views from the subject property
   5. Things to do
      1. Oceanfront activities
      2. Acadia National Park
      3. Nightlife
2. Part II: Hulls Cove
   1. The cove
   2. The Hulls Cove neighborhood:
      1. History
         1. origins in 1768, in the wake of the Indian Wars
         2. next 100 years
         3. late 1800s, during the Gilded Age: beginnings of the Lookout Point neighborhood
         4. 1900s
      2. Lookout Point Now
3. Part III: The Town of Bar Harbor
   1. Standing of Bar Harbor
   2. Beginnings of Bar Harbor
   3. Features of Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island
4. Part IV: Acadia National Park
   1. General
   2. Oceansedge and proximity (1 mile) to Acadia National Park
   3. Past and present
      1. Past
      2. Present
         1. Carriage Roads
         2. Things to do
5. Part V: Mount Desert Island
   1. General
   2. History
      1. Settlement
      2. The Gilded Age
      3. The Fire
      4. Changing of the Guard
6. Part VI: The enduring Hulls Cove neighborhood within Bar Harbor

Location

Part I

1. The Subject Property
   1. General Location of the Property

      The subject property is a single-family home located on the ocean . . . in the Hulls Cove neighborhood . . . in the Town of Bar Harbor . . . within one mile of the official entrance to Acadia National Park . . . on Mount Desert Island . . . in “Downeast” Coastal Maine.

   2. Oceanfront property
      1. Hulls Cove

         The subject property is located directly on the ocean at Hulls Cove in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island. (Photo 1)

      2. Lookout Point

         The property is part of a 50-acre peninsula (Lookout Point) which reaches eastward into Frenchman’s Bay. (Photo 2)

      3. Frenchman’s Bay

         Frenchman’s Bay is a part of the much larger Penobscot Bay, for which the Penobscot River is a 265-mile tributary and Bangor is its headwater.

         Frenchman’s Bay is an irreverent reference to Samuel de Champlain who passed by Mount Desert Island in 1604.

         Champlain was on his way in 1604 to conferring for the first time, in what is now Bangor, with several Indian tribes including hundreds of warriors. He was wisely conciliatory, as the English would not be. The same Indian Tribes would later become allies of the French, and would terrorize for a hundred years New England’s English speaking coastal settlements, particularly in Maine where Indians abducted or killed one out of ten of the settlers .

         In 1608, 12 years before the founding of the feeble Plymouth Colony which later antagonized the native population, Champlain founded Quebec, including the creation of a citadel above the St. Lawrence River. (Photo 2.1). Quebec, a Catholic stronghold, would become the capital of the vast New France empire reaching west beyond the Great Lakes to the Rockies, and south to what is now New Orleans.

         If Champlain had chosen Bangor (the future lumber capital of the world)and its richly forested 12-million-acre Penobscot River Valley, instead of inland Quebec, the French might never have been dislodged from North America.

      4. Penobscot Bay

         Penobscot Bay is more 50 miles in width and contains 200 islands.

         Penobscot Bay is one of the most majestically beautiful destinations in the world for recreational sailors during summer months, as memorialized by Walter Cronkite’s book North by Northeast (1986), and as evinced by the legendary Hinckley Yachts company of Mount Desert Island and now Newport, RI.

         Founded by Henry Hinckley of one of the earliest of Maine families, Hinckley Yachts has crafted since 1928 gorgeous power and sail vessels (Photo 2.2).

         The company serves particularly affluent and discriminating customers worldwide.

         One of the Hinckley-made motor yachts, which yachts cost as much as $120,000 per lineal foot, is moored during the summer months just across Hulls Cove from the Oceansedge property.

         Perhaps a Hinckley Talaria 57
         (https://www.hinckleyyachts.com/models/talarias/talaria-57) (Photo 2.3), it is the deserved possession of a neighbor and corporate executive who handsomely flourished in the oil business in Texas and was a fortunate survivor of the oil business in Russia.

   3. The Oceansedge property and the enclave within the Hulls Cove neighborhood
      1. Lookout Point

         1. The subject oceanfront property, Oceansedge, is a gated residence located on a private road on Lookout Point – a peninsula on Frenchman’s Bay with the North Atlantic beyond

            Lookout Point is an extension of the historic neighborhood of Hulls Cove, within what is now the Town of Bar Harbor.

         2. Lookout Point is part of a 50-acre private enclave within that Hulls Cove neighborhood.

            That enclave is considered the most prestigious residential neighborhood in Bar Harbor.

         3. Presently occupying the Lookout Point peninsula are perhaps ten fortunate oceanfront homes.

            Two additional and new and extraordinary homes occupy the summit of the peninsula.

            (A little more than a century ago, affluent, bold, and politically pathfinding women of national renown occupied a home on that summit and nearby, until the Great War instantly ended in 1914 the Progressive era here, the Edwardian era in Europe, and the Gilded Age everywhere). (Photo 3)

            Winding through that peninsula is Lookout Point Road.

