1878 1 ehron. 10/20/05 1879 1880 Trep to brittany. - Forg field/GustMentas Old Farm buil 4,51818 1880 (Also see 1980 -Oll Farm built file) is - of at Harvard occuped Hadley long doc (12/29/44) see Pychical Exp. File] -Post Graduate work - - 2 at Haward physics - Long Field arvana Callage. Class 8 1874 50thcm Anniversary Report 1924] [87] Bennett, a- writer and translator of note. Three sons and a daughter have been born to them: all are married, and there are five grandchildren. The family home is at 12 Dane Street, Jamaica Plain, Boston, with a summer place, The Moorings, Ogunquit, Maine. GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR was born in Jamaica Plain, Bos- GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR ton, December 29, 1853, son of Charles Hazen and Mary Gray (Ward) Dorr, and fifth in descent from Edward Dorr, who came to Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled in Rox- bury about 1660. Dorr prepared for college in Mr. Dix- well's school. After graduation Dorr lived for four years in Europe, spending some of the time in travel. Returning to the 1875 United States in 1878 he entered the Harvard Graduate School, and for three years read philosophy, history, and general literature.> He served as chairman of the Visiting Committee on Philosophy, which with the help of President Eliot and the Faculty of the Department raised a fund for 1905 the building of Emerson Hall.(Later he again travelled in Europe, and in Egypt and the Nearer East. He became in- JAMES DWIGHT 1917 terested in the opening fields of mental suggestion, thought transference and psychical research, working on the latter subject in conjunction with Professor William James and the English Psychical Research Society, which later pub- lished a volume on his work. He travelled in the West through the wilder portions, and took up the study of trees and landscape planting: he founded the Mount Desert Nur- series at Bar Harbor, and joined with President Eliot and Bishop William Lawrence in establishing the Hancock County, Maine, Trustees of Public Reservations. In 1916, on Mount Desert Island, in territory once a portion of the French Province of Acadia, Dorr founded Lafayette Na- tional Park, the first in the East or bordering the sea, and LOUIS DYER *1908 [88] the first Wild Life Sanctuary administered by the Federal Government in our Eastern States. In recognition of this work by Harvard University, at Commencement, 1923, President Lowell conferred the honorary degree of Master of Arts upon him, as "A lover of nature, who has preserved as a national park the grandest point on our Atlantic coast ". And in 1924 the University of Maine gave him the honorary degree of Master of Science. Dorr's address is The Somerset Club, Boston, or Bar Harbor, Maine. JAMES DWIGHT JAMES DWIGHT was born in Paris, France, July 14, 1852, son of Thomas Dwight and Mary. Collins, daughter of John Collins Warren, M.D., of Boston. After he was two years of age he lived in Boston, and he prepared for college in the school of Epes Sargent Dixwell. After graduation Dwight entered the Harvard Medical School, choosing naturally the profession in which his mother's family had won great distinction. He took his M.D. in 1879, and entered practice: by reason of ill health he was soon forced to give up medical work for a time, and he never resumed it. On January 12, 1887, he married Elizabeth Frances Iasigi, who bore him three sons and three daughters: the first son, Alfred Warren, died May 4, 1893. After a long and painful illness our classmate died at Matta- poisett, Massachusetts, July I3, 1917. Mrs. Dwight, two sons and three daughters survive him: two of the children have married, and there are two grandchildren. The young- est child, Richard Warren, is a member of the Harvard Class of 1925. Mrs. Dwight resides at 18 Browne Street, Brookline. " From boyhood Dwight's success in games involving skill, strength and judgment had been great. This was the more remarkable because in certain ways he was physically 4/13/2019 Expositions universelles de Paris - Wikipédia WIKIPÉDIA Expositions universelles de Paris Cet article traite des différentes Expositions internationales et nationales qui se sont tenues à Paris, et qui ont en partie façonné la capitale française que l'on connaît aujourd'hui. Sommaire Exposition universelle de 1900. Exposition nationale de 1844 Exposition universelle de 1855 Exposition universelle de 1867 Exposition universelle de 1878 Did the Darrs visit? Exposition universelle de 1889 Exposition universelle de 1900 Exposition internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes de 1925 Exposition universelle de 1937 Exposition spécialisée de 1947 Notes et références Voir aussi Articles connexes Liens externes Exposition nationale de 1844 Britanny 1940 I'OVISION C.2 In the spring of 1878 we -- my father, mother and I -- made a trip together into Britanny. It was at the season when the broom and the gorse were in their bright yellow bloom, making gay the tracts along the coast, wild and picturesque with long, rocky inlets and projecting reefs on which the surf broke unceasingly as western winds drove in the waves from the Atlantic. It was a lonely coast from which fishermen sailed their craft, not in fleets but singly, each for himself. It was a dangerous coast, too, and often the fishermen, caught by fog and storms, did not return. But it made a great appeal to the imagination, the region steeped in ancient myth and legend. There was no thought then of motor cars; their day was yet to come. So we drove leisurely through the land, stopping where we would, my mother making sketches and my father and I wandering along the shore where the water came surging in from the outer sea. Years ago I came upon a book, then lately published, entitled "The Fairy Lore of Celtic Lands." The author was a young student who, graduating from the University of California, planned to take that subject up as his first objective and went out to France to study, going to the University of RENAEXX Rennes, where he wrote a thesis for his doctorate on his chosen field. study getag-te-the Thence he went to Oxford and studied under Sir John Rhys, the world's greatest authority on the old Celtic myths and legends. 2 Britanny 1943 Rhys found him a student according to his heart and, when he had completed his work with him, suggested that he take the subject of his Rennes thesis and expand it into a book. This he did and in it he discussed the theories that have been offered in explanation of the fairy lore which was 00 marked a feature among the Bretons, the Irish and the Scotch Highlanders, all of kindred stock. But, one after another, he dismissed these theories and stated his own conviction that there was something real behind it all, something of which we in the broad light of the passing day fail to be conscious but which none-the-less is there, a $ factor (to be reckponed with) in our surroundings. And the author of the book, defending his position, said that no one who h d not done what he had done lived with the people in their huts, Wan dered by moonlight over lonely moors or visited the shore by starlight listening to the breaking waves -- was in position to pass judgment on it all. "There are," he said, "things we cannot see in the broad light of day but of which we may become aware under the right conditions of eeriness and solitude." II It was a thought that interested that our minda and senses may for am for from feeling neveral 7 us in ordinary life the whole k that which is page 3 Brittany 1943 But to return to Brittany. The people at the time when we were there, sixty years ago, still wore in many parts their native costumes, quaint and picturesque. They still had their fairs and still went as a Sunday, attired in their best, to the little, stone-built churches to worship and hear mass chanted, in the simple, unquestionin. 9 faither inherited through generations. One feature of our trip which was very pleasant IV as that it was made in great part by carriage, a welcome relief from the tyranny of railroads. The difference in the character of the people of Britanny and of Northern France was extraordinarily marked; they W ere two races, two distinct xxx civilizations. All through Britanny ns through Normandy, which we went on to from Britanny, the drink was not wine, as elsewhere througout France, but cider. to XXX JmL. Box 1, end folder 6 OLD FAEH PT-1 page 2 of the April 6 diotaphone transcription near the middle of Cylinder 1, but a new subject. Frenchmans Bay is the la st considerable opening on the coast as one goes north which lies open freely to the ocean. Beyond,all is one great bay st which the tide rolls with sweeping force, that culimmates in the Bay of Fundy, the name given by a Portuguese fisherman who came out upon the Banks to fish in the latter half of the 16th century, meeting there fishermen from Brittanyand from England -- a truly Cosmopolitan gathering. The Bay of Fundy is a corruption early of Baiou Fonda, the Deep Bay. The French called it Baie Francoise, but the Portuguese is the one that held, handed down from one generation of fishermen to andt her, till it came fixed with all. For naval purposes Frenchmans Bay, a name which goes back to the early 17th century when the French province of Acadia stretched down to t he Penobscot and Frenchmans Bay was the r endezvous for French vessels gathering for attack on the New England coast or for shelter in attack. The PREEX pleasantest EXEXEXT and most fertile part of Nova Scotia , the best in soil east and exposure and the most free from fog, lies no nearly Runnatte of Mount Desert Exem Island, though somewhat to the north. It is a well sheltered coast, relatively free from fog, ps. 4 pago 4, April 6 moved slowly southward, a.. solid, dividing the ancient granite mass into separate, isolated peaks, the Island's though present mountain chain. It is a great history, but dimly apprehended, That it covers the whole development of life on land, vegetable and animal aliko with we clearly know from he rare evidence left behind. And that of life upon land goes further ages back to life within the sea, which receded addras the source of all its varied life on land, plant and animal. Compass Harbor, to return to that, is the only Bay/ I know unon the Island, though there may be others, bottomed with quartz sand, the delightful to see and for children to play upon, that comes from the coast southward Ogden's Point, the point from which bounded on the northern side to the vicinity of Schooner head, is the most ancient on the Islnad, built up of hard old rock, and except at Caompass Harbor is cliffed and bold, leaving no opportunity for sand to gather. Compass Harbor got its name from t he early settlers from the shores of Massachusetts Bay,tt -- settlers who did nt come direct from overseas -- at the end of the Acadiannperiod, who named it from its placing opening due north toward toward the Gouldsboro Hills, which give that whole section of the coast its unrivalled beauty, It makes excenti mally good mooring ground, where I kept my boat, The Wren, page 5, April 6 Cyl 3 built for me by the elder Burgess, Edward Burgess, who safely built some of the earlycup defenders, -- for eighteen nearly years though a great midsummer storm once wrecked it as it strained upon the hook of inch thi ck iron by which it was moored, till, when the storm was over I found it had just held by chance, being all but straightened out. Opposite Compass Harbor and the Oldfarm shore liesh a mile away but nearer, seemingly, the bold, rounded mass of Bald Porcupine, a baxx dense mass of ancient lava rock poured out from some bench or crack probably in the earth's surface, on top of its more ancient Cambrian rock which one may see lying in strata beneath the lava at the eastern its foot of the great cliff, the sea gulls' nesting place. This island now belongs to my friend and neighbor, on northern that Ogden Point, which forms the eastern bound of the Harbor as it does the southern bound of Cromwell's Harbor, a superb sitro, but limited practically to the single house site. Mrs Browning broght the island because I told her of what Congressman Crampton, who once stayed with me at Oldfarm with his wife, on their way back fromCanada, told me 12 that unless we secured that island which we were then looking at from my Oldfarm winde- porch, we would wake uo some day and find it covered with huge advertisement, so conspicuous an opportunity cyl 3 page 6, April 6 for them were its cliffed faces, west and south, past which all boats went by. So, when I had done, I thought, my share I invited Mrs Browning to purchase it for our joint protection, which she, repeating to her son, he bought it for her and incidentally for me as well. But there is nothing to be done with it but to hold it nd she would gladly give it to the Park, I know, should ft be desired. The Old farm property is one of the best and most fertile pieces of farmland on the Island, long cultivated when which he did for my father purchased it in the summer of 1868, the first spent here and a dozen years before we built the Oldfarm house. one of the It was an early farm grant, the earliest on the island, datingx stretching back with straight parallel sides onto the nor thern front of the mountain once called Neport for no known reason and now by its Government renaming/: Champlain. That further is now part of Acadia National Park, given to it by me, when the Park was formed. The Mount Desert Nurseries occupies the central portion which was-- constituted the 'Cousens' country farm and our Oldfarm house , overlooking the Bay, rises, built of red-tinged granite from the Gorge, rises from one of the most beautiful house sites I know upon all the coast, taken in can junction with the beauty of the shore and gardens. Cy1 4, page 7, April 6 For gardens, gardens of the hardy perennial plants, natural to this- tjuxxx such northern regions the W orld around seem almost a necessity in this northern land, and on our coast especially with its wild seas One needs the contact But the early settlers lived full as much upon the sea as upon the land. It was their only highway and connection with the world of men. Over the seas they traded their lumber and their salted fish for the rude comforts of their life. But it is all new country yet; another life has long as mine has been in acquaintance with these shores would take one back close to the first beginnings of all things on the Island or the neighboring coast and what such another will do, going forward through the years to come, lies beyond all conjecture.- the world is moving rapidly in change. The great change lies in communication. When one can hear, as has been lately done along our whole Atlantic coast, a speech delivered by a man in Rome, the capital This of Italy, the world has shrunk in respect to / sound at least to the dimensions of a room. The real battleground of the future is the air that carries sppech rather than the land we live upon, for as men may be moved by speech to think and feel, they may be molded to the speaker's will, the strength a nd indepenednce of the nation may be sapped and yet no blow be struck. one add. po. (8). 1828 old form April 14, page 5 Still Cyl 2 Separate paper. The National Park had its origin at Oldfarm, the old Cousens' farm grant, one of the earliest on the Island where preceding its Bingham purchases Note for copyist Please get and read to me Richard Hale's paper on the Bingham purchases which he sent me lately, and which I asked, I think to have copied. The Bingham purchases which bordered it originally on the south, extending from it along the shore to the Sand Beach and beyond and extensively over the mountain. Like the other early grants of that time it ran a mile back from the shore and- at mean low tide for a measured mile, the measurement taking in whatever it encountered , mountains, lakes or in a woodland and running definite course with two parallel sides and an end perpendicular to them. This was the case 3 Oldfarm which was as defined by t he Cousens farm grant, a very various piece of ground, extending from the-Aepth-side from high upp on the north side of Champlain Mt to the sea two brooks flowing through it , Bear Brook next the mountain , rising in the wooded Gorge between Picket Mountain and Champlain, and Compass Harbor Brook draining the farmland to the north, and winding widely through the Ogden , Coles and other lands to come out finally at the base of Ogden's point into Compass Harbor. It is not only page 6 of April 14 but exceedingly interesting piece of land, CO taining also sono of the best farmland on the Island. Fro the beginning on it has been tied up inextricably wi th the Park, It is long before the Park tunkox was established that its real history begins. In writing my history of the Park beginning, I want this clearly recognized and established. Cyl 3 The present generation will pass as my own has done, but the mountain S and the woods, the coasts and streams that have now passed through the agency of the Park to the National Gove rnment will continue as a national possession, a public possession, henceforth for all time to come. It never will be given up to private ownership again. The men in control will change, the Government itself will change, but its possession by t he people will remain whatever new policies or developments may come. The important thing now is to start the Park it right in its service to the public and for this ** is wonderfully placed, looking out across the Atlantic to the coasts of Europe from the Mediterranean to the British channel and the Irish Sea. It is a part and a unique feature of the eastern boundary of the c country, but a true international boundary now to be guarded and defended. For the new developments of page 7, April 14 science are bringing our country dangerously near what was so have remote and distant a hundred years ago. The changes that kax come in my lifetime here, commencing in the eighteen sixties, are are but the beginnings of others that we cannot in any way foresee. That is the point that impresses itself now upon my bounded past human