What's in a Picture? 6013 THE-LOUISBURG, BAR HARBOR, MT. DESERT ISLAND, ME. COPYRIGHT 1901, BY DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO Thank you for the collar it is very pretty Post from the Past R EC'D your letter will ans. soon. Thank you for vibrant flowerbeds bordering its wide porches, no the collar it is very pretty. Happy New Year longer stands. Neither do some twenty other enor- from Annie Wilson." The line of pretty pen- mous, elegant hotels whose most popular rooms and manship that swirls around the outer edge of this suites often had to be reserved two years in advance. 1901 Bar Harbor postcard - conscientiously neat if During peak season, they housed some 2,500 well- sparsely punctuated - is as intriguing as the photo- to-do rusticators, those, of course, who couldn't graph around which it was inscribed. Was Annie afford one of the 220 palatial "cottages" for which Wilson a resident of Bar Harbor and sending a post- Bar Harbor also became famous. Amid all the hik- card she had just bought downtown during the off- ing, golfing, boating, sketching, and "rocking" season? Or was she a regular warm-weather vaca- (apparently defined as climbing amid seaside boul- tioner at the Louisburg Hotel (above) who dipped ders to track down shells and wildflowers), summer into a stash of treasured summer mementoes to sup- visitors adhered to a strict social code: paying proper ply this wintry greeting? Fortunately, the postcard is calls on one another via horse and buggy. In fact, in more straightforward. One of the many reproduced the photograph above, two or three buggies outside in Earl Brechlin's new book, Bygone Bar Harbor: the Louisburg await the return of passengers no doubt A Postcard Tour (Down East Books; 208 pages; soft- visiting guests inside the hotel. The depressed thir- cover; $12.95), this postcard is more than an image ties, however, brought fewer and fewer guests until of a once-popular watering hole; it is a virtual ticket to in 1939, the Louisburg was torn down, escaping the a time and place that no longer exists. Visitors to Bar disastrous fire that swept Mount Desert Island eight Harbor nowadays will find the mountains and ocean years later and officially ended the era of grand hotels and wild beauty much the same as a century ago, but in Bar Harbor. One can only hope Annie Wilson kept the five-story Louisburg on Atlantic Avenue, built a postcard for herself to remember the Louisburg by. in 1874, with its yellow and cream exterior and -Ellen MacDonald Ward