      2. Lookout Point Road

         1. Historical development of Lookout Point Road and the enclave in Hulls Cove

            In the last years of the 1800s, a Manhattan speculator and socialite capitalized, with money from Bangor’s bankers and from that city’s lucky speculators in 20,000,000 acres of Maine’s timberlands, the construction of Syndicate Road (now Lookout Point Road) through the south side of the peninsula. (Photo 4) (“Syndicate” meant a consortium of investors).

            The road was the spine for the collection of new lots the developer offered for sale.

            The undertaking was then Bar Harbor’s largest single residential development. The Hulls Cove development surpassed the work of a bold Boston owner of shoemaking company who developed, on a shoreline that had served for eons as an Indian encampment, the similarly stunning oceanfront properties on West Street in Bar Harbor. (Photo 5)

            The Hamors, hardy men who were descendants of Bar Harbor’s first families, constructed with Hulls Cove’s beach sand the Lookout Point Road still in use today. (The sand taken from the beach on Hulls Cove may have been pink, which would square with reports at the time saying the road was visually magnificent).

            In 1887, the Hamors additionally constructed for the development project, with massive granite blocks as large as small cars, a pier which amazingly still functions as well as ever – testimony to the Hamors’ Yankee ingenuity.

            In the last years of the 1800s, tenders from warships of the visiting Great White Fleet [the North Atlantic Squadron] brought to that pier on Hulls Cove senior Naval and Marine officers. They came in order to attend dusk-to-dawn dinner dances catered by dozens of domestic servants, in magnificent homes festooned with palm fronds and decorated with the pelts of African hunting trophies and with gas lights filtered in cheering colors of crimson and cobalt). (Photo 6).

            Some of the ships and the sailors alike were veterans of the Spanish American War in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. They would have met there Civil War veteran General Porter, who owned along with his affluent wife from Philadelphia and the county’s oldest surviving banking family: the entrance to Lookout Point Road, much of the Hulls Cove neighborhood, and a notable residence in Bar Harbor.

            More interestingly, they would have met Bar Harbor’s frequent summer visitor General Nelson Miles (1839 – 1925). Miles was sometimes accompanied by his relative, General Sherman, understandably despised by Southerners as a pyromaniacal sociopath.

            Summer-visitor Miles was: a hero of the Civil War, the primary actor in numerous ethnic cleansing engagements with Indian tribes throughout the West for 15 years ending with the reviled Massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890, Grover Cleveland’s violent strike breaker of the Pullman Strikes in 1895 (photo 6.1, an illustration by Frederic Remington), and the commanding general of the US Army during the Spanish American War which cost only 385 American combat deaths but gained for the United States a 2- hemisphere empire.

            Summerites from Northern Virginia (including some former Confederates who had held lofty social and political and military positions during the War), Baltimore, New Orleans, Washington, NYC, Chicago, and Philadelphia, readily acquired the lots in that enclave on Hulls Cove.

            The peninsula’s sunny glades, its ocean views, and especially the privacy and tranquility of the place, drew the buyers of the lots, even though those new neighbors had been implacable enemies years earlier.

         2. Present

            Lookout Point Road, perhaps a little more than a mile in length, is now a private road open only to the fortunate homeowners and their guests – notably included among welcomed guests are the magnificent deer and other nearly tame wildlife for whom Lookout Point is still a safe haven, a quiet refuge, the rarest of sanctuaries among Bar Harbor’s several neighborhoods. (Photo 7)

            During most of the past 12 decades, all the property owners on Lookout Point Road viewed their properties as second homes, enormous those summer cottages often happened to be. (Photo 8)

            But lights now still glow in the windows of some of the houses on Lookout Point Road in the evenings, months after the last of the Town’s summer visitors have crossed over the Trenton bridge at the head of the Island, leaving the rest of us behind for the winter. (Photo 9)

            Above all, the Hulls Cove’s Lookout Point Road community is a quiet and distinguished neighborhood. It is a darned good place for the road to end.

      3. Private location of Oceansedge on Lookout Point Road

         The entrance to the Oceansedge property along the private Lookout Point Road consists of a wall of hefty pink granite stones native to coastal Maine.

         (In the late 1800s, thousands of Maine men produced: the granite for Grant’s 3-story tomb costing almost $1 million and fit for a pharaoh, rivers of cobblestones for the streets of NY, innumerable post offices complete with fluted Corinthian columns and fierce stone eagles all brilliantly crafted, and mausoleums seemingly most popular in mystical New Orleans. But the rarer pink granite, thought for awhile to contain traces of gold, was popular in Bar Harbor and much later became the stone chosen for John F Kennedy’s memorial and its eternal flame).

         Midway along that already pretentious display are: solid wrought iron black Victorian gates and lofty stone pillars surmounted by lanterns.