mind -- the shortness of the banninix having whose history we so largely know and the boundless future which we cannot read but yet can influence. And the story we now tell, the shaping that we give the present, will remain as a tale of origin and as a shaping force through endless generations if man endure. That is the point I want to emphasize: The brief past and the immesasurable future which changes all- beyond all human predication Which that brief past has already seena nd the changes the future may bring yet greater than the past. For the Park the main thing is to open it as widely as may be to the people while yet keeping it from being a mere playground; to make it a source of real reoreation- re-creation and save it from vulgarization. To make it something that will uplift and inspire its visitors, while giving them new health and bigor. And to develop all the possibilities that it offered for study along many fields for the giving out of ideas to a great audience, for in one of those spots that it and the to whole coast about it has which people always come in summer, unique in i ts situation on sea and the pikxx facing that it has across it to the lands of its parentage, beyond. -- the source page 8, Apri 14 perhaps of future danger, the source quite certainly of new ideas whether for good or ill. Note: One of the things to be established is a flying service across the entrance to the bay of Fundy to the western coast opposite, of Nova Scotia. It would make a mos t interesting excursion to be done by flying boat from the Upper Bay and would be reached at any point desired in an hour, flying boat would limit it to the shore in aeroplane provided on the Nuva Scotia and have the whole Maritime provinces (end of record not good) Monday, February 12, 1940. It was my father's purchase of this old farm which Henry Higgins had sailed Himself down with his family from Cape Cop to build a century before on the yet wild shore of Frenchmans Bay with its mountain lands and wood- lands, its safe little harbor facing north on Frenchmans Bay, its pleasant site for building on and good land for cultivation, that oddly enough became as the years went by the foundation stone from which, as a starting point, Acadia National Park has risen. And it is to tell of how this came about step by step that I am writing this today. All from the beginning flowed on consecutively through various channels but with the end undreamt of till the last to the establishment of a unique and striking monument to a chapter, great in its consequences, in world the history: the struggle and its issue between great colonizing powers of France and England for the control of North America. fateful The historian who has made that contest peculiarly his own, Francis Parkman, came down for years with President Eliot and his sons, sailing himself down with his boys aid, to camp on Calf Island in Frenchmans Bay and Parkman took the opportunity President Eliot offered to sai 1 down with them and gather material for his work. One of the lesser but boldest and most outstanding of the mountains in the Island chain was named by the Government on its Acceptance of the my ship to pq.4 1. June 14. In the history of its land-titles, Oldfarm goes back to the first days of occupation of the Acadian coast by settlers from the English colonies, sailing down from western ports to make new homes for themselves along the shores of the former French Province of Acadia. Mount Desert Island, situated on the constantly embattled coastal border between the French and English colonies, Acadia and Massachusetts Bay, was thrice conveyed in gift, once by the Province of Quebec, se t of Government of the French Dominion in America, to Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a gentleman of ancient lineage from Gascony in So thwestern France, who was then serving as an officer in Acadia, the grant of the Province being con- firmed to him soon after, ona return to Paris, by Louis the Fourteenth; again, after the fall of the French dominion in America, to Sir Francis Bernard, last Colonial Governor of English birth of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whose title was similarly confirmed to him by George the Third; and finally, after the Revolutionary War, by the State of Massachusetts, now acting in its own right as a sovereign state, to the heirs of these two previous grantees. To the granddaughterrof Cadillac 3. : Oldfarm as its name tells broad feat Oldfarm, the house, stands on a ridge of the same hard and ancient rock that encloses Compass Harbor along the coast on either side, against whose base, when the land stood at lower level in relation to the sea during the last flacial period, the waves must have broken with tremendous force. To the north it faces across the whole length of the Upper Bay to the Gouldsboro Hills; to the south the Oldfarm lands and gardens merge unbrokenly into those of Acadia National Park which drew from them their early inspiration for the origin of the Park. X*- The house, fitting well the landscape, is built story? up to the second floor of warm-tomed, native granite 9 above itris covered with shingles of the California which Redwood, similar in tone, which have never needed to be renewed, save in portions of the roof, since the house was built, now close onto sixty years. It is spaciously designed, with ample out-door porches, screened from the driveway, fronting on the view, while broad stone steps, laid in easy descent, lead from it to the lawns above the shore. (then follows History, which is paged History- 1 etc. 1879 flo In the history of its land-titles, addar goos back to the first days of occupation of the Acadian coast by settlers from the English colonies, sailing down from western poarts to make new homes for themselves along the shores of the former French Province of Acadin. Mount Desert Island, situated on the constantly em- battled ecastal border between the French and English colonies, Acadia and Massachusetts Bay, was thrice conyeyed in gift, once by the Province of Quebec, seat of Government of the French Dominion in America, to Antoine de la Mothe Cadillae, gentleman of ancient lineage of Gascony in Southwestern Frence, an officer then serving in Acadia, the grant from the Province being confirmed to him soon after, on a temporary return to Paris, by Louis the Fourteenth; again, after the full of the French dominion in America, to Sir Francis Bernard, last Colonial Governor of English birth of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whose title was similarly confirmed by George the Third; and finally, after the Revolutionary War by the State of Massachusette, now acting in its own sovereign right, to the heirs of those two former granteess To the granddaughter of Cadillao and her husband, M. and Mme. da Gregoire, refugees from Brance at the commencement of the -1- French Revolution, the General Court of Nassachusetts gave the eastern half; to John Bernard, son of Sir Francis, the western half, sending down two surveyors -- Salem Towne and John Peters - to make division and except from the grant such tracts as they might find alroady taken up and hold by 'squatters rights'. This division was made up the deeply penetrating fiord of Somes Sound and thenco northward to the Narrows. John Bernard mortgaged his portion and went to England, where later he appears as receiving from the Crow, in acknowledgment or his father's services, the Governorship of one of the lesser West Indies, where be thoreafter lived and dieds the de Gregoires came down to Mount Desert and lived upon their grant, building themselves a house a Bullo Cove and selling off their lands, tract by tract, as sottlers came down and sought them and the good title which they carried, Among the first tracts sold was that of the present aldfarm and its continuation southward up the steep-forested side of Champlain Mountain, easternmost member now of the National Park range, to one Henry Higgins, recorded as pur- chasing it in 1792. 8. Henry Higgins was born at Eastham on Cape Cod, the son of Terael Biggins who had sailed down with his family from South Truro, on Cape Cod, in 1771 and established himself at Bulls Cove, as it soon after became known. But before its purchase by Henry Higgins, John Cousins, son of Elisha Cousins, who had sailed down yet earlier with his family, from Harpswell on Casoo Bay, casting about as he grow up to see what be best could turn his hand to, had sottled himself in true pioneering fashion, asking no leave of any, where there was as yet no owner but the state, on this same tract, with its tall pines and spruces, fit for masts and building, and its good harbor for shipping them off to western markets. Into this work he threw him- self with such energy and good result that for generations after, though he never had or claimed a legal title to it, the land romained known as the 'Cousins Lot', Henry Higgins died early and the tract acquired by him from the de Oregoires passed by inheritance to others, whose names and those of their successors it would be 1d1o to recall; they are all on record. In the summer of 1868, our first at Bar Harbor and the first in which land was bought on Mount Desert Island for summer residence, the eastern partion of the Henry Higgins lot was purchased by IV father, Charles Hasen Dorr, and 4. his friend, Thornton K. Lothrop, who had come down with us from Boston to see the new coastal landscape of whose beauty and pleasantness we all had board so much. The western portion of the Henry Higgins loti as it was then divided, had been purchased a few weeks previously by Professor Mahan of West Point, father of Captain A. T. Mahan, a boy then, who became famous a generation later for his writings on the influence of sea power upon history and the fate of nations. Three and a half years later, early in the winter of 1871-172, Professor Mahan died and his widow, on my father's writing her, sold him the land she and her husband had earlier planned to build upon. This land my father bought from Mrs. Mahan contained in st the deep-soiled, cultivated land of the old farm and two splendid house sites between which, when we came to build, we hositated, but finally chose - wisely, I think - the site the aldfarm house stands built upon. Finally, in 1875, when we were making plans to build at Oldfarm the following year, my father acquired from Mr. Lothrop his share in the joint earlier purchase, uniting once again the original one-hmndred-aore Henry Higgins lot. 5. The site we chose when we came to build in the autumn of 1878 was the broad, flat top of an ancient sea-oliff whose base had been raised by ooastal elevation some forty- odd feet above the present level of the sea, where the waves in their oeaseless activity are now at work on forming a new and lower coast-line. From it one looked out due north across the whole wide stretch of Upper Frenchmans Bay to the Gouldsboro Hills, forming a picture which in the long, slowly-deepening twilight of the northern summer is one of surpassing beauty. The oliff we built on markes the western termination of a line of ancient rooks, hard and contorted and rising beyond Oldfarm into yet higher cliffs, which, continuing eastward to Schooner Head, is the oldest geologio formation on the Island. To the west the cliff we built on descends abruptly to the level of a former sea beach, marked by the surf-piled stones of a sea-wall, behind which lay, as in many another spot along the present coast, a salt marsh, now become a fertile meadow-land, across which our Oldfarm house looks out, evening after evening, to the deep-red sunset glowp while to the south the area drops gently away to rise again 6. into the deep-soiled cultivated lands of the old farm, which extend away, with no house in sight, framed in the distance by the mountains of the National Park. Tr. May 13 The house we had looked forward to and planned for so long Europe after we started building at once on our return from/a stay, unexpectedly long, Start over The house we had planned for and looked forward to and looked forward to SO long we started to build at once on our return from Europe in the autumn of 1878, after a stay unexpectedly prolonged. Almost immediately after landing, we came down with our architect, Henry Richards, to determine on our site and set things in motion. My mother soon returned to Boston but my father and I stayed on, studying and planning until the approach of winter made us thankful to return to Boston. The next spring we started in good 1879 earnest, our plans worked over through the winter contributing we made our part. My mother had been most interested during a stay in England in the work of William Morris, architect and designer, which she had seen at an exhibition a year or two before) and worked with our architect, a mo st happy choice, to carry out some of the ideas which she had got from them. The practical part my father and I contributed, but the artistic was hers and her architect's, young, enthusiastic, capable of absorbing new ideas. It was the first house at Bar Harbof/r to be really well built; and well built it was with nothing 2. spared in work or material. The first storey we built of granite split out from tumbled boulders in the gorge, weathered and warm-toned, save for where cut stone was water-table (*?) necessary for the and the windows, and at the last some brick was used that added their touch of color to the warm-toned granite. Above that first storey, all was shingled with shingled of the warm brown, never rotting California Redwood, which, on all vertical parts of the house remain upon it still. Great chinmeys of brick rose above the shingles promising gnerous warmth, a promise which they have well fulfilled. In the interior, the frame was built with extra strength my father saw to that- while all the interior skilfully and finish was carefully worked out from the best of Michigan and White Pine, Maine wood of similar grain being no longer floors obtainable. The xxxxxthroughout were of well-seasoned, native oak, birch and maple, and better one could not have. The carpenters 6 and the Maine folk have a genius for that work, took great pride in thetxx their work and endless time about it. The result, when we at last moved in the summer of 1880, the carpentors still working upon the house, was a delightful home and a home it has proved to beat any season of the year. May 2d transcription. The site my mother, father and I, together with our architect, Henry Richards, chose for the Oldfarm house in the fall of 1878, was the broad, flat top of an old sea-cliff, facing north to the Gouldsboro Hills across the long reach of Upper Frenchmans Bay. This cliff rose well back from the present shoreline, where the breaking surf is now setting its makr on a new shore, thirty to forty feet below the old one, carved evidently in a stormier period. The gently sloping space over which the surf rolled up to break against the cliff, was covered at that time with dark evergreens, mingled with birch and pine. Bald Porcupine rieses opposite, a mile away, dividing eastern with its mass the itam and northern skies, the dawn long growing in this northern clime before the sun appears. From the high-placed casement windows of the chamber I chose for myself when the house was done, the Sea Room as it as called, I used to see, day after day, this wonderful, slow breaking of the dawn, with the bold rounded mass of the Porcupine black a gainst the growing light reflected in the Bay, then changing insensibly to green S the light grew stronger. 2. To the west of the site we built on, cliffed also on ed that side, a long level line stretch 111 away, making what was at that time the cobblestone or sea-wall beach behind which had lain a considerable mass, as I discovered once on digging down for water, coming at nine feet depth on smooth. glaciated rock with the characteristic fine blue clay left everywhere by the over-riding ice-sheet of the last glacial period. In this I found shells of a shell-fish extinct in the regional waters now, but extant in the arctic still. I gave these shells, in which my father took great interest too, to a friend of ours, Dr. Henry Chapman of Philadelphia, who presanted them to the Philadelphia Natural History Museum, where they were iden ified and placed. STAIRS TO STORM BEACH TERRACE SERVANTS' DINING LAUNDRY ROOM DINING ROOM LIBRARY PARLOR PLAZZA ENTRY COVERED TERRACE D w.a KITCHEN I HALL LANDING DEN ENTRANCE PLAN OF FARST FLOOR PORCH SCALE 4'-1" Old Farm House of George B. Dorr Bar Harbor, Maine New York, March 5, 1878. My dear Mary: We hear constantly of you and Charles and George from Lily and Bessy, and no doubt you get full accounts of all our goings on. Bessy tells us that you have invited them to visit you in Paris on their way to this country and that there is some chance that you may cross the water with them, and if you do I suppose your natural destination for the summer would be Lenox. I need not say how welcome the news that you are coming would be to us. I do not know how far you would find Lenox land- scape sketchable. It is a singular fact that in all my living at Lenox, I never have been tempted to sketch; but the truth is, that with the exception of a little sketch- ing at Canton and a year ago we were at Luzerne, I never did any in this country and scarcely anywhere except in Italy and Egypt, where the pictures are ready made to your hand. Still I always flatter myself I am going to take to it again. If there were only some way of making charcoal stick! The ordinary processes are too slow for me in our windy, summery climate, and any sketch that takes me more than fifteen minutes is too long for me. So charcoal just suits me if it would only stay put. But for a painter there are no end of beautiful studies at hand. I trust our new home would interest you all. It is very audacious and my friends shake their heads, but I think it will be delightful. Imagine two modest farmhouses, last quarter of record fresh beginning after interruption. The Oldfarm house was built under plans prepared by Henry one of the best younger architects of his day and as Richards thoroughly as could be, making no sacrifice to cost. It is in as good condition now as it was when first completed and the only changes made have been those needed to keep it level with the times in all new development. Electric lighting was unknown when the house was built and for twenty years the reafter at Bar Harbor. gracity So with the town water and so with the telephone. But all that has been needed to keep it abreast of the time has been added. Life was simple in he 1880's. So long as my mother and my father lived, Oldfarm was the scene of constant hospitalitity. The house was- is specious and was kept always full with delightful company. My father died first in 1893, my mothr seven years later. Ever delighting to have friends about her, my own especially. 