BAR HARBOR'S GREAT COTTAGES By Margaret Hammel HERE have always been The Rich, whose emeralds and ocean-going yachts and 80-bedroom houses have ex- erted a powerful hold on the American imagination. With Midas bankrolls and the leisure to spend lavishly, such people found challenge in inventing grand gestures - whimsical or absurd, sometimes vulgar - and in few places in this country have their antics been better demonstrated than in the famous watering place of Bar Harbor, on the northeast shore of Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Novelist Scott Fitzgerald, illustrious chronicler of the Jazz Age, once wrote that the rich are different, to which his writing contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, snortingly replied, "They only have more money." While Fitzgerald's famous remark was not based on observation of Bar Harborites, he had ample opportunity to know at firsthand their counterparts in other playgrounds of the United States and Europe. Thirty years before the coming of the millionaire "cottagers" in the 1870s-80s, Bar Harbor was "discovered" by artists of the Hudson River school of landscape painters. Amid the scenic splendor of mountain and ocean, which surpasses in natural beauty that of any other coastal resort in the country, the artists pitched their easels, lived Architectural grandeur as depicted by the Rockefeller estate at Seal Harbor (left) and Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury's Bar Harbor home, "Wingwood House," (upper right and below). The dining room (right) was designed in 18th Century English style, with buff and green-glaze walls, Queen Anne chairs lacquered blue, and an original Georgian mantel. and ignored the discomforts provided by small Not surprisingly, they were soon joined on Mt. Desert by houses in the town. a goodly company of distinguished Episcopal churchmen, wing the artists came a stalwart band of Bostonians among them Bishop Lawrence of Boston and Bishop Doane roper ones, of course - people given to strenuous of Albany; by such notable university presidents as Charles n hikes, sensible shoes, deep breathing, and high W. Eliot of Harvard and Seth Lowe of Columbia, and by a Without complaint they ate fish three times a day, dazzling band of other intellectuals who valued the art of ys a week, for they firmly held that such a diet lofty discourse far more than Lucullan tables. With their tes and adds to the brain." Creature comforts were early-to-bed, early-to-rise regimens, they represented the imum in the hotels of the 1860s-70s, the buildings vanguard that was to fight the encroachment of the ly crudely finished, with porous walls and some- fabulous cottagers yet to come. Their tenacious stand on ky roofs. Furnishings, too, were few and bleakly early supper as opposed to late dinner; their endorsement e Bostonians of that time, however - always more of Maine's then stringent liquor laws; their contempt for y at ease, when away from home, on cornhusk ostentation and distaste for idle gossip were attitudes held s than on goosedown pillows - felt their intellects in vain when the next and most glittering period in Bar n the exhilarating, winy air of Bar Harbor's hills. Harbor's social history began. Left - The estate of Mr. and Mrs. Ernesto Fabbri. A relative, steamship mag- nate Alessandro Fabbri, was a radio enthusiast who interested the Navy in establishing a radio station at Otter Cliffs during World War I. At right - The "Stanwood" cottage of Secretary of State James G. Blaine, and a gathering of the family and Washington notables in 1889. TO w MAINE FOR-JOSEPH PULITZER E.SQ ANDREWS JAQUIS AND RANTOUT Left and above - "Chatwold," the summer cottage of pool. Outdoing the gentlemen, Mrs. Ann Archbold had a Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, before motorized dining room table of some engineering complex- and after additions were made. Sensitive to noise, Pulitzer ity (for that time), which enabled her dinner guests to had the tower section of the mansion specially insulated gossip with impunity out of earshot of tattling servants. J.J. against sound. "Chatwold" was one of the seventy-two Emery of Cincinnati, landscaped his cottage, "The Tur- great cottages destroyed during the forest fire which swept rets," with hanging gardens. Mt. Desert Island in October, 1947. Of great renown was Joseph Pulitzer, newspaper tycoon, who rebuilt elegant "Chatwold" and added to it a $100,000 granite refuge he called "The Tower of Silence," THE so-called cottage era was in full swing by the 1890s, for he was preternaturally allergic to noise. He outdid even though some modest and comfortable summer Vanderbilt by building a heated swimming pool; his yacht, "camps" had been built prior to that time by a few New the 300-foot Liberty, which housed both a gymnasium and Yorkers and Philadelphians who shared the Bostonians' music room, did not have to bow deferentially to any of penchant for simple, healthful living. But from the 1890s the other showcase yachts riding at anchor in Bar Harbor on, with real estate booming and with an income tax yet waters. And, of course, there was J.P. Morgan of banking undreamed of, it was the multimillionaires who made the fame, who aboard his luxuriously appointed Corsair - or legend of Bar Harbor and who invented some of the grand ashore - carried on in his gold-fisted way enough flirtations gestures alluded to above. to keep the resort awash in titillating waves of scandal. For instance, John S. Kennedy, New York railroad Still later, after World War I, came such self-made magnate, built "Kennarden Lodge," the first cottage notables as Philadelphia's E.T. Stotesbury and Atwater boasting its own electric plant. The Ledyard Blairs in- Kent. The Stotesbury cottage, "Wingwood House," rebuilt stalled a marble elevator in their house. George Vander- twice at an additional cost of over $1 million, had forty bilt, at his palace-cottage, "Pointe d'Acadie," pioneered in servants' rooms and twenty-eight bathrooms, including one his own way by constructing the first private swimming for Mrs. Stotesbury, which had solid gold fittings. Atwater At "Stanwood" - Rear (l-r), the Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge, Secretary Halford and Walker 61 Blaine. Front (1-r), James G. Blaine Jr