         (In their earlier life, the Oceansedge lanterns were the sort of gas lights which still charm Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay, and which the developer of oceanfront West Street in Bar Harbor attempted to replicate in recent years).

         The gates are in the signature design of what was once the entrance to one of the now forsaken great mansions and architectural masterpieces on Mt. Desert Island during the Gilded Age. (Photo 10). (Bar Harbor now has only the glorious and multi- ton gates of the Kennedy/Dorrance estate).

         1. driveway

            Beyond the walled and gated entrance on that road, a driveway slopes down, for perhaps 1,000′.

            On the left: a collection of fruit trees and dappled willows on one side, all of which bloom profusely in pink in the spring.

            On the right: three ponds where ducklings learn to swim and would practice flying but for wings still too short. (Photo 11)

            The driveway leads to the house itself. The house fronts on the ocean. (Photos 12, 13, and 14)

         2. Nature preserve

            The added privacy and remoteness of the property make for a nature preserve of sorts.

            Deer are frequent visitors to the pond, and to the lawn behind the house on some occasions. Rare birds are not so rare visitors for hairy woodpeckers and pileated woodpeckers and two bald eagles living in the trees on the peninsula. (Photo 15, 16)

   4. Views from the subject property

      South-facing views from the house and from the broadlawn above the shoreline (Photo 17), include:

      1. the Cadillac Mountain range of Acadia National Park, green with spruce almost to their stony summits,
      2. the mansion-studded shoreline,
      3. the active Bar Harbor waterfront and the Town’s boat basin,
      4. the chain of Porcupine Islands, like stepping stones from Cadillac Mountain (Photo 18),
      5. gorgeous sunrise and moonrise views over the North Atlantic horizon (Photos 18.5, 18.6, and 18.7).
      6. working lobster boats, which are within hailing distance,
      7. the Bar Harbor Yacht Club and its fleet of sail boats coming and going.

      The best aspect of that south-facing home is invisible: the warmth of the summer sunlight mixed with bracing oncoming sea breezes. (Photos 19 and 20).

   5. Things to do
      1. Ocean front activities

         Guests launch kayaks from the shore in front of the house. (Photo 21)

         On request, a mooring can be placed in the cove in front of the house, so that a sailboat of considerable size could be maintained there (Photo 22), although a mooring at the Bar Harbor Yacht Club might serve as well or better.

         The Bar Harbor Yacht Club (along with some of the Gilded Age’s vestigial cliffside mansions) is located on the opposite side of Hulls Cove from the Oceansedge property.(Photo 22a)

         The Bar Harbor Yacht Club (initially the Eastern Club) has been around since 1885. At the time, the BHYC was situated in what was then the “Reading Room”. (During Maine’s Prohibition era, the Reading Room was drinking club for aristocrats blessed with impunity, of course). The Reading Room is now the formal dining room of the elegant oceanfront Bar Harbor Motor Inn, the best real estate in Bar Harbor since that forever commanding frontage on the harbor was first known as Birch Point where goats tended the lawns.

         In 1954, the creation of the Bar Harbor Motor Inn had prompted the BHYC to move to Hulls Cove. With financial help from the remarkable Bertha Thorne, a clubhouse emerged on a narrow cliffside stretch of shorefrontage with gorgeous views of any sailor’s Nirvana.

         For generations, children aged 8 to 16 came to the BHYC to learn how to sail, perhaps 50 children per summer, initially for just $10 for the season. As author Sargent Collier spoke of the club 70 years ago, the BHYC was later where a boy home from school for the summer would take his best girlfriend (plural implied) for a sail across Hulls Cove and out to Frenchmans Bay. Perhaps in a small boat he borrowed for the afternoon. Perhaps feeling like one of the millionaires on shore. Perhaps glad for his daysailer as much as for a yacht. and proud to be a small part of the idyllic Island’s wonderfully diverse generational history.
         
         (Photo 22b)

      2. Acadia Nartional Park

         The property is within one mile of Acadia National Park’s main entrance on the inland side of Route 3 in the Hulls Cove neighborhood.

         This means guests can bicycle in minutes from the house to the beginning of 50 miles of bicycling, hiking, walking, and mountain-climbing trails, without having to unload and load a bicycle or look for parking spaces. (Photo 23)

      3. Nightlife

         The property is also within minutes of the Island’s best hotels, almost all of which are perched above Frenchman’s Bay, including the excellent Regency Hotel (Holiday Inn) located near the Oceansedge property. (Photo 23a)

         The Regency was the creation of Tommy Walsh, the first of his large investments in Bar Harbor. He later acquired and developed virtually the totality of Bar Harbor’s commercial ocean frontage along the full length of harbor-front West Street, beginning with the Bar Harbor Club. Now included as well are the superlative Harborside hotel and all the associated restaurants, bars, docks, shops, sea craft, and single-family residential properties, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in blue chip holdings in Bar Harbor.