838, surveyed Have the rose garden lot as laid out in my intention to take in my mother's old flower garden, from which as us back a beginning the Park developed. This takes that to the middle axxig 1880's when the garden was fo rine d. The road to the shore lot above Storm Beach has its own entrance from The Way Road and the rose garden, as intended, will be entirely screened from it by the ridge of rock on the east, with the will brook on the west beyond. This road watch bound the lot upon the east and south and it will be bounded on the west with the path through to and beyond The Way from Oldfarm, being open at some point to the- entrance from the path from Oldfarm, which it nowhere will A plan should be drawn by Breeze and Sherman for the development of the parking ground where the tennis sourt now is, the soil being carefully carefully preserved for use elsewhere in the garden. The entrance to the rose garden will be byond the cedar he dge to the southeast and the opening through the hedge be allowed to close. The whole needs to be drawn out in detail and studied. Restrictions against building or di sfigurement or other use than flowering plant exhibition should be placed upon that portion of the nursery land above The Way road to the south, as far as KEK to the first crossroad from which northward the direction of the watering pipe undated typesigh ps 4 of 6. s. Heary Eiggins died early and the treet acquired by him from the de Gregoires passed by inheritance to others, whose names and those of their successors it would be idle to recall; they are all on record. In the summer of 1868, our first at Bar Harbor and the first in which land was bought on Mount Desert Island for summer residence, the eastern portion of at the Henry Higgins lot was purchased by father, R Charles Hazen Dorr, and his friend, Thornton K. Lothrop, who had come down with us from Boston to see the new coastal landscape of whose beuaty and years Quary lot of pleasantness we all had heard so much. The western portion of the Henry Higgins lot, as it was then divided, had been purchased a few weeks previously by Professor Mahan of West Point, father of Captain A. T. Maham, a boy then, who became famous the Cherkyore a generation later for his writings on the influence of sea power upon history and the fate of nations. Three and & half years later, in the early winter of 1872, T.E. Professor Mahan died and his widow, on my father's x Lacin writing her, sold him the land she and her husband had earlier planned to build upon. Whitten 3. Title BE 1: Old on green 1st 2 pases, history of Among the first tracts sold was that of the present Oldfarm and its continuation southward up the steep-forested side of Champlain Mountain, eastern- most member now of the National Park range, to one Henry Higgins, recorded as purchasing it in 1792. Henry Higgins was born at Eastham on Cape Cod, the son of Israel Higgins who had sailed down with his family from South Truro, on Cape Cod, in 1771 and established himself at Hulls Cove, as it soon after became known. But before its purchase by Henry Higgins, John Cousins, son of Elisha Cousins, who had sailed down yet earlier with his family, from Harpswell on Casco Bay, casting about as he grew up to see what he best could turn his hand to, had settled himself in true pioneering fashion, asking no leave of any where there was as yet no owner but the State, on this same tract, with its tall pines and spruces, fit for masts and building, and its good harbor for shipping them off to western markets. Into this work he threw himself with such energy and good result that for generations after, though he never had or claimed a legal title to it, the land remained known as the 'Cousins Lot'. 4. Henry Higgins died early and the tract acquired by him from the de Gregoires passed by inheritance to others, whose names and those of their successors it would be idle to recall; they are all on record. In the summer of 1868, our first at Bar Harbor and the first in which land was bought on Mount Desert Island for summer residence, the eastern portion of the Henry Higgins lot was purchased by my father, Charles Hazen Dorr, and his friend, Thornton K. Lothrop, who had come down with us from Boston to see the new coastal landscape of whose beauty and pleasantness we all had heard so much. The western portion of the Henry Higgins lot, as it was then divided, had been purchased a few weeks 2 U.S N.A. previously by Professor Mahan of West Point, father of Captain A. T. Mahan, a boy then, who became famous a generation later for his writings on the influence of sea power upon history and the fate of nations. Three and a half years later, early in the winter of 1871-172, Professor Mahan died and his widow, on my father's writing her, sold him the land she and her husband had earlier planned to build upon. 5. This land my father bought from Mrs. Mahan contained in it the deep-soiled, cultivated land of the old farm and two splendid house sites between which, when we came to build, we hesitated, but finally chose -- wisely, I think -- the site the Oldfarm house stands built upon. Finally, in 1875 , when we were making plans to build at Oldfarm the following year, my father acquired from Mr. Lothrop his share in the joint earlier purchase, uniting once again the original one-hundred-acre Henry Higgins lot. The site we chose when we came to build in the autumn of 1878 was the broad, flat top of an ancient sea-cliff whose base had been raised by coastal eleva- tion some forty-odd feet above the present level of the sea, where the waves in their ceaseless activity are now at work on forming a new and lower coast-line. From it one looked out due north across the whole wide stretch of Upper Frenchmans Bay to the Gouldsboro Hills, forming a picture which in the long, slowly-deepening twilight of the northern summer is one of surpassing beauty. 6. The cliff we built on marks the western termination of a line of ancient rocks, hard and contorted and rising beyond Oldfarm into yet higher cliffs, which, continuing eastward to Schooner Head, is the oldest geologic formation on the Island. To the west the cliff we built on descends abruptly to the level of a former sea beach, marked by the surf-piled stones of a sea wall, behind which lay, as in many another spot along the present coast, a salt marsh, now become a fertile meadow-land, across which our Oldfarm house looks out, evening after evening, to the deep-red sunset glow; while to the south the area drops gently away to rise again into the deep-soiled, cultivated lands of the old farm, which extend away, with no house in sight, framed in the distance by the mountains of the National Park. may 30 - Dectaf Philasophy We returned from Europe in the fall of 1878, after a stay of four years. That autumn we came down to Bar Harbor and chose the sito for our Oldfarm Home upon land my father had already purchased and planned upon our return to build upon. A new life began for us all, centering round this home out of which sprang the National Park and much besides. Living for four years abroad in the midst of historic scenes and reading much with my father about the human interests connected with them, I came back with a mind full of questions as to the whys and wherefores and bent toward the study of philosophy. But my aim was practical; not the study of dialectics and past systems of thought leading nowhere but to get light on human hature and the problems of existance. Reading along these lines, I became a member of the Harvard Alumni Visiting Committee on the department of touch philosophy which brought me into/with the work that was being done there and the men who were doing it. William James's father had been an old family friend and William and Henry had been familiar figures at our house while I was growing up; John Fisko I know through my aunt, my-father's sister, who had sent 2 abroad when I was a boy to got a first hand knowledge of Herbert Spencer and the new philosophy; and Josiah Royco was giving lectures on Spinoza and I arranged to read with him privately and talk Spinoza system over which had raised many questions in my mind and led me far baok into the Middle Ages for its origin. The Visiting Committee on philosophy at the time I went an it was an interesting one, no less than the Faculty. Brooks Adams, younger brother of Charles Frances and Henry, was its chairman and its members all were really interesting both in the subject and the work. I stayed on the Visiting Committee for years and presently became its Chairman, taking part as such in the raising a fund for experimental xp psychology, a new subject then, and ultimately in the building of a hall for philosophy, which hitherto had been housed about the yard as space could be found for it and lecture hours fitted in with lectures upon other subjects. Education, a new subject then in Academic circles, ***/ was given place by President Elliot till independent standing could be gigen it, in the department of philosophy. And this brought me into contact with the work that was being done to raise Everson 3. its standard and with its teacher, Prof. Hanus, who had many troubles. One evening in , Prof. Royce came in to see me at our home in Boston to tell me of difficulties he had got into over the building of a new house on land he had purchased alongside of William James on Irving place, part of the old Norton property at Shady Hill which had been recently opened for development. The building of the house then well under way was oosting much more than he anticipated and he had no funds to meet the additional expense. What Kd was ho to do about it. I took it under consideration and told my mother, who offered a very practical solution; sen she would organize some lectures for him on the history of philosophy, its men and problems, to be given in different private houses in Boston, the sponsoring by whose owners of them would give them standing and command attention. It was an admirable scheme providing means if it succeeded for Prof. Royoo to meet its obligations without borrowing and the burden of an idebtedness hanging over him. For a brief moment he questioned; could he give such a course of lectures and make them popular without lowering the dignity of his subject.- Philosophy. The houses The houses were obtained, the tickets sold, Royce wrote his lectures and the whole went off with much ocalat. Another course was organized for the following autumn, followed by yet another in New York. The lectures were put into book form and published, and the book was dedicated gratefully to my mother, she had solved his problem. After that he used to come down and stay with us at Oldfarm with other friends each summer that he could get away, having long talks with my mother and widening his horizon. Professor Royce, a born philosopher, was & remarkable man. Born in a mining town among the mountains of California, he worked his way along through the University of California, were Prof. LaConto befriended him and thence went out to Germany to study philosophy, getting a place as instructor at Harvard on his retunn, had a quaint and homely personality. He had a head like Soorates, a slow, drawling speech, and a gift of humor all his own. His memory was remarkable. I remember one night when we were returning home, after dining out in my little open buckboard and were passing a meadow lit by a misty, waning moon, he started in his slow drawling utterance quoting what I had 5. what I had never ohanced to have read or heard before, Edgar Allon Poe's poem Walman which just fitted the hour and the scene and which he quoted from beginning to end without the loss of a word (find the poem) Mr. Dorr make quotation. You I rember his once telling me speaking of the limitation to the imagination to things one has seen or experienced, that born as ho was in the little mining town among the mountains of California and knowing no other scene he had read of the ocean and longed to see it. He dreamed of it but never in his dreams could he picture it as other than a big miner's pond. Big he could make it but it had to be no other than what he knew. He loved musio of the symphonic type, understanding how it was built up, and he loved Browning who combined poetry with religion and philosophic speculation. One morning, when our house was full at Oldfarm, he came down to breakfast from the cottage on the hill where we kept rooms open always to overflow into, complained bitterly that Dr. Hodgdon, in a boisterous and mood, and had made themselves so disagreeable about - I forget precisely what now - some favorite poem or poet of his that he was going home. He would not stand it! But breakfast over he was feeling better and by noon had forgotten it -- which shows philosophers too are but human after all. No had a very interesting group of younger people - friends of my own - who oamo to stay with us every summer in those days, climbing the mountains and going off on all-day tramps, with older people mingled and over enchanging group, bringing now thought and interests. And we.kept open house without no dinner parties,but teas and suppers only and no dress suit, no telephone as yet, nor electric lights, my mother still the center of it all until the last, interested in the younger generation, interested in people. her face was turned always to the sunrise, hot to the setting. My father had passed on the winter following our return from Egypt, along with Bishop Brooks, the greatest preacher I have over heard who left all dootrine behind to ? go to the heart of things, And our friend and neighbor, Col. John Markoe of Philadelphia, gar a very gallent gentleman and soldier of the Civil Wt. Those were the closing years of a period that went back with little outward change to the end of the Civil the water was flowing fast the while beneath the bridge and a new world was in the making. In 1897 or thereabouts I got a pamphlet from a younger friend of mine at Harvard, Thoodore William Richards, a chemist of the new school which mingled experimental higher px1 older/chemistry with/mathematics, outlining a new idea of his, a continuously Pulspting Atomowhich I read, so far as I could following/ it with interest and went to talk it over with him. It had won him fame, I learned, and the offer of a ohair one of the Bamous old Universities of Germany which he was at that time considering the acceptance of though Harvard hold him, but the offer of a full professorship.com the atom of the older schoolof ohemists had always been a mystery to me and I was interested. His atom I Bound was a certain portion of space defined by the possesssion of certain characteristic energy -- for this was still the time when men conceived the world as made op of distinot, indestructible elements. What makes your atom expand?, I said, 'The solf- repulsion of the space within it', he answered. 8. "And what makes 1t contract?", I asked. 'The kick-back of external space, he answered, resisting the expansion. Then somewhere in space, I said, there must be a point of resistance equal to the forco of expansion . 'Yes, he said, 'but that you can place as far off as you will. "It means however, that a stream of energy, incaluably straight, is always going out into space and never returning. " 'It does,' he said, I but that does not enter into my calculation. For them all I need is mathematical space, space that I can deal with after the method of geometry S Frankly, I have no use for matter. 