         Tommy Walsh began as an accountant in Bangor. He took a chance on buying in Florida in the early 1970s small hotels which the gas crisis of the time had left in financial ruins. (OPEC’ had imposed on the US a devastating embargo on oil shipments to the US, in response to the Israeli war of the time). He became during later decades the largest owner of Holiday Inns in the US, and in some foreign countries. Bangor’s celebrated son was, I believe, Maine’s first billionaire, a quantum amount ahead of Bangor’s Stephen King.

         The hotels of the utterly unpretentious late Tommy (always “Tommy” and nothing more) Walsh remain outstanding. The best in the business. Every one, in every city.

         Bar Harbor’s hotels include the Island’s best restaurants, bars, swimming pools, tennis courts, and other recreational facilities. (The hotels’ proximity is sometimes an advantage to those of our guests who are part of a much larger party staying on the Island for a wedding or the like).

Part II

2. Hulls Cove

   Hulls Cove is both a cove, as the name suggests, and a neighborhood within the Town of Bar Harbor.

   1. The cove

      Hulls Cove, which is a remarkably beautiful and serene inlet on the northeast shore of Mount Desert Island, has drawn admirers since 6,000 years ago when prehistoric Indians first came there and stayed for eons, as discussed below. (Photo 24)

      In the 1800s, Hulls Cove, the neighborhood, was the seat of the town then called Eden. Among others, Samuel Hull, a ship builder from Connecticut, constructed ships on the shore there. Hence, Hulls Cove.

      The cove was generally protected for the water being less violent than farther down the shoreline cliffs of the Mount Desert Island. And the ship-building was less obvious to possible raiders passing beyond the islands of Bar Harbor.

      (In 1812, Samuel Hull’s brother General William Hull, who had been charged with protecting Detroit, cravenly surrendered without a fight 2,500 American soldiers. The Americans were engaged against half as many British troops and admittedly ferocious Indian allies. Samuel may have hoped to find in remote Eden some anonymity.)

   2. The Hulls Cove neighborhood and Lookout Point:
      1. History

         The Oceansedge property is located on a peninsula (Lookout Point), an extension of the historic neighborhood of Hulls Cove, within what is now the Town of Bar Harbor.

         The Hulls Cove neighborhood (originally the Village of Eden) is arguably Bar Harbor’s most historic neighborhood:

         1. origins in 1768, in the wake of the Indian Wars

            The first settler on the east side of the Island arrived at Hulls Cove in 1768 at the conclusion of a century of relentless and savage wars with the French and their allied Indian tribes.

            The wars took the life of that first settler’s father at Fortress Louisbourg in Nova Scotia. (His Scottish father, along with half of the 4,000 American colonists occupying that dank vanquished fortress during the frigid winter of 1745-46, died in an epidemic of consumption [tuberculosis]). The wars also took the lives of other members of his family, including men, women, and children, whom Indian raiding parties descending from Quebec usually masochistically killed or abducted to Quebec from whence most never returned. (Photo 25)

         2. the next 100 years

            During the next 100 years before there was a “Bar Harbor”, the Hulls Cove’s community endured a meager way of life but survived three American wars that always came close to home: the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.

            Hulls Cove families lost an astonishing number of fathers and sons and brothers, on land and sea, including during the fighting at Bunker Hill, during the Penobscot Expedition at Bangor which was the greatest of American naval fiascoes, and in the killing fields of Northern Virginia.

         3. The last years of the 1800s

            Arriving during in the late 1800s,during the Gilded Age, the first settlers of Lookout Point included some prominent families which had come from Northern Virginia and Maryland and who had enjoyed lofty social and military standing within the Confederacy during the Civil War years.

            The newcomers, Northerners and Southerners alike, constructed on the lots which they acquired on Lookout Point Road architecturally exciting “shingle-style” Victorian summer homes to be tritely known as cottages.

            Possibly the nation’s first shingle style home was “Redwood” (Photo 25a) constructed in 1879 on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor, for Charles J Morrill of Boston – the China Trade, of course. The prolific architect was Harvard’s William Ralph Emerson who designed a score of luxurious summer homes in Bar Harbor, almost always for affluent Bostonians known to each other.

            Louis Auchincloss of Newport, RI later owned Redwood and came there during the summers of the 1940s with his family including a step daughter, Jacqueline Bouvier who became Jackie Kennedy.

            Mansions by any other name, the new houses appeared along the Lookout Point shore and on the promontory that is the northern side of the Hulls Cove shoreline.

            That northern side of the Hulls Cove was, and is, Lookout Point.

            The peninsula on Hulls Cove was first termed Point Lookout, not Lookout Point as it is now known.

            Also, a Point Lookout on the Potomac in Maryland had been before the War, as Bar Harbor would become after the War, a high society summer colony.

            It is therefore my own thought that the peninsula in Hulls Cove took its name from that Point Lookout on the Potomac in Maryland.

            Although the Union Army had created there in Maryland during the War the most lethal of prisoner of war camps for Confederates. Post-War Southerners would have viewed the name “Point Lookout) with at least mixed feelings.

         4. 1900s

            As was the case with the original homeowners at Lookout Point, some of the homeowners summering in that historic Lookout Point neighborhood during the early 1900s were also well known.

            Some were: Jane Addams of Chicago, the Bowens of Chicago who married well and wisely, and Sumner Welles and Mary Scott Townsend Welles of Washington and the world for that matter.

            Other residents were descendants of:

            1. Jay Cooke (1821 – 1905) who largely financed the Civil War for Lincoln by creating wholesale bond brokerage across all the free states thereby earning an almost incomprehensible trove of commission income on more than a billion dollars in bond sales. He lost everything in the Panic of 1873 which he caused. He then struck gold on a fluke. Whereupon he paid all his debts, and carried on with one of the great American sagas.

            2. the original Amos Eno (1837 – 1915) of NY, a successful merchant of imports from China who lost everything during the Civil War. He spent 36 years voluntarily repaying already forgiven debt. He, then founded the mighty Second National Bank of NY. Eno spent his last years at Jekyll Island, then the most exclusive club of America’s wealthiest men.

            3. the venerable Biddles of Philadelphia who later included the Mayflower Madam.

            4. the eccentric media mogul Joseph Pulitzer of Humgary, NY and St. Louis (1847 – 1911). Descendants of Pulitzer lived at Lookout Point. But Pulitzer himself spent his summers on the south end of Bar Harbor’s Main Street at Chatwolde, an enormous oceanfront edifice most notable for its absolutely soundproof Tower of Silence where Pulitzer could experience, as Simon & Garfunkle would later say in lyrics, the sound of silence.

               “Fools” said I, “You do not know
               Silence like a cancer grows
               Hear my words that I might teach you
               Take my arms that I might reach you”
               But my words, like silent raindrops fell
               And echoed in the wells of silence.

               Pulitzer died in South Carolina on his yacht Liberty on its way to Jekyll Island. His last words said to his reader were “Softly, quite softly”.

            The last resident of Lookout Point Road of national recognition was Robert Kinney.

            Bob Kinney grew up in a farm town near Bangor, the son of a horse trader.

            Thinking he saw a boy with promise, an industrialist in Lewiston, a rough and tumble mill-town on the Andrscoggin River in Maine, paid for Kinney’s way through Bates College. Kinney graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1935 facing the height of the Depression.

            Kinney began his career by borrowing $300 from a sagacious 2nd- generation boom-time Bangor banker who knew a business prodigy when he saw one. (Importantly in this case, Bangor bankers were the personal lenders to the founders of Bar Harbor’s two fledgling banks, and one of those founders had been on the board of Bangor’s Eastern Trust Bank).

            Bangor produced two generations of superb bankers between the Civil War and WWI, and Kinney’s banker was one of two Bangor bankers who moved to NYC and reached the pinnacle of American finance as the presidents of three of the largest banks and insurance companies and investment banking firms in the world).

            Kinney, who knew he could buy unwanted crabs for a penny apiece, then speculated on a crab canning plant in Bar Harbor which eventually employed 400 people in that close knit community. It was only the beginning of numerous his ventures down the New England coast. His companies became enormous suppliers of canned food desperately needed by the US Army in Europe and by the Marines in the Pacific during World War II.

            Mr. Kinney lost his namesake son, a Marine, to the war in Vietnam.

            Mr. Kinney was a member of the Bar Harbor Club (and of the still esteemed Pot & Kettle Club in Hulls Cove), where other members hugely enjoyed and respected him.

            Mr. Kinney would eventually become the chairman of General Mills. (Entirely coincidentally, General Mills had been founded by a Maine boy who “had gone West” and who would be backed by Bangor capital).

            Kinney arguably became Maine’s most accomplished business manager and corporate executive of any era. He was a director of a dozen of the largest of American companies. He was a legendary philanthropist particularly to Bates College.

            But he has been almost completely forgotten or never known in Bar Harbor, in Hulls Cove, and among the later residents on Lookout Point Road – perhaps because he was above all a man without pretensions.

            Mr. Kinney was just “Bob” to everyone, including to just a boy like me at the time. Like Tommy Walsh who is mentioned above, the Mr. Kinney I knew was a kindly and genteel person, as the most accomplished of Mainers generally strive to be.

            The whole State of Maine is, after all, only a large small town, where a nobody can become a somebody, and where even a somebody might have been first a farm boy in Pittsfield or a bookkeeper in Bangor.

      2. Lookout Point now

         That same Lookout Point neighborhood on the north side of the cove is still a peninsula accessible only via a private, posted road (Lookout Point Road).

         Only a dozen or more shorefront homes – including the subject property – now occupy that enclave on Lookout Point Road.

         The subject property, possibly the first and longest continuously operated vacation rental property in Bar Harbor, has been so operated as a seasonal rental for more than 25 years.