1 I cannot imagine it in itself but only by its action upon other similar source-points of energy. Give me a point to work from, lines for measurement and an equation and I have all I want. I This, cradely stated, was the substance of his theory and it was a theory that worked so well that it brought him honor and advancement but it was not long afterward that the new roantgen rays were discovered and stop by step the old atomic theory gave way before now theories of matter, equally incom- prehensible reducced all to motion but cannot toll what it is that moves, or why or how. This is now nearly forty years ago and the mystery only deepens. More 9. than ever it is wise xp not to dognutage Our knowledge is founded on our senses and our senses tell us only about things that have been useful to man, his preservation and development to the point he has now obtained. We are in the presence of forces that we cannot estimate, and of SALK others which doubtless we are yet unconsoious oft/Nohetheless make part of ourselves and our environment. Faith, the evidence of things unseen, tells us nothing surely about facts; about principals I feel it does tell st us of eternal truth and that on it we can surely build. copy 1 File 1879-80 C 0 OLDFARM P Y Bar Harbor, Maine The Cottage August 1, 1940. His Excellency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The White House, Washington, D. C. Dear President Roosevelt: I write about a matter that is much in my heart at this time and that I hope greatly you may look up- on favorably. I have devoted my life these last two and thirty years, as its major work and interest, to the creation of Acadia National Park, where scenery on the New England coast is at its finest and the climate at its best, invigorating and refreshing through the summer heats. The Park, proclaimed as a National Monument by President Wilson on July 8th, 1916, became by Act of Congress and the President's signature a National Park during the single day and night President Wilson spent at the White House on his first return from the Ver- sailles Peace Conference, on February 26th, 1919. It has steadily advanced since then till it now holds all the mountains, with a single and minor exception, in the Mount Desert Island chain, and extends across the entrance to Frenchmans Bay to include the magnificent rounded mass of Schoodic Head, looking down upon Moose Island where the best opportunity for overseas radio communication upon our Atlantic coast exists and has been fully developed under expert advice. The first gifts of land in which the Park orig- inated, conveyed to a public service corporation formed by President Eliot and myself for the recep- tion and holding of such properties, began with a gift from myself from an early grant of land acquired Page 2. by my father in 1868, before any summer residences ex- isted on Mount Desert Island or the coast about it. 1879 Upon this land, eleven years later, we built our home, Oldfarm, occupying it the following year, it being one of the first and pleasantest of the summer homes built upon the Island, which still remains, my father and mother having long since passed away, in my possession. This old family home, which has been in its day the scene of much generous hospitality, I would like greatly to have become, while I yet live, the possession of the United States, that it may serve the President and his Executive Officers, who will plan the policies of the Government in the critical, important times that lie ahead, in maintaining health and vigor for their work. The acceptance of this gift, made directly to the Executive Branch of the Government, entails no obligation other than that of using it in such fashion as may best serve the purpose for which the property is offered. Acadia National Park can readily at this time be brought to extend unbrokenly to entrance on this prop- erty, opening directly to its roads and trails in all their beauty and variety, protected by an efficient, well-organized ranger corps. Upon the opposite side, the lands of the estate I offer, of exceptional beauty in themselves, descend onto a harbored shore where I kept my own sailing boat in safety for many seasons. The property offered is directly accessible from Washington by air and water over distances that, reckon- ed in terms of time, are rapidly and constantly diminish- ing; while radio communication, rapidly improving, is already of the best, as are those of mail, telephone and telegraph, making a nerve center of the site of the most direct and sensitive character. The house I offer, simple in character but spacious and most comfortable, stands out alone upon its site, with ample space about it of garden grounds and lawns; Page 3. while executive offices for work, independent of the house, could be added, unseen, in its immediate vicinity and equipped with every facility for planning, discussion or the dispatch of business. I may add in conclusion that the whole State, of whatever Party, would welcome most warmly the estab- lishment of such a summer home for the National Execu- tive, and do all that may lie within its power to pro- mote its purpose. Hoping greatly that my offer and its purpose may appeal to you, believe me to remain, with ever high regard, Sincerely yours, GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR. Education Spiritualism. In the eighteen forties and fifties a good deal of interest was taken in Boston and elsehwere in the phenomena of spiritualism, as they were alleged to be. Whatever their cause might be, the phenomena at least seemed real; and if real, to open up new fields for study, new conceptions of existence. My father was interested, my mother too, and making trial had some experiences which it did not seem possible to explain in terms of the known facts of material existence. I knew nothing of these at the time --I was too young -- but they were told me later, and what my father told me I could not question; he was an excellent and cool observer. Years later I, chance throwing the opportunity in my way, experimentedmyself along the same line and equally arrived at no conclusions. A number of years after I graduated from Harvard, returning 1878-19 from some years abroad with a new phenomena of electricity awaken- ing my interest, I went out to the Jefferson Laboratory at Harvard where the professor of Physics in charge --Professor Trowbridge was an old acquaintance, and entered myself as a postgraduate student in one of his courses upon electricity. With a more mature mind than the other students in the class, I sought to understand the principles governing the phenomena and, lingering along after the others had left, I asked him certain questions which he frankly told me he could not answer, and would think them over. I said that I should have thought they were questions his students would be asking constantly and familiar to him. "No", he said, "they Spiritualism =2 work at the problems set them, read what the text book says, and leave it there. Those who want to understand the philosophy of the matter are few; two or three in the year, perhaps, at most." "But", he added, "you are working along the wrong line! You want to know the theory of what happens and hang your facts upon it, al there is no theory; all that we know as yet are facts." This is the case also with what are temred the phenomena of spirituali all that we can hope to learn at the present time are facts; and all we can do is to learn whether they are genuine or not. For the whole study of these phenomena is complicated by endless frand For one thing, I made up my mind that there is communication be- neath the level of our consciousness between mind and mind, not made through any sense we know nor limited apparently by establish sense conditions. Yet, and "there's the rub", it is not 80 simple as that; one might understand one mind's acting on another, trans- mitting a name or thought; there are plenty of instances of that. But there are cases that seem beyond question where active, creati intelligence comes between and the thought taken from one person is dramatized, and not simply echoed, in coming from the other. What is that intermediate intelligence and how does it work? When we ask ourselves this, we have to recognize that we know literally nothing of consciousness in itself, neither where it is seated nor how it operates. It is one of the ultimates of existen Spiritualism -3 which there seems as yet no chance of reaching. It is one of Professor Trowbridge's "facts" and which we cannot even formulate a theory for it to hang upon. They are trying experiments now at Duke University on this very subject of thought transmission and have published within a few months results that so far as they have gone seem to postulate communication not limited by the time conditions of known electrical phenomena --which make light the ultimate of speed. Communication between distant points seems to be instantaneous and if it be our physicial science kn owB no medium or agency through which such communication can take place. They are continuing with the investi- gation and if, as they believe, they can establish the facts it seems to make necessary the recognition of energies and forces, hidden from ordinary observation, but constantly in operation none the less, which followed further, may work a revolution in our conceptions of the universe. Another complication of these old phenomena of my father's time is that they relate not only to thought communication but seem to have been associated with physical movements, and move- ments directed apparently by some extraneous intelligence that can receive ideas and act on the matter. I remember one summer when we were in the Engadine in Switzer- land spending the summer, that I sat at table d'hote next my father's and mother's friend Mr. Benjamin F. Rotch of Boston, a man of unusual intelligence. He told me, speaking of the phenomena of that time, whid Wi he, too, had been interested in, that one time Spiritualism -4 when a famou 8 medium a man, was in . Boston, he and a small group of his personal friends, genteèmen who all knew each other well, met at his house in Boston together with this medium, no one else being present nor any possibility of a confederate; that the medium brought with him certain of the paraphernalia of the medium's trade - a large hand-bell, like a school bell, with a stout handle to it, and that this went flying about the room, while a heavy mahogany dining table in the room was drawn apart where the leaves were inserted to enlarge it on occasion, and this bell in its gyrations thrust itself up, the handle rising through the space the table was drawn apart, just wide enough to admit it, and that he grapsed it firmly in his hand, resting his fist upon the table either side, and said to the medium, "Now if your spirits will take that away from me, I'll believe there is something in it." The medium replied that he did not know whether he could get this done but he would ask the controls and see. Mr. Rotch tole me that in a moment or two he felt a tiny pull upon the bell which made him laugh and ask if that were all that they could do, but he said the pull increased and increased till finally it drew the handle of the bell out of his grasp, supported by the table as it was, not as if some one were jerking it away but as though some great machine was quietly but irrestiatably pulling it from his grasp. If Mr. Rotch had been a man of impressionable character, and if no others had been present, or a confederate had been there, one might look for some normal explanation of what took place, but Spiritualia -5 he was not in the least of an emotional character and his experi- ence does not st and alone. Others have had a like, nor is any explanation offered. I recall his commenting upon it to me and saying that he was then, in the prime of his younger life, unusually muscular and strong; no man could have drawn that bell away from him without a jerk, a sudden pull, but the force that withdrew it from his hand was like that of some great machine. I have known of other instances in which heavy mahogany dining tables were moved about in private homes when a small group of friends, no medium being present, joined their fingertips above it. The hands of all present being visible and the table moving in response to suggestions given by the people present. It all seems utterly meaningless but if there be truth at all anywhere it means that there are fordes at work, and forces not wholly dis-assoc iated from intelligence, which if we can learn more about them and bring them under the range of observation may alter our whole (conception of the universe. One of the things that happened in that first period of my father's and mother's interest in the subject was when they went on to New York to stay and dined out the first evening they were there where these matters were spoken of at table and an address given of a medium, a man named Foster, if I remember right, whom they said was remarkable. My father took down the name and the address and thought no more of it, but the following day he and my mother and a friend of my mother's who had come on with them, Spiritualism -6 were walking through the street when it suddenly occured to my father that they were passing the address he had written down the night before, and he suggested that they gotin and see if he were there and would give them a sitting, which they did. The man was there and some remarkable things took place. He did not go into a trance but seemed to pass into a state not wholly normal in which he carried on communications, according to his talk, with personalities and presences in another world. He asked my father to write down on a blank sheet of paper questions my father would like to ask and give him the paper, not letting him see what was written. This my father did folding the paper as he wrote and taking it where by no possibility could the medium read as he wrote, and folding the paper down as he wrote each question, to oover it from view. When he had asked his questions he took the folded paper and twisted it and tossed it over to the medium who took it up and held it in his hand and began to talk, answer- ing the questions categorically as my father had written them. What the questions were I do not remember but this I recall; that one of my uncles on my father's side, a half-brother of an older group, had recently died at our home in the country, my father caring for him to the end. Of him, as though present, my father asked one of the qestions he had written down, and when he came to this question the medium began to talk not as though talking himself--he was an illiterate man of common speech - but as my uncle, who was a noted scholar of a time when long-syllabled words and Johnsonian phrases were the custom among scholars, and Spiritualism =7 which my father said he could by no possibility imagine the medium could have used even if he had known my uncle. But a more cirious thing than this happened. The friend who had come on with my mother and father from Boston had been living abroad for years and while she was there she had become engaged to a Englishman. The engagement was never announced and my mother who knew her intimately had no knowledge of it. The man had died; the incident was closed. But at this seance the medium insisted that there was some one there, a man, whowished to sent a message. It me ant nothing to my father and mother and my mother's friend, if she realized what was coming, must have endeavored to avoid it, if avoidance were possible, but the medium, controlled as it were by this presence on the other side insisted and the name and the facts came out, much to the embarrass- ment of my mother's friend. What was said beyond the name and the fact of presence I do not recall, or if it were told me, but in some way the past which had meant so much to my mother's friend surged up and presented itself dramatically before her and before my mother and my father who had no knowledge whatever of it and from who se minds it could not in any way have come. Nor could the medium have had any knowledge of my mother's friend, for she and my father and mother had only come to the City the evening before and their coming in to see the medium was the merest chance, yet somehow the fact came out and came out dramatized as though the man she had lovee was present. B8 Another time. earlier than this, my mother when she was living at Jamaica Plain, and I was but a young child, too young to be told of it at the time, went at see a medium she had heard of, hoping possibly to get some word, if there were truth in it, of a brother no had lately died abroad and her whole thought in going was centered upon this, but a seeming personality in- truded itself in the talk of the medium on going into a trance, much to my mother's vexation who did her best to force it, - the personality that intruded on the trance - aside. But this person- ality - one doesn't know what name to give it other - insisted with reiteration that he had done my father a wrong in a business transaction connected with a bank and wished to tell him of his deep regret. My mother telling my father of this on her return home said "I might have thought it was so and so (referring to a matter of which she knew in part ) but that he said it related to a bank and that affair had no connection with a bank. " My father replied, "It all turned upon a bank; it was a bank transaction", and he was much impressed. The result of all which is that "there are more things in heaven and earth's Pition than thou has dreamt of in thy philosophy." 7/14/08 Dorr Papers Spectralian Boston intent, 1940's- M&u Dar among them,to IS to GISB leter. Years later, 6 B D experimated "no conclusions." Electrical studies c Prot. Troubridge. whole "whole study complicated } endless fraud." GBD concluded that then is conscoous comment limited to established sense data. "We know literally nothing of consumer in itself, neite when it is seate nor how it operates." n.y. Recalls suman In Smitgerlad, sat next to Denjamin 1.4 7. Rotch of Proston, who referred to a tomous medium's his experience i forces operating on p.5 physical objects. Also, "I have to noun of other instruces" when "heavy mahogary dining table me moved about duy goth of small group of tues, no medium by present. p-L Really parents expensi in 1840's- is C.H.D'S > use it medium to role contact with his half brother whom CHD helcared for. p.7. Citer moth instrum of meducin knowledge at past e ments of one of Dorr's friend. n.y Citer anth water From 1850's, N 6W0 wet 4 see a medicar hoping to got info "afa broth ur had lately died abroad." But a "personality" intruded insisting he had done CHO a wrong in a business tranaction, wishing to expus rep ugget. When mouth to CHD, "he wes and impused since it insomatid 10 his line history. Conclude: involething in heaven earth that thouhes dreat of in thy philosophy 3. Illness in 1880. "Early in the 1880's I had a long illness a caplete but -dnu of nerv ous rigar ad energy The cause was obscause." Physicans punded no help. "It looked as if I right not live." The GBD found an unsamed book telly of writeral cures- people put in "meomeric trances" to receive suggestions. Dozs not benefits google. na it physician a hospital in India. (Braid?) Carried - at high seentia plane." Wnked attached hy The Lancet, "in the uilest manner. Wheel it work on Dar? At saw two an movent in Booton sealed "Mental Healing, one sf its nones. Han th mind weres the in street but 'one knew methi more, ne how fe Suggestion been effective there the n. 3 nervous supten. Anoble group, Chush Sminsts, troth up c Mrs. Eady, what Dorr acvided because he was not seperation in read, to take up an faith doctors I and not industried Mrs. Dor fond a practition for GRD, The female practition ( Mrs. D E? Urs.Dresser?) said all that an human was t he "quiescent IN our attitude t has a open wind. The powerlag deeparthan words. GBD walf regulars enly Z was t no effect. But suddey I realized a clot 7 felt c new power, a new energy rising wh me + this 3. continued to someweah men, worly a mul from Format in my state." The change he interputs + due due to the unconscious mind it has gun in the litt I needed of the improvent catiness on, gradesly buy me new strength + vigor." Undated CAM 1- casa, 1285 Excellent Road (850's) 71879 -6B0 wheelful BH the building ira torristi and GSD. fine The Long Field and the Great Meadow in the early days ⑈ are Kebo The Long Field I remember walking out to one 1879 Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1879, when our Oldfarm house was building and we were boarding at the DesIsles House in the Village. Colonel John Markoe and his wife were spending the summer in a 2 house ndarby and it was with them and a pleasant group of younger folks who were staying with them forg that I was walking. Tall spruces of the native wood that had grown upon the Field had just been cut and the ground was being cleared of roots, the soil sold and hauled away to make the lawns of summer homes along the Bar Harbor shore. There was then no town road that led to it, nor to the Great Meadow beyond, which remained hidden from view from any public way until twenty years later, when I built the road connecting the County road to Otter Creek with the right-of-way to Harden Farm. 2. Entrance to the Long Field was over a haul-way round the northern end of Strawberry Hill, avoiding the brook which swept the narrow gorge below from side to side. The Great Meadow basin was then completely locked away, shut in by woods, no road approaching it. A single farm, called after its owner 'Harden Farm! reached down to it on the northwest, at the foot of the Kebo range, and a right-of-way road led to it from Cromwell Harbor road to give it entrance. Climbing, one looked down on the Meadow from its encirclement of mountains; else, near as it was to Bar Harbor, it remained -- when life was at its fullest in the big hotel days and early period of summer home construction unvisited and unseen. But an old Indian Trail, leading through the Gorge from the northern shore of Frenchmans Bay to Otter Creek, ran past it on the west, around the mountain base, along whose line I later built the beautiful Hemlock Road past Sieur de Monts Spring. 