Part III

3. The Town of Bar Harbor
   1. Standing of Bar Harbor

      Bar Harbor is the host community to Acadia National Park, as no other community on Mount Desert Island is to the same degree.

      Bar Harbor is the largest and most historic community on Mount Desert Island.

   2. Beginnings of Bar Harbor

      Soon after the Civil War, a plucky third generation of the descendants of the few initial settlers at Hulls Cove would create the first significant commercial buildings in Bar Harbor. (Photo 26)

      Almost all of the buildings – some of them enormous firetrap hotels – were constructed in a hurried response to a land rush of affluent summer visitors. (Photo 27)

      Initial summers residents of consequence were families which largely came from Boston.

      Some of those families were the world’s most prolific millers of cotton which came, of course, from Southern slave plantations. Ironically, those families of still legendary names were paragons of abolitionist rectitude. (They were not above shipping, in crates marked “bibles”, hundreds of Sharp.50 caliber carbines to John Brown in Bloody Kansas). Others among the early Bostonians coming to Bar Harbor were wildly affluent heirs to the intra-family monopoly on the opium trade in China.

      Among the most notable of the early arrivals was a woman from Alabama and her son. They had been owners of thousands of acres of cotton plantations before the Civil War. After the War, they were only slightly less affluent proprietors of the same empire of servitude then devoted to Reconstruction era share cropping. They lived in Bar Harbor side by side with the Bishop of Boston on the highest of the high ground in Bar Harbor’s downtown, in one case to be above the madding crowd, and perhaps in the other case to be close to heaven. This additional irony, at least, was divine.

      The lumber for those buildings came from 7,000 acres of Bar Harbor’s then virgin forest of ancestral pines stripped from the slopes of Cadillac Mountain and then marshaled on Eagle Lake, as horrifying as that may now sound. (Photo 28)

      Generations of men of Hulls Cove – all related by descent or by marriage – erected three primitive damsites and sawmills located below the Eagle Lake watershed. There, they reduced the driven logs to lumber. (Photo 29)

      For decades, those sawmills plus related shipbuilding and maritime commerce with the Caribbean and Southern colonies enriched beyond their wildest expectations erstwhile Hulls Cove’s farm boys and weary soldiers and pitiful sailor swabbies. (Photo 30) (They traded lumber and salted fish and vessels used in the slave trade in exchange for sugar and rum and Spanish silver).

   3. Features of Bar Harbor (and Mount Desert Island)

      Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island offer all of the following:

      1. Dozens of superior shorefront and mountaintop restaurants, bars, and nightclubs.
      2. Some of Bar Harbor’s best hotels plus several athletic facilities (e.g., the nationally renowned and stunningly beautiful golf course, Kebo) (Photo 31) which are proximate to the subject property.
      3. Salt and fresh water beaches that include the enchanting Echo Lake (Photo 32), and the broad Sand Beach (Photo 33) which receives unending ocean rollers.
      4. Convenient and abundant connections to commercial airports in Bangor (45 miles from subject property) and from Trenton (15 miles from subject property).
      5. Ferry service to Canada, whale watching, deep sea fishing, sailing, shopping at nearby LL Bean (Ellsworth), etc.
      6. Sailing up and down Penobscot Bay, as lushly depicted in Walter Cronkite’s book North by Northeast. (The famed Hinckley Yachts are crafted on Mount Desert Island, as mentioned above). (Photo 34)
      7. Maine’s signature lobsters, night and day. (Photo 35)

Part IV

4. Acadia National Park
   1. General

      Acadia National Park comprises approximately 30,000 acres and 3/4ths of Mount Desert Island.

      The Park offers with open arms 50 miles of: walking trails; bicycling paths; mountain climbing routes leading to lakes and ponds and mountain vistas (Photo 35a); and both salt water and fresh water beaches for swimming and fishing.

      Acadia National Park is one of the most-visited National Parks, notwithstanding its distance from major population centers.

      Acadia’s appeal lies in Mount Desert Island’s mountain-meeting-the-sea landscape of visually majestic proportions, a scenic national treasure. (Photo 36)

      Bar Harbor and Mt. Desert Island are considered among the most beautiful places in North America.

   2. Oceansedge and proximity to Acadia National Park

      Importantly, the Oceansedge property is located within 1 mile of the Reception Area for Acadia National Park. Getting to the Reception Area from the subject property by bicycle is an easy matter. (Photo 37)

   3. Past and Present
      1. Past

         The seminal event leading to the creation of Acadia National Park was the assemblage of land in the early 1900’s by affluent summer residents. They intended to thwart the further logging of Mount Desert Island’s gorgeous and nearly virginal stands of spruce, fir, and pine; and to avert the sort of forest fires that had been occasioned by logging.

         The Rockefellers later joined in the conservation effort in order to maintain a prohibition on the use of “petrol” powered automobiles on Mount Desert Island. The irony: the Rockefellers’ controlled 95% of the petroleum produced and refined in the US.

         In 1919, President Wilson formalized the creation of the national park on Mount Desert Island, the first such national park east of the Mississippi. The park became “Acadia” National Park in 1929.

         Choosing the name “Acadia” quaintly and oddly brought full circle a French connotation to the same island settled by French Jesuits settled in 1613, but which British colonists vanquished weeks later

         French-allied Indians then reduced to a no man’s land for more than 100 years most of the whole coastline of what is now Maine. British regulars and Colonial rangers finally wrested from the French at Quebec in 1759 a vast continental territory including the comparatively small Mount Desert Island and “Acadia” to the east.

         In the end, in 1783, American revolutionaries expelled the British who had expelled the French empire at unthinkable cost to the British, thereby causing the British to feel more than forever jilted.

      2. Present
         1. “Carriage roads”

            The official entrance to Acadia National Park, which is just one mile from the subject property, is the gateway to almost 100 miles of meticulously maintained gravel “carriage roads“” first constructed by the Rockefellers approximately 100 years ago.

            The Rockefellers built the carriage roads with little regard to the cost of vaulting Romanesque bridges built over mountain gorges, or as to the cost of millions of tons of perfectly-crafted pink granite stonework still in perfect condition today. (Photo 37a)

            The carriage roads are still completely devoid of all motorized vehicles of any kind. (Photo 38)

         2. “Things to do”

            The Park offers almost 100 square miles of gorgeous lakes and ponds, and spectacularly beautiful ocean shorelines.

            The Park also offers almost every outdoor activity contemplated by any LL Bean catalogue ever printed.

            1. Hiking dozens of trails over and around the Cadillac mountain range which includes the tallest mountain peak on the East Coast (Cadillac Mountain).
            2. Walking paths to remote lakes and ponds and waterfalls.
            3. Mountain climbing.
            4. swimming and canoeing and kayaking and fishing at fresh water and salt water beaches. (Photo 39)
            5. Bicycle-riding and dog-walking and jogging on the carriage roads in warm-weather months.
            6. Cross country skiing through idyllic landscapes to ice-skating and ice-fishing destinations in winter months.

            (One exception to the LL Bean vision is deer hunting which the Park strictly prohibits. Although, after the summer visitors depart, the Town periodically flirts with the notion of an off-season deer slaughter, or “culling”, depending on one’s point of view.)

Part V

5. Mount Desert Island
   1. General

      Mount Desert Island comprises approximately 40,000 acres.

      Mount Desert Island is the 2nd largest island on the East Coast of the US.

      Long Island in New York is just ahead of Mount Desert Island in size, and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts is behind Mount Desert Island. Both of those other locations happen to be likewise historically fashionable and prestigious summer resorts.

   2. History
      1. Settlement

         Mount Desert Island’s first settlers arrived 6,000 years ago.

         They were prehistoric Indians advancing toward the retreating Laurentide glacier, an ice mass which had stood, 25 millenia ago, a mile deep above what is now Mount Desert Island. The Indians occupied the beach at Hulls Cove, where their artifacts are still sometimes found.

         In 1604, well before the Mayflower’s arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, Champlain claimed for Catholic France Mount Desert Island and its surroundings. (Champlain may have initially anchored in Hulls Cove and replenished his water casks at a brook there).

         In 1613, an expedition from the Protestant Jamestown Colony devastated the French colony on Mount Desert Island. The purge, which included setting Jesuit priests adrift on a row boat in the Gulf of Maine and putting others to the sword, established on and near Mount Desert Island a dangerous fault line between New France and New England.

         The same area, eventually expanded to include what is now Eastern Canada and New England, would be contested for over 150 years by the French and by the British and by their respective Indian allies, and then by the Americans. Most of two centuries were given over to inestimable carnage.

         Following the American Revolution, and following the later creation of Maine as a state carved from Massachusetts in 1820, residents of Mount Desert Island were primarily farmers and fishermen and pensioned soldiers. By the mid 1800’s, the principal community on Mount Desert Island was located at what is now Hulls Cove and was then called Eden.

      2. The Gilded Age

         By the late 1800s, Eden would become Bar Harbor (so officially named in 1918). And Bar Harbor, like Newport, RI, would be a cockpit for high society swells in the US.

         The most financially legendary American families (the Astors, the Fords, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, and others) would go on to erect on the oceanfront hillsides of Bar Harbor, lavish Victorian residences. Every edifice was, of course, a monument to its owner and testimony to the extreme and obscene disparity of personal wealth in America during the Gilded Age and beyond to the Edwardian era culminating with WWI.

      3. The Fire

         As mentioned above, one of those heralded families, the Rockefellers, would be the financial catalyst for the assemblage of thousands of acres comprising Acadia National Park, and for an early experiment in conservation. (Photo 40) Perhaps fittingly, a sometimes summer visitor to Bar Harbor had been a youthful Teddy Roosevelt, the archetypal conservationist.