3. The Great Meadow must anciently have been the basin of a lake walled around by high hills, with a background to the south of the Island's mountain chain, cut at their midst by the deep Otter Creek gorge, forming a picture, could one have seen it in that early time, of seclusion and great beauty, with the green forests growing down unbrokenly to the water's edge. Gradually through the centuries, the waters flowing from this lake cut their way down where the Long Field now lies, finding an outlet through the rock which all but closed their passage at its northern end, beyond which it unites with Cromwells Harbor Brook. Gradually, the stream / deepening its channel, the lake drained itself down to the present meadow level, that which lay below this level filling up with washed-down clay and gravel from the hillsides round about and with peat from the in-growth of sphagnum moss round about the water's edge. 2. 4. At this stage, it would have been possible for the early settlers, when, pioneering, they came to make homes for themselves along the Bar Harbor shore, fishing and lumbering, to drain, at slight expense, with all the big timber they then had at had, these outflowing waters and to have re-created the lake and furnished themselves with a water power, at Bar Harbor's very door, ample for their own and the future village's every need, whether for water or for power and water of the purest for drinking, close at hand, had they but had the vision, and altered, at a single stroke, the whole character of the future town. When, climbing the hills that close it in about, I first saw the meadow, it was an uncultivated bog producing only masses of wild swamp grasses, green in spring but which quickly dried to a dusky brown when summer droughts began. Amddst these grasses, here and there, grew beds of the native cranberry, with foliage that turned to brilliant shades of crimson in the late summer, and great patches of the swamp rhodora, with its beautiful red blooms at the end of June. That was as the Meadow was when I first knew it, when we built our summer 3.5 home on the opposite Compass Harbor shore and dwelt in it. Not long after, in the middle Eighties, when we 1880's had spent the winter abroad, my motherm father and I, we were on a trip along the Riviera, homeward bound, when we received, in a belated batch of mail, a letter from our caretaker at Bar Harbor, who told us that a terrific fire, starting among the dry swamp grasses of the Meadow, was raging even as he wrote, over the whole length of Strawberry Hill and threatening the homes upon the shore, our own among them -- and there the letter bboke off, after adding that our friend and neighbor, Mr. Edward Coles of Philadelphia, with a home near ours on the shore, had packed all his silver and valuable possessions of small bulk in sheets, ready to carry off in case the house should go. 4.6 Then no further word reached us for near a week, while we travelled on in suspense, not knowing whether we had a home in Bar Harbor to return to or if it lay in ashes. At last a second letter came, giving full detail and the welcome assurance that our house was safe as well as those of our neighbors along the shore. Cranberry pickers on the Meadow had in some way started a fire, with pipe or matches probably, among the dry swamp grasses and, unaware, had left it smoldering. The high southwest wind which accompanies such times oi' drought along our coast fanned it into flame, whose smoke was reported to the office of the Selectmen. Two men were sent out to put out the fire. It had at that stage nothing but the dry grass tofeed it and they beat it out sufficiently, as they thought, and returned home to dinner While they were gone the fire started up again and when the men returned it had spread on to the then thickly wooded western side of Strawberry Hill, swept on by terrific gusts of wind, great sheets of flame which it seemed that nothing but the sea could stop. But then a miracle had happened. The tremendous heat of the fire, when it reached the steep eastern declivity of Strawberry Hill, caused an updraught so strong that it held the fire in its onward rush and saved the houses on the shore below. All that was needed then was to establish a cordon of men with buckets who extinguished the sparks and burning embers which rose into the sky and then dropped upon the lawns and other grounds of houses on the shore. 5. 7 The town had no water supply nor organized fire department in those days. All depended upon wells which, shallow at best to the bedrock below, were all but dry. Realizing the possibility of such a fire emergency my father and I had dug out near the Compass Harbor shore where a brook flowed by in spring and fall, a cistern forty- five feet long by fifteen wide which went down to the glaciated bed- rock nine feet below. Putting a cover over it we had always kept it filled with water drawn from the brook. This now proved invaluable to the fire fighters from the town and was their only means of ob- taining water for extinguishing minor blazes which sprang up here and there upon the various estates on the shore. 8. In 1899, to obtain for my mother and our friends and neighbors on the Eastern Shore a short and pleasant drive, not leading through the Twon but connecting with its western side, I made the Town a favorable offer to obtain the right-of-way and build e, road around the Western side of Strawberry Hill, connecting the Otter Creek county road with the Town's right-of-way road to Harden Farm, limiting the Town's expense to $2,500, an estimated one-half of what the road would cost, making myself responsible for the rest. The Town accepted, the road was built for me by the Mount Desert Nurseries and opened to use in the Spring of 1900. This road, opening up for the first time the Great Meadow basin made a beautiful quiet drive for use with horses. The meadow, its drainage blocked by the silting up of the brookbed, was a bog, with wild cranberries growing anid swamp grass on its eastern side, which turned to beautiful color in the later season, while on its western side, and embayed by the extension of the forest onto it grew the swamp-loving rhodora, mingled with Labrador pea and similar wild plants of the northern bogs, and forming brilliant sheets of color every spring. Road construction requirements were simple in those horse-driving days, I drained the road-bed well and graded it, using such material as I found along the way and the Town has never had occasion since to make expenditure upon it, other than on surfacing it for motor use. Fifteen years later, when motor cars had come in use, I built, owning then the land, a road around the Meadow's southern end, continuing my e arlier road, so that people coming from Seal Harbor or beyond might take this shorter, better routs to reach the Building of Arts for concerts, flower shows and the like, XVX/ the Kebo Valley Golf Club, with its nine-hole course, or summer residencesobn Bar Harbor's western side. When, in 1930, Mr. RockefeAler, having acquired the land on the Island's ocean front, from Sand Beach to Hunter's Brook, asked the Town if it would surrender to the Government its Ocean Drive that he might build,for the Park, replacing it, a motor road along this whole magnificent stretch of shore, bridging the Creek, and the Town agreed, he included in his offer the construction of a road connecting the Cadillao Mountain road where it rises over Great Pond hill with this ocean drive. His offer accepted, he brought surveyers down from New York to study this connection, who worked the whole following summer through, consulting also, in regard to it, eminent landscape architects, before giving the route publicity. But the result was not a happy one, limited as the study was to lands the Park already owned. And ultimately Mr. Rockefeller, giving the lands he had acquired for carrying out the plan, withdrew from his offor, leaving it to the Govern- ment to continue with it,placing it for execution with the Federal Bureau of Roads for further study. In this, familiar with the whole territory as I was, I was able to help. The road originally surveyed was laid out over the Great Meadow's boggy bottom, where construction would be costly and no compensating view could be obtained. at high level The road I had laid out and built/around the Meadow basin NA was clearly the place where the rod should go. In this, once stafted, all agreed, but none had thought it possible the Town would yield the road to the Government. I thought it would, if given good pe rmanent connection with the road when turned over to the Park and thi 8 connecti on I W as in position to make possible through my ownership of the Long Field, the one tract still left to me of the land I had originally secured for my Wild Gardens project. This I gave. The Tonw, the matter being laid before it at its next annual meeting, agreed, and my road of thirty odd years before round the Meadow's northern YX end and eastern side, was taken for the new Park road, leaving free from road construction the lake- like moadow bottom and incidentally saving the Government a full half its estimated oost. In making my gift to the Government of the land down the Long Field, which alone made it possible to obtain the Town's consent to the relinquishment to the Government of its road around the Great Meadowm I asked in return one thing: The construction, planting and maintenance of a path over it and across the Great Meadow beyond, connecting the Town with Sieur de Monts Spring and the mountain trails which rise from it. This path, long since planned and partly built, lies wholly in its course over land of my giving and recalls, being full of association for me, my Wild Gardene plen which led on to the Park's creation. To this, referred to Washington, the Government, represented by the National Park Service, agreeed, as it did also to my having the plants intended for it grown in advance En-m under my direction by the Mount Desert Nurseries, COPY: NEA: 1/30/41 I Random notes on the early history and development as a summer resort of Mount Desert Island and particularly Seal Harbor. DAS By George L. Stebbins -- August 1938 X MY The discovery of Mount Desert Island by Samuel de Champlain for in 1604 and the various attempts at settlement in those early times are so well known through the accounts of Francis Parkman and others that I shall not describe them but commence with the first permanent settlers who established themselves about the year 1768. The Somes family and others at Somerville, now Somes- ville, John Hamor, Captain Samuel Hull and others at Hulls Cove and the Manchesters, Clements and others at Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor. The Town of Mount Desert was incorporated in the year 1789 and included all of the Island, Bear Island, the Cranberry Isles, and other small islands. The Town of Eden, now Bar Harbor was set off in the year 1796, the Cranberry Isles in 1830, and the Town of Tremont, now Southwest Harbor and Tremont, in 1848. In the year 1840 when the town included Southwest Harbor and Tremont as well as the town of Mount Desert, the taxable valua- tion of the town was as follows: Real Estate $109,290 Personal 59,801 Total $169,091 and it is interesting to note that of the Personal Estate, $37,850 was represented by shipping, indicating that almost all of the inhabitants got their living by following the sea. The total valuation of the present Town of Mount Desert for the year 1930 was $3,787,000. In 1840 there were in the town: 213 Oxen Now o 382 cows " 71 52 horses 11 42 19 pleasure carriages From about 1797 to 1807 the land in the vicinity of Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor was surveyed by John Peters of Bluehill who had moved from Massachusetts to Bluehill, Maine, and had been engaged in "running out" settlers' lots in various parts of Hancock County under the authority of the General Court of Massachusetts. It may be interesting to note that this John Peters became the ancestor of many men later prominent in the affairs of Maine, including two chief justices of the Supreme Court of Maine, the present Judge of the United States district court and the donor to the Trustees of Public Reservations of the Black Mansion and its contents at Ellsworth. John Poters and a son named James ran an east and west line starting at a point on Asticou Hill and running eastward to a point on Day Mountain, crossing the Long Pond Meadows north of Long Pond and the Jordan Pond road near the house now owned by James McCrae. North and south lines from this back line to the shore divided the land into settler lots, but when Peters came to a point on the east side of Seal Harbor just back of the present residence of Arthur M. Clement, he stopped and made a note in his book that the land east of the point was not worth surveying, "that is was lazy land". That worthless land now comprises the sites of the Dane, Dunham, Hoe, Ford, and other houses. About 1866 or 1867 a large tract of this land was owned by a man named Porter Brewer who said he wanted to sell it. There were two buyers, James Clement, son of the founder of Seal Harbor, and John Bracy, and Brewer said that he would sell it to the highest bidder so they sat on the ledge and commenced to bid against each other, starting at 10d an acre and bidding up until finally Clement bid $1.00 an acre and Bracy told him he could have it, it was not worth that. When I made this statement at the Village Improvement Society Meeting at the Seaside Inn, August 12th, 1931, Mr. Charles II. Clement, the son of James Clement, said that he remembered the incident and was there at the time. Mr. Clement died in 1932 at the age of 91. The town assessors recently told me that the square half mile included in this tract is now the most valuable square half mile in the town, including, of course, the buildings on it. When this sale at $1.00 an acre was made, the land was surveyed by Eben Hamor of Town Hill and I was told by my friend, Judge Peters, that the next time Hamor came to survey land in that vicinity, it had sold for $2000 an acre, this of course was many years after. The Town of Eden, now Bar Harbor, was set off from the Town of Mount Desert in 1796 and the first town meeting was held at the residence of Captain Samuel Hull of Derby, Connecticut who settled at Hulls Cove prior to 1789 and in this connection it is possible that I may claim to belong to one of the oldest families of the Island for my great, great grandfather was Captain Samuel Hull of Derby, Conn. At first I thought this Captain Hull might be my ancestor but upon consulting "Uncle" Eben Hamor who was the sage of the Island at the time I arrived and knew all the families, I found they were not the same person but probably my ancestor was an uncle of the settler of Hulls Cove. The records show that John Manchester settled in Northeast Harbor in 1775 while the first settler at Seal Harbor was John Clement who came in 1809. In 1796 William Bingham of Philadelphia purchased most of the eastern half of the Island (it being a part of the tract owned by de Gregoire family up to 1792). 