         Later conservationists would experience a horrific reversal when a wind-driven, forest fire burned flat 17,000 acres of Mount Desert Island in 1947. (Photo 41)

         The conflagration ended only when a 10-day cyclone of roaring flames, with nothing left to burn, diminished to a zephyr and died on the ocean cliffs above Frenchmans Bay. The fire had incinerated much of the east side of the island, the location of Bar Harbor itself and its more than 100 hilltop and oceanfront mansions.

      4. Changing of the Guard

         The Fire of 1947, which began near Hulls Cove, ended a way of life in Bar Harbor and on Mount Desert Island.

         Many of the rich and famous simply did not return – they moved to Nantucket and to the Hamptons and to Tuxedo where their descendants now see the mountains meeting the sea only in darkened rooms on wide-screen TVs.

         But the coniferous forest on Mount Desert Island eventually reasserted itself. And the island community recovered.

         Acadia is now one of the most-visited National Parks in the US.

         Quiet communities on Mount Desert Island have regained their erstwhile luster of wealth and privilege and panache and cultural progressiveness, which some would say The Fire never completely drove from Mount Desert Island.

         Mount Desert Island’s notable residents still include some of the old-name Rockefellers and Pultizers and Astors and Dorrances. But there are also newcomers like Martha Stewart who was the first self-made female American billionaire and who now owns the mountaintop estate mistakenly left behind by Edsel Ford.

Part VI

6. The enduring Hulls Cove neighborhood within Bar Harbor

   250 years ago, in 1768, first-settler John Hamor, a fisherman and farmer and militiaman by trade, sailed south around a pronounced turn in the shoreline of the eastern side of Mount Desert Island, at what is now Hulls Cove.

   Hamor had been traveling up the coast of Maine with his wife and 5 small children, the oldest being 11 years old. The Hamors had departed from Arundel (now Kennebunk). They came in a pitifully small sailboat, perhaps like the Chebacco sailboats of Cape Cod. (Less than a year later, John Hamor would be lost at sea in that boat, on his way alone to Arundel for winter supplies, leaving behind his family bereft at Hulls Cove).

   They had sailed from Blue Hill Bay to Mt. Desert Narrows at the northern shore of Mount Desert Island. Today, a highway reaches from that northern shore over a bridge to the hardly noticeable Thompson Island; the highway then continues again by bridge to the mainland at Trenton.

   Low tides have always rendered the Passage impassable. The Hamors therefore paused at Thompson Island for a picnic, the first of countless families to do so as there is a picnic area there to this day, not far from the always busy Trenton Lobster Pound restaurant.

   In coming to Mount Desert Island, John Hamor was claiming the spoils of long and cruel wars. Mt. Desert Island, although seemingly one of the loneliest places in the world at the time, may have been the greatest single prize.

   Mount Desert Island and Coastal Maine had been an unsafe place for any English-speaking White man to have come during the more than 100 years of the Indian Wars that ended at Quebec in 1759 with the remarkable victory of British infantry and colonial Rangers from New England; and with the French surrender in 1763 of New France including Maine.

   The Indian Wars had resulted in the death of John Hamor’s father at the battle for Louisbourg, the largest fortress held by the French in North America. Likewise, other members of his family had died in the wars: Indian allies of the French ensconced in Quebec had repeatedly roamed south to pillage Arundel and to capture and slaughter inhabitants there and everywhere among the settled towns of Southern Maine.

   Making their way down the shoreline from Thompson Island, John Hamor would have observed a desolate place. No settlers lived anywhere on that eastern stretch of the Island. The first settler of what is now much more populous Bangor would not arrive there until a year later.

   However, at Hulls Cove, John Hamor could see from his boat the relatively calm water sheltered by a southerly and concave shoreline leading to the isthmus to Bar Island, plus the Porcupine Islands. He could see from Hulls Cove a beach and gentle shoreline for shipbuilding. A brook which happened to debouche from the valley of the pure Eagle Lake, and equally a brook which would be sufficient to turn mill wheels. A flatland for farming. And seemingly endless stands of virgin timber with which to build ships and homes and mills and places of business for more than a century.

   To paraphrase Samuel Eliot Morison, John Hamor saw from his boat the essential elements needed by settlers to have a chance for survival.

   He also saw there a visually hypnotizing landscape. A magnificently beautiful covehad drawn since time immemorial Indians who had encamped there in summer months, until the end of the Indian wars. Likewise, it was a landscape that would draw in the next century some of the greatest of American artists like Harrison Bird Brown. (Brown depicted the Hulls Cove shoreline in pink as might have been the color of the beach sand then, before the sand was expropriated for the building of Lookout Point Road). (Photo 42)

   John Hamor had weighed his alternatives as to all of the Maine coast and the whole of Mt. Desert Island lying beyond his bowsprit.

   He chose Hulls Cove as the most beautiful and welcoming place to come ashore with his family.