2 Mr. Bingham died in England leaving this property in trust for his children, two of his daughters marrying members of the Baring family, and this trust has continued until the present day, most of the titles running back to that ownership. At first the early settlers were only squatters but as they became established, they went over to Ellsworth and got deeds for their lots from the Trustees of the Bingham estate paying a few dollars for the titles. The deeds described the conveyances as to the shore which was considered sufficient until a few years ago when some lawyers searching titles raised the point that they did not convey to low water mark of the sea and we were therefore obliged to get deeds from the Bingham Trustees for the property between low and high water mark which were given for a nominal consideration. In looking at the old maps, one of which I have dated 1868, it is interesting to note the shift in population from the west to the east side of the Island, at that time the most popular section being around Pretty Marsh, Center, Seal Cove and Bass Harbor which now is the most sparsely settled part of the Island. The Island was brought to the attention of the eastern city dwellers by artists who cruised this way before the Civil War, but very few people came until after that was over, when the resi- dents of Bar Harbor commenced to take boarders, and the first summer cottage, which still stands near the Newport Hotel, now in process of demolition, was built in 1867 by Alpheus Hardy of Boston who was followed the next year by Mr. Dorr, father of George B. Dorr, who has done so much for the Island. The attrac- tions of the climate and scenery soon became known to the fashion- able world and gradually the boarding houses were replaced by large, barnlike hotels which offered very little in the way of conveniences but were most popular, particularly with the young people. The heyday of hotel life at Bar Harbor was from 1875 to 1885 when the Rodick House was the center of social life. It was situated in the main street extending with its grounds from Higgins' Grocery Store down to Cottage Street, the tennis courts being on the lower end of the lot. While life was very simple, Bar Harbor was a very fashionable resort and it was considered quite the thing for a debutante of Boston, New York or Philadelphia, to spend at least part of the summer there. Sproul's restaurant catered to the fashionables and the races of the Kebo Valley Club were gala affairs. When the hotel dwellers commenced to build cottages there was very rapid development and there was an active and rising real estate market from the middle 70's up to the boom year of 1887. The first cottage builders took up the shore property but later the possibilities of the hillsides were seen and farseeing men from the cities planned their development. Charles T. How of Boston was the leader of these and did more than anyone else to promote the best development of Bar Harbor, buying large tracts of land and building the Highbrook, Cleftstone and other roads on the hillside. 3 Although the first residents landed at Southwest Harbor, that being the largest village, the development of the west side of the Island came later, and that of Northeast Harbor dates from the your 1880 when President Eliot of Harvard University bought land and built his cottage and Bishop Doane of Albany stopped at Squire Kimball's boarding house situated on the site of the present Kimball House and also bought land. It is stated that Deacon Kimbnll was very much puzzled by his new boarder and stated to a friend that he did not know what to call him because he had regis- tered in the style of an English Bishop as "William of Albany". It wns almost an accident that President Eliot did not settle where Sorrento now is for his son told me that in 1877 or 1878 he oruised down this way with his two sons then in college and made an offer to the Widow Bean for her farm comprising the point at Sorronto, quite a large tract of land. It was a good offer for that time but was refused because the widow thought it so high that there might be some hidden value that she did not know about. It sooms that a short time previous, silver ore had been discovered at Sullivan Falls and the widow thought that this college professor who was a scientific man had discovered silver ore on her property and timt was why he made such a high offer. Dr. Samuel Eliot also tel li me that he and his brother camped at Northeast Harbor in 1880 and advised their father to buy land there for a summer home, whereupon he drove along the shore front from Manchester's point to Soal Harbor and selected the point where the house now stands as the best there was. The development of Nor theast Harbor as a hotol and cottage colony was very rapid for the next 12 years and has nontinued steadily up to the present day. The first settler in Seal Harbor was John Clement who came in 1809 and set up a bark tent until a log cabin could be built. He was n cooper and made barrels for the Hadlocks of Cranberry Isles. During the next year he settled on the east side of the harbor on land of the Bingham Land Purchase. His sons took to fishing and went to the Magdalen Islands in the springs for herring to smoke for the Boston market. They succeeded in this business and accu- mulated enough money to buy some real estate where the Seaside Inn now stands. One of the brothers, James Clement, built what is now known as the Homestead Cottage which still stands and in 1869 thoy sold all interest in the fish business and commenced to re- build the old house into a summer hotel which was a success from the start although for a number of years in a small way. In 1884 the Glen Cove Hotel was built on the site of the present Village Green and later an annex was built to this hotel connected wi the the main building by a passage way known as the "Hyphen". In its early days Seal Harbor was noted for the number of literary and scientific men and college professors who made their 4 homes there either at the hotels or in cottages. Among them being Professors Rowland of John Hopkins, Dana and Summer of Yale, Toy and Thayer of Harvard, besides Doctors Edward K. Dunham, Christian A. Herter and Simon Flexner, the authors James Ford Rhodes, Hamilton W. Mabie, Winston Churchill, Dr. Henry van Dyke and others. In fact at the old Glen Cove Hotel the scholarly atmosphere was such that the bell boys were sometimes wont to construe latin prose with the guests. Up to the year 1894 there was very little cottage development at Seal Harbor, the principal summer residence being that built in 1891 by Mr. and Mrs. George B. Cooksey on the point at the east side of the harbor now occupied by the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest B. Dane. Previous to this Admiral Crowninshield, Mr. R. R. Thomas and Messrs. Boggs and Barr had bought on the west side of the harbor but there was no road to enable people to get to the shore front beyond the Cooksey point and the real development of the place commenced when the Cookseys bought 800 acres of land with the shore front from their point to beyond Little Hunter's Beach, a distance of about two miles and Mr. Cooksey in 1895 built the Sea Cliff Drive and provided an adequate water supply for the place from Jordan Pond. Development followed rapidly and summer cottages were built by Professors Rowland and Dana besides Messrs. Hoe and Bodman and others, and also Doctors Edward K. Dunham, and Christian A. Herter who had besides, well equipped laboratories and took an active interest in the sanitary conditions of the place, the milk and water being regularly inspected commencing with the year 1902. After the death of Dr. Herter, work in his laboratory was continued by Dr. Henry D. Dakin, developer with Dr. Carrell of the Dakin solution which saved many lives during the World War and in 1921 the place was bought by Dr. James B. Murphy of the Rocke- feller Institute for Medical Research making a continuous line of scientific men in the same location interested in the welfare of the place. Speaking of these laboratories, there is rather an amusing story in connection with Dr. Herter's. Dr. Herter had a number of monkeys for his spinal meningitis experiments and one day the laboratory attendant was careless and left the door of the cage open, whereupon the monkeys escaped and sought their home in the woods of Mount Desert Island. But finding its natural food scarce, one of them was tempted by the smell of cooking from a cottage occupied by an old gentleman whose cook was broiling a steak for his noonday meal. She was a good cook and had been in his employ for a long time but unfortunately was inclined to indulge a little too much in the cup that cheers and also inebriates. The kitchen window was open and the monkey seeing and smelling the food, jumped through it onto the shoulder of the cook who, not knowing what had happened to her, rushed in to her master who was equally surprised but soon recovered his composure and drove out the animal. 5 When I came to Seal Harbor in the year 1892 for a visit to my cousin, Mrs. George B. Cooksey, who had recently built her house on the point where the Dane house now stands, there was not a house on the Jordan Pond Road. There were two hotels and only five cottages which had been built for summer residents, although there were a few other houses owned by the permanent residents, which were rented in the summer time. The water supply was from a dam in the brook about half way up the Jordan Pond Road, and was very fitful. Mr. Cooksey soon saw that a better supply was needed and he bought the plant and franchise of the water company from Mr. Campbell of the Glen Cove Hotel and planned to bring the water from Jordan Pond down the Jordan Brook valley to the foot of Long Pond. He thereupon had a survey made for condemnation purposes at the outlet of Jordan Pond where the present dam now is, the only point where a water supply could be taken from the pond, and had his lawyer, John A. Peters, now Judge Peters of Ellsworth, commence condemna- tion proceedings at Ellsworth, went to Boston, and ordered the necessary pipe, the order being so large that it took all the available pipe there was in Boston, had it shipped by fast freight to Mount Desert Ferry and chartered a steamboat with Captain William Cox of Seal Harbor, an experienced navigator, on board to trans- port it from there to Seal Harbor. At this point the officers of the Northeast Harbor Water Company and the residents along the Asticou Road got wind of the proceedings and concluded that they would like to have control of the supply of water from Jordan Pond. They had possession of another charter which was outstanding and which contained the right to take water from Jordan Pond and under the impression that the first company that laid pipe from the pond would have the prior right, telegraphed to Boston for pipe and received word back that there was no pipe in Boston. In the meantime, Mr. Cooksey's pipe had reached Mount Desert Ferry but its arrival at Seal Harbor was delayed because of a dense fog, so they thought of some old rusty discarded pipe which they had in stock and rushed it up to Jordan Pond with a gang of men to dig a trench and put their pipe in it, although there was no possibility of its carrying any water. Mr. Cooksey's men with their pipe arrived soon after and there then was some trouble up by the outlet of the pond. One gang throwing dirt out of the trench and the other throwing it in. But soon Mr. Gardiner of the Northeast Harbor Water Company got word from Ellsworth that Mr. Cooksey's condemna- tion proceedings were completed and that he had therefore the prior right. As soon as Mr. Cooksey had won the contest, he, with his usual 6 liberality, approached Mr. Gardiner and his associates, told them that he wished to give them an adequate supply of water and made arrangements which were perfectly satisfactory to them. I was not here at that time but I got this account from Judge Peters, who attended to the legal matters, from Mr. Gardiner, who in his usual humorous way expressed it by saying, "I was like Davy Crockett's coon who said "Don't shoot, I will come down", and from Mr. Alanson Clement, who, although a close friend of Mr. Cooksey, was President of the company sponsored by the Northeast Harbor people. An amusing side light occurred when the schooner arrived off Cooksey's (now Dane's) Point. Mr. Cooksey, wishing to help, went out on the point and shouted and Captain Cox, wishing to hear the waves on the rocks and not recognizing the voice, shouted back, "Shut up, you damned fool". The four-inch water main down the Jordan Brook valley served the place for a few years but the growth was so rapid that in 1901 Mr. Cooksey's company laid a ten-inch main below frost down the Jordan Pond Road to the village, this, giving a winter supply of water, created a rapid growth along the Jordan Pond Road, which has continued until this day. An important element in the development of these villages was the establishment of the Village Improvement Societies, the Northeast Harbor Society being founded in the year 1898 and the Seal Harbor Society in 1900, the basic reason for their establishment being the system of town government characteristic of New England. The towns comprise large areas outside of the villages and there are no local village governments to take care of immediate and local wants such as the sprinkling of street, removal of garbage, etc., and in these early days, the town finances did not admit of their being taken over by the town, therefore for a number of years at North- east Harbor and Seal Harbor the sprinkling of the streets and the removal of the garbage and refuse and the raking up of the village streets were done by these societies, the funds being provided by voluntary contribution or entertainments gotten up by the summer people. Later as the towns grew larger and the jobs became too big to be handled by the societies, they were taken over by the town. The most important development in the history of the island was the establishment of the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. This was orgenized by President Eliot in 1901 on the model of the Massachusetts organization of which he had been an officer for a long time. The officers were: President Charles W. Eliot; Vice-president - George B. Dorr; Secretary - L. B. Deasy; Treasurer - George L. Stebbins. This organization was empowered to receive lands to be held for the public benefit but 7 no lands were received until the year 1908 when my associate, Mr. Cooksey, suggested that we might start things by presenting the trustees with a very small bit of land on which the Champlain Monument had been erected in 1904 and the first deed recorded by the trustees was June 5th, 1908, of this little bit of land comprising a f ew square yards. The first substantial gift, however, was from Mrs. Homans of Bar Harbor, by deed dated prior, but recorded subsequent to the Cooksey deed of a considerable tract of land on the Bee Hive Mountain back of Schooner Head. Very notable additions were made to the reservations in the years 1910 and 1911 when a group at Seal Harbor composed of George B. Cooksey, Tracy Dows, Richard M. Hoe, Edward C. Bodman, Dr. Edward K. Dunham, Dr. Christian Herter, and George L. Stebbins, discovering that a good title could be obtained to a tract of over 3600 acres once owned by a bankrupt land company of the boom days of 1887, bought the tract and by arrangement with Mr. Dorr of Bar Harbor, turned over to him some 1600 acres on the slopes of Green Mountain in the town of Eden and made a gift to the reservations of Pemetic Mountain and the Triads, some 1000 acres. Soon after that the Charles T. How property, comprising about 1700 acres, including Jordan and Sargent Mountains and most of the Bubbles, came on the market and was bought and presented to the reservation by a group from Northeast Harbor headed by President Eliot and assisted by contri- butions from the Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor Water Companies. At that time other purchases were made in the Bar Harbor district largely through the generosity of the late John S. Kennedy, resulting in a tract of 5000 acres being held in the reservations more than half of which came from the Town of Mount Desert. In the late summer of 1910, Mr. Rockefeller who had rented a cottage in Seal Harbor that and the previous season, bought and made large additions to his present residence, the Eyrie built in the winter of 1900-1901 by Professor Samuel F. Clarke of Williamstown, Massachusetts and immediately became interested in the reservations, and later the National Park, rescuing large tracts of land from the umbermen. Few people realize, except those immediately concerned, that these acquisitions were made just in time to save our forests from being devastated by the wood cutters. In the old days the deep woods were safe because it cost too much to transport the logs to the sawmills, which we're located at the outlets of the ponds, but soon after the beginning of this century, the portable gasoline sawmill came into general use and that, together with a great increase in the price of lumber, made it profitable to cut any of the soft wood growths on the island. 8 In acquiring these tracts for the reservations, thus saving the forests, we in some cases got ahead of the speculators and lumbermen by a few hours only. One of the lively episodes of what are now old times was the fight to keep automobiles from the roads of Mount Desert Island. In the year 1903 a Bar Harbor lawyer got a bill through the Maine State Legislature permitting towns on Mount Desert Island to prohibit the use of automobiles on their roads and all of the towns immediately voted for that prohibition. Conditions remained very satisfactory until about the year 1911 when a strong sentiment in favor of admitting automobiles grew up particularly among the permanent residents of the town of Bar Harbor, resulting in that town voting in July 1913 to admit the automobiles. This was soon followed by Southwest Harbor, but the Town of Mt. Desert held out with a solid opposition to the admission of automobiles, expressed by the summer residents and backed up by an over-whelming vote in August 1913 by the voters of the town and it was not until action was taken by the State Legislature in the winter of 1914-15 that the automobiles were admitted. The next event of great importance in the development of Seal Harbor, was the presentation by Mr. Rockefeller in the year 1920 of the property comprising about six acres on which the old Glen Cove Hotel, which had been closed for years stood, to the town for use as a Village Green and public park. The buildings which housed the Whitmore store and Billings' market were moved northward, giving the open space which we now see and which adds so much to the beauty of the village and to the pleasure of its inhabitants. The Mountain Road and other developments by Mr. Rockefeller which are of so much benefit to Seal Harbor and Mount Desert Island, are matters of recent and not old times and, therefore, I shall do no more than to refer to them. As the place grew, various activities for the benefit of the winter as well as the summer residents developed, the Seal Harbor Library being built in the year 1900 on land donated by George B. Cooksey and Mrs. Charles H. Clement, a summer and a winter resident. In 1906 the Harbor Cliffs Tennis Club was established on the high land east of the harbor and continued its activities with tournaments every summer until 1927 when it was superceded by the new Harbor Club. The Seal Harbor Neighborhood Hall was built in 1914 principally for the benefit of the permanent residents of the place and from subscriptions made very generally from both the permanent and summer residents. This hall was burned to the ground in 1919 and replaced by the present building from the proceeds of the insurance with additional subscriptions, and fills a very important part in the 9 social life of the place, particularly during the winter months. The Seal Harbor Yacht Club was organized in 1923, its first Commodore being Mr. Roscoe B. Jackson of Detroit, who served until his death in 1929, he was succeeded by Mr. Edsel B. Ford, and in 1935 by Mr. Edward K. Dunham, Jr. The Club affords landing to visiting yachts and holds an annual Regatta each year in coopera- tion with the Northeast Harbor Fleet, which organization sponsors the July and August series of races participated in by the racing members of the Seal Harbor Club. In 1910 Mr. and Mrs. Ernest B. Dane bought the Cooksey point on the east side of the harbor and built their present house on the site of the old one and Mrs. Marcus A. Hanna occupied her new house built on the point adjoining it on the east. In 1925 Mr. Edsel B. Ford who had been coming to Seal Harbor for stays of longer or shorter duration for many years bought 75 acres on Ox Hill at the east of the harbor and the next year occupied his present residence. In that year also Mr. Roscoe B. Jackson bought the Penrose property on the east side of the harbor just above the Yacht Club and built the residence which now stands there. In the year 1926 Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Ford, and the late Mr. Jackson and the late Dr. D. Hunter McAlpin, seeing the desira- bility of a swimming as well as a tennis club, bought property bordering on Bracy Cove and built the present Harbor Club with its Club House, swimming pool and tennis courts, the old tennis club being given up in that year. An account of Seal Harbor would hardly be complete without mention of two other items. First the Jordan Pond House which has played a large part in the life of the summer residents and has been conducted since the year 1895 by Mr. McIntire who built it up from a very small beginning to its present attractive condition. The other is the network of woodland paths radiating from this spot for, as stated by Baedecker in his guide-book of the United States, "It is for its convenience as a center for walkers that Seal Harbor is very favored." These trails, laid out and mapped mostly in the years 1895 and 1896 by the late Waldron Bates of Bar Harbor with assistance from our side of the Island, are kept up by the Village Improvement Society and offer a variety of sea- shore, mountain and valley walks such as can be had in few places. In speaking of old times, I recall various incidents which perhaps are not familiar to the present generation. When I attended my first Town Meeting in March 1896, the seat of the town government was at Somesville, and we all drove there to the meeting. 10 It often happened that there was good sleighing and an old time custom still prevailed of the men from the other villages as soon as the meeting was over, to hitch up their horses and race home, making it sort of a local Derby day, and I remember a week or two before the meeting seeing various men cut at dusk with their fastest horses, getting them into condition for the race, but when one spoke to them about it, they always allowed that they were not going to race this year because their horses were not in good "ruddin" condition. During the years in which I spent a great part of the year at Seal Harbor, I made many close friends among the permanent residents and I well remember a drive to Somesville with the late James Clement, when, in his relation of old time stories regarding the residents along the road, he displayed his keen sense of humor. As we came to one place he said a man named Richardson once lived there who had three sons not noted for their industrial habits. One day he undertook a journey to Ellsworth and before leaving, gave each son a hoe and told them to hoe the corn patch during his absence; but when he returned he found the three sons leaning on the handles of their hoes, gossiping, with very little of the patch hoed. A few days after, he again went to Ellsworth but be- fore going he took a saw and sawed the hoe handles half way down to the blade so that they could not lean upon them but upon re- turning a little early, he found the three sons with the hoes reversed, sitting on the blades and talking. At another house, he said an old fool lived there who had a rooster that crowed very early in the morning, thereby disturbing the next door neighbor, whose house was near the barn. The neighbor conceived a plot to rid himself of this nuisance and went and told the man that it was very bad luck to have a rooster that crowed at midnight, and that night he got up at midnight and went into his neighbor's barn with a lantern and waked the rooster up so that it crowed. The next day the owner of the rooster told the neighbor that he was much alarmed, that the rooster had crowed at midnight and he was assured it was a very bad sign. The next night the neighbor repeated the truck which resulted in the rooster being killed the next day. 11 1880 Some Thoughts Concerning Acadia National Park, Planning for its Future. George 5. Dorr December 10, 1940. Omitting studies in detail, my desire is to do what I may, while the opportunity yet remains, to create certain central points of interest in the eastern portion of the Park, whence it originated and where its planning and directive activities have always lain. The first of these concerns itself with the Park Office whose site I chose even before the thought of a National Park had clearly taken shape in my mind, and which was suggested by opportunities that had come my way for laying it out on the broad scale and striking setting it now occupies. Along with this, I wish to convey to the Park, as a central feature in it and giving it contact with the sea upon a harbored shore, my own inherited home at Compass Harbor on Frenchmans Bay, where my dream of the future Park first came into being and which was one of 2. the first summer homes built upon Mount Desert Island and rich for me with long, personal association. The third point I look upon as central is that of Seal Harbor where some of the earliest reservations, making possible the Park upon a broad and national scale, were obtained, and where so much has since been accomplished both on the shore and inland to make it the central landscape feature of the Park and Island, with its dominating mountains either side of the most beautiful lake basin upon Mount Desert Island. The Park Office site came to me in its entirety and including the Town Athletic Field it looks out upon, southward and toward the mountains, as the result of a combination of circumstances whose bearing upon my plan I recognized and, aided by others, took from the start full advantage of. That plan has as yet been only carried out in part, but it still lies in my power to complete it in its original intention and make it permanent through the Govermment's ownership, which I now wish to do. This involves the inclusion in the Park of the land lying west of the Athletic Field where, as the maps accompanying this will show, the separate road system and path system of the Park shall take their start, commencing off Park Street, the road laid out by me for the Park offices to front upon. The land required for this, reserved for the pur- pose, lies in my power to give, freely and without con- sideration, and this I now propose to do. But certain modifications of the present Town road system will be required to give it full effect, and to obtain these some few early house sites of the town remain to be acquired. The whole plan for this, also, is clearly shown upon the accompanying maps. In planning for Park Street, my thought was to take the road across the whole breadth of the plain the Town of Bar Harbor is situated on, from the summer residences on the shore to the east, making use for this 4. of a road already built, named for Mr. Johnston Livingston of New York whose lands it bordered, to Glen Mary Park upon the west. The portion of this road frontage opposite the Athletic Field, some five hundred and twenty feet in length from Main Street to School Street, is what I am now offering to the Government in its entirety for its administration buildings, for which it forms a dignified and spacious site. 1914 On the corner of Main Street, where Park Street commences, I built, in anticipation of the Government's acceptance of the lands I offered, the present Park Office building, planning it most carefully with the help of a competent local architect, and rented it to the Government when the Park was created, so that from the first that site has been associated with the Government's administration of the Park. This office, ample for earlier needs, suits ad- mirably the need for information, suggestion and ad- vice to the great stream of visitors who come now seasonally to see and explore what the Park has to offer. But this need, grown great beyond all anticipation, re- quires practically the whole building and the work of the Park administration now absolutely needs a separate building where the office of the Superintendent and his assistants may be placed spaciously in a dignified, at- tractive setting. The want of such a building, long felt, is provided for in the present plan, the site selected, after careful study, being opposite the center of the Athletic Field, with most attractive plantings of trees and flowering shrubs on either side long since set cut, with all due care, and growing well. The only request I wish to make in connection with this building is that it be designed, since it will represent the Government to all who now come in such numbers from the whole country over, in a style characteristic of the best old-time New England architecture. The land west of School Street, fronting upon Park Street, has now been accepted by the Town of Bar Harbor 6. for its office and administrative needs, for which it forms a most excellent site, looking out upon the lands offered to the Government and tying up together in the happiest way the Town and Park ddrinistrations to the gain of both, the whole forming the most attractive road frontage in the Town. Along with this broad development of the Park Office site and the secure and permanent possession of it by the Government which it provides for, I offer, in connection with it, my old family home, Oldfarm, upon the shore of Frenchmans Bay with which the whole develop- ment of the National Park has been, from its inception on, most intimately associated. This, one of the earliest and best-situated summer homes upon Mount Desert Island, was for many years the scene of generous hospitality, till those who made it so, my father and my mother, had passed on, leaving to me the spirit of that hospitality, to which, extended to a wider, national field, Acadia National Park, in its origin, is due. The site occupied by this home is that of one of the earliest cultivated farmlands on the Mount Desert coast, settled by migration from Cape Cod. This farm- land, with the woodlands and wild lands associated with it, is, owing to the bold, rocky character of the coast beyond, the last tract of farmland character capable of being cultivated upon the western coast of Frenchmans Bay or the coast beyond until Seal Harbor and the island- sheltered entrance to Somes Sound is reached. It also fronts directly upon the last good harbor for small vessels along that whole stretch of coast, lying closely outside the extensive sheltered basin of Upper Frenchmans Bay created by the breakwater extended by the Government, at great expense, from Round Porcupine westward toward the Bar Harbor shore, with passage-way left open between for smaller craft. The original Oldfarm grant acquired by my father extended back from the Compass Harbor shore and the Storm Beach point beyond for a measured mile, ending on the all but precipitous slope of Champlain Mountain, 8. the easternmost mountain in the Mount Desert Island chain, which, with Bear Brook and Beaver Dam Pool at its base, was one of the earliest gifts of land, made by myself, which now constitute Acadia National Park. This Oldfarm tract, which, in its entirety, I inherited from my father, is one of extraordinary in- terest and variety, with its harbored shore, its cul- tivated farmland, its bold granite heights above the cottage that I now occupy, its tiny lake, Compass Harbor pond, and the stream that winds its way down from it to the harbor. And along with these the tract across the public way, the Schooner Head Road, which I gave early to form part of the group of public reservations that presently became the National Park. Wide extended as the Park now is, it has, even yet, no frontago upon any harbored shore until Somes Sound is reached, midway of Mount Desert Island. The Oldfarm tract I now offer will fill this want, and in the most complete and satisfactory way. 9. The house itself, Oldfarm, built by day labor under my father's, my mother's and my own direction in consultation with the architect and the builder, is, owing to the care taken of it, in as good con- dition now as it was when it was finished, sixty years ago, and no repair to it is needed, within or without. It occupies a magnificent situation above the shore and harbor and is completely furnished, having been rented to friends of mine at intervals throughout the years. This furniture is included in my offer. Private roads, avenues and foot-paths connect the house widely and directly with the lands now already included in the National Park, and it seems more natural and right to have the Park extended across the public way to Compass Harbor and contact with the sea and to the house that was my own. 10. Oldfarm, the house, was built by the day, and most extraordinarily well. Our architect was Henry Richards of Gardiner, Maine, a recent graduate of the Nassachusetts Institute of Technology, who took the keenest interest in his work and followed it closely, consulting constantly with my mother, my father and myself as the work went on, unhampered by any contract. Whatever changes suggested themselves as the work progressed, adding to the comfort and convenience of the house, were promptly made, for we planned for the future and an enduring home. The lower story of the house was built of granite, using, for effect's sake, the old oxidized surface from a new quarry in the Gorge opened for the purpose; cut stone was only used for the window frames and doors and the effect was excellent. The rest of the house was splendidly Pramed in wood, the best Maine could supply, with strong and heavy beams that made the structure of this portion as enduring as could be built in wood. The upper stories and the roof were shingled with California Redwood, imported for the purpose. The Redwoods all possess some quality that prevents decay -- they never rot, though they may wear thin and crack with time. This was a suggestion of our architect, who used them for their warm, reddish tone, fitting well with that of the granite used in the lower floor. The house was built sixty years ago the present year - 1940 - and no renewal or repair even of these shingles has ever been required, save for those upon the roof which ultimately wore thin and cracked and which I had replaced, as better fitted to the climate and exposure, with the best native cedar shingles pro- duced in Maine. We planned the house spaciously, that we might have our friends come to stay with us freely, and it became at once, with the rare gift for entertaining that inj mother had, a social center of the pleasantest sort. It is the recollection of those days and the good times we had that makes me desirous now of making our old home serve the Government in recreation and in rest, if it so might be, for those who shape, at Wash- ington, the policies of the National Government. C.) UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Acadia National Park Bar Harbor, Maine, May 1, 1939. Mr. Arno B. Cammerer, Director, National Park Service, Washington, D. C. Dear Mr. Cammerer: I have given Mr. Hadley a brief statement to enclose you in regard to Oldfarm, along with what he has written in answer to your request for figures from the Town Assessors' book and has just mailed you. I now write a further word concerning this and on some memories the question has brought up. In 1878 we returned from Europe - my father, mother and I - after a stay abroad unexpectedly prolonged by my older brother's death in New York two years before in the summer of 1876, while studying law in the office of an ol- der friend, Mr. Louis L. Delafield, one of the leading law- yers of the country at that time. Old 14.7am We had planned returning home ourselves the fall of that year and building a permanent summer home at Oldfarm on a site my father had already purchased a half dozen years before. My mother was at work over plans for this, studying some of the old English country houses, when a cable reached us, telling of my brother's sudden illness, followed immediately after by another informing us of his death. Bar Harbor, when we returned in the fall of 1878, was just recovering from the effects of a typhoid epidemic two years before, brought on by the rapid growth of the place as a resort and lack of realization by its citizens of the need or corresponding sanitary measures. It had learned its lesson, however, and steps were in progress to correct UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 2. Director 5/1/39 the evil, but the effect on summer life, when we returned, and commenced to build, still lingered; no land was being sold, no houses built. Ours at Oldfarm as the first house to be built for summer residence, spaciously and comfortably, on Mount Desert Island and the re utation of it as the work went on gave confidence to others, starting what was known afterwards and long referred to as the &Bar Harbor boom. , The price of lands along the shore went up a hundred per cent within six weeks that summer and building continued ac- tively thereafter for years to come. The Oldfarm house was built for the first storey up of granite of a warm reddish have from the nearby Gorge and above that was covered with shingles hewn out of Cali- fornia Redwood, their tone blending well with the granite and still remaining, after all the years, untouched by decay. We had for architect Henry Richards one of the old Gardiner family of Gardiner, Maine, who had married the daughter of my mother's early friend, Julia Ward Howe. Henny Richards was then a recent graduate from the archi- tectural school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked in well with my mother in the plans which she had made, producing a house that has ever remained for me one of the most attractive, home -like and best-fitted to its setting built on our eastern coast. The soale of wages at that time was low, one dollar to a dollar and a quarter a ten hour day for ordinary labor; two and a half to three dollars for skilled. The work was done by the day and was sound throughout and good. father and mother were building for the future and spent liberally upon the work. When all was done, my father told me one day that the house and the work done upon the grounds connected with it had cost seventy thousand dollars, an amount far greater than it would seem t oday. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 3. Director 5/1/39 But the work has long since justified its cost in its enduring quality and the fitness and pleasantness of the home constructed. Yours sincerely, GED-0 last quarter of record fresh beginning after interruption. the Oldfarm house was built under plans prepared by Keury one of the best younger architeots of his day and as dichards thoroughly as could bo, making no saorifico to oost. It is in as good condition now as it was when first completed and the only changes made have been those nooded to keep it level with the times in all new development. Eleotrio lighting was unknown when the house was built and for twenty years the reafter/ at Bar Harbor. thanxhx gracity So with the town water and SO with the telephone. But all that has been needed to keep it abreast of the time has been added. Life was simple in t he 1880's 8. So long HS my mother and my father lived, Oldfarm was the soene of constant hospitalitity. The house was- is specious and was kept always full with delightful company. My father died first in 1893, my mothr seven years later. Ever elighting to havo friends about her, my own O specially. C 1938 3. A Oldfarm as 1 ts name tella broad feat plin Oldfarm, the house, stands on a stuge of the same hard and amient rook that encloses Compass Harbor along the ooast on either side, against whose baso, whon the land stood at lower level in relation to the sea during the last glao1al period, the WAVOB must have broken with tromendous force. To the north it faces across the whole length of the Upper Bay to the Gouldsboro Hills; to the south the Oldfarm landa and gardens merge unbrokonly into those of Aoadia National Park which drew from them their early inspiration for the origin of the Park. XX L The house, fitting well the landscape, is built story? up to the second floor of warm-tomod, nativo graniteg above Title oovered with shingles of the California which Redwood, similar in tone, which have never needed to be renowed, save in portions of the roof, sinco the house was built, now close onto sixty years. It is spaciously designed, with ample out-door porches, screened from the driveway, fronting on the view, while broad stone stops, laid in easy descent, lead from it to the lawns above the shore. (then follows History, which is paged History- 1 eto. C.I 1939 UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Acadia National Park Bar Harbor, Maine, May 1, 1939. Mr. Arno B. Cammerer, Director, National Park Service, Washington, D. C. Dear Mr. Cammerer: I have given Mr. Hadley a brief statement to enclose you in regard to Oldfarm, along with what he has written in answer to your request for figures from the Town Assessors' book and has just mailed you. I now write a further word concerning this and on some memories the question has brought up. In 1878 we returned from Europe - my father, mother and I - after a stay abroad unexpectedly prolonged by my older brother's death in New York two years before in the summer of 1876, while studying law in the office of an 01- der friend, Mr. Louis L. Delafield, one of the leading law- yers of the country at that time. We had planned returning home ourselves the fall of that year and building a permanent summer home at Oldfarm Old on a site my father had already purchased a half dozen years before. My mother was at work over plans for this, studying some of the old English country houses, when a cable reached us, telling of my brother's sudden illness, followed immediately after by another informing us of his death. Bar Harbor, when we returned in the fall of 1878, was just recovering from the effects of a typhoid epidemic two years before, brought on by the rapid growth of the place as a resort and lack of realization by 1ts citizens of the need or corresponding sanitary measures. It had learned its lesson, however, and steps were in progress to correct UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 2. Director 5/1/39 the evil, but the effect on summer life, when we returned, and commenced to build, still lingered; no land was being sold, no houses built. Ours at Oldfarm as the first house to be built for summer residence, spaciously and comfortably, on Mount Desert Island and the re utation of it as the work went on gave confidence to others, starting what was known afterwards and long referred to as the &Bar Harbor boom. The price of lands along the shore went up a hundred per cent within six weeks that summer and building continued ac- tively thereafter for years to come. The Oldfarm house was built for the first storey up of granite of a warm reddish hue from the nearby Gorge and above that was covered with shingles hewn out of Cali- fornia Redwood, their tone blending well with the granite and still remaining, after all the years, untouched by decay. We had for architect Henry Richards one of the old Gardiner family of Gardiner, Maine, who had married the daughter of my mother's early friend, Julia Ward Howe. Henny Richards was then a recent graduate from the archi- tectural school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked in well with my mother in the plans which she had made, producing a house that has ever remained for me one of the most attractive, home-like and best-fitted to its setting built on our eastern coast. The soale of wages at that time was low, one dollar to a dollar and a quarter a ten hour day for ordinary labor; two and a half to three dollars for skilled. The work was done by the day and was sound throughout and good. My father and mother were building for the future and spent liberally upon the work. When all was done, my father told me one day that the house and the work done upon the grounds connected with it had cost seventy thousand dollars, an amount far greater than it would seem t oday. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 3. Director 5/1/39 But the work has long since justified its cost in its enduring quality and the fitness and pleasantness of the home constructed. Yours sincerely, GED-0 18 in that city, under the firm name of J. E. Ditson & Co., now doing business at 1228 Chestnut Street; will return to the Boston house this summer, though the Philadelphia. business will still be carried on under his supervision; Oct. 2, 1877, was married in Boston, to Henrietta Curtis Mixer; Oct. 20, 1878, James Edward Ditson, jun., was born. NATHAN HASKELL DOLE. The first year after graduation taught at De Veaux College, New York; the next year was instructor in Greek and English literature at the High School, in Worcester, Mass.; in December, 1876, succeeded Nichols, as preceptor of the Derby Academy, in Hingham, Mass. where he remained until June, 1878; since then has resided at 2 Mount Vernon Place, Boston; and has been engaged in general literary work, especially in editing and enlarging Rambaud's History of Russia," published in three volumes, by Estes & Lauriat, of Boston; is American correspondent of "Le Livre," and has recently been appointed on the Committee to visit the Academical Department of Harvard. GEORGE BUCKNAM DORR. Soon after `graduation went to Europe, where he remained, travelling and studying, until 1879; since his return to Boston has not been in activé business; the past year has been treasurer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. (No report since graduation.) JAMES DWIGHT. In the fall of 1874, began the study of medicine at the Harvard Medical School; serious illness interrupting his work at the school. he did not receive his degree of M.D. until June 25, 1879; passed the following winter as House Physician at the Boston Lying-in Hospital, and has since been practising his profession at Boston and at Nahant; in 1879 was elected a Fellow of the Massa- chusetts Medical Society. LOUIS DYER. Soon after graduation entered Balliol College, Oxford, England continued his studies there until February, 1877, when he was called home to Chicago on account of his father's illness; remained in Chicago for some months, studying, teaching, and lecturing, and for the past- two years has been tutor in Greek in Cambridge. and is ex officio a member of the faculty in July, 1878, received the degree of B.A. from Oxford; has written several reviews for the Atlantic Monthly;" expects to pass this summer in Europe. WILLIAM SAMUEL ELIOT. Died in Boston, Nov. 15, 1874. See first triennial report. 4 Know all men by these presents that he Lucy this of the City of Boston, County of saffolk, Com- monwealth of Massachusetts, singh gentlewoman, Theodore Chase and aliee Chase wife of said Theodore Chase both of land City of Boston, John marko and Matilda markoe wife of land John Markoe both of the City and County of Philadelphia, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, being all the owner and rightful oce- pants of two certain parcels of land situation in the town of Eden, Comity of Hancok and state of name, morefully described in a certain deed of the ways and Easements heremanter described from sand Charles H, Don to said lucy Ellis and others dated November 29-1879 and recorded in the Registry of Deeds for Hancock County, state of name, Vol 169 page 229, the first of which tack is bomined and described as N with and East by the Sea: South by land formerly of the Angham Estate, and West by land of Charlis H Don: and the second of which lots is bounder and described as follows: North by land of said Incy Ellis: East by the sea; south by Dear Book; and West by land of said Don; in consideration of the sum of one dollar and other good and valuable considerations to Each of hs paid by Charles N. Don of the Land City of Boston, the receipt whereof we do hereby acknowledge do heach useb in said deed, which clams, rights, Fitter, interests and Easements are described in said deed as follows: a night of way over and across the land of said Door to and from the highway known and called the Jehom W Head Road, such way hereby granter being par- triularly located and described as follows: that is to say beginning on the East side of said highway called the Schooner Head Road, at the South host corner of a cottage of Laid Dorr, and thence rummy following the avenue of said Dor, as now built, first South seventy form degrees East, Eight and three forths rods to the West line of the "Sherman "lot" so called thence South forty one and three fourths degrees East five oods; thener south fifty one and three fourths degrees East fine sods: thener south sixty two and one fourth degrees East, two rods: thener South Seventy and three fourths degrees East five rods: thence South fifty form and one half degrees East nine and three fifths oods to the West line of land of said Don which lme is the East line of sand "shirman ' lot ' themer South listy seven and one fourth degrees East three rods; thence South fifty five and three forth degrees East five rods; thiner South forty Eight and one half degrees East ten rods: themer South fifty and three fourths degrees East (deverying from the mam Avenue of said door/ form Ands to a shake; thence South twenty sing and onehalf degrees East Twelve tods; thence South forty six And rods; thener North Seventy one and one fourth degrees last two rods to the point of L ledge: themer South Eighty mm and one half degrees two rods; thence Douth Awenty three and three fourth degrees East two rods to a stake: the apresaid way from the place of beginning to this last stake to be twenty feet wide; thence South fifty three and one half degrees East one not to a shake on the West line of Laid land of said they Ellis: the said way at this point be thirty feet wide. The time herein above described by to vanons comes distances and monuments, from said Schooner Hean Road to the land West the of land of said Lucy Ellis to be the center Im of the way hereby granted. The comes herem above named are the general courses, but there are curves between points herem before grown, and said way is a emong way numming through sain points herem before named. For further identification of said way hereby greater reference may be had to a plan of paid way, made by C m. Hamon Surveyor, from his survey, the lamman September 13FA.D. 1879, said plan being dated September 18-1879 marked A" and signed by said E.M. Hamor and herewith to be recorded, the way herely granted being marked on said plan in red mk. meaning and intending hereby to remise, release and quit claim to the said Charles # Dor his him and assigns way or other thing granted w conveyed to us And om him and assigns by the need of said Charles H, Don bearing even date with these presents and to be recorded in the Nancock Comity Registry of Duds, although the same or any part thereof may be identical with the ways, rights, Fitles intents and Easements herem described am upon, N over any land covered by n meluded in said way herein described or my part thereof. To have and to hold the herdy released premises with all and apportenances thereof to the tain Charles H, Door and his herr and assigns forever, but subject & the foregoing aception and reservations, so that, 4cept as herembefore accepted, neither we the said Suey Ulis, Theodore Chase, also Chase John marker and matila marker nov either of us nov nor the him ON assigns of Either of hs nn any person or persons claiming by, through or under, or in the name, right or stead of us or Either of wo or the hims N assigns of us or eithin of us shall N will by any way or means have clam or demand any lawful night or tith to the Laid premises ON then appentinances or any part w hand thereof frever In witness when of we the said Lucy illis, Theodore Chase, aliee Chase John marko and Matilda Markoe (the saidaliu Chase and matilda markoe signing then these presents in testimony of then selm- quistment of all nights of dower and all other nights in the premises herely acleased) have heremeto set m hands and peals this 31- day march in the year one thousand Eight and sinely Theodore bigitive any signed, ml in Commonwealth of Massachusetts City of Boston, Suffoth County SS. On this 31 day of march A.D. 1890. personally appeared before me, a Notary Public of said suffolk County the above named buy Ellis and acknowledged the foregoing instrument to be her free act and deed. In witness whereof, I have percento set my hand and affixed my official seal the day and year aforesaid. (signal) Andrew hishe Notan Public for suffoth lomity Commonwealth of Messachusetts Suffoth S.S. Boston gnd april 1890 Then personally appeared Theodore Chase and acknowledged the foregoing instrument to be his free act and deed, before me (signal Lewis A Dabney justin of the Peace R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 1871 - GBD & WWD go to London- then join parents at Baden-Baden (Good copy - to be read for typographical errors) Trace noute on map. Italy. 1872-1874 - C.H.D. to Paris for winter, going to Riviera and &WWW to Rome; ChD. returned home in spring; GBD & WWD going again, the same spring to England, Scotland and Wales, with Mr. Dana as a companion on the trip; in the fall of 1873 WWD returned home, & CHD joined GBD for a winter in Paris and on Riviera, returning home in the spring of 1874. (Good copy, but change has to be made, as it is written incorrectly.) 1874 - 1878 -- Abroad - Rome, etc. (unfinished) 1878 - trip to Brittany ; trip to Spain, winter of 1877 to be added to the story. 1882 - Trip to Central Italy & Sicily - Rough Copy 1891-1892 - Trip to Palestine & Up Nile - Good Canoeing Trip to Moosehead Lake with Sam Warren - 1895 1902 - Trip with Geologists - Good 1903 - GBD & Vanderbilts - Good 1904 - To Sierras - Good 1907 - Last Trip Abroad Rough A trip through Virginia Staying at Biltmore Estes Park - (Col. Fordyce hebacco The Journal of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society Volume XXII SUMMERS OF SCIENCE AND WONDER THE CHAMPLAIN SOCIETY LOGBOOKS 1880-1882 2021 Mount Desert, Maine Champlain Society 1880 Champlain Society members at Camp Pemetic, 1880. Left to right: Donnell, C. Eliot, De Windt, Townsend, S. Eliot, Davis, John Wakefield, Rand, Breyant. M.P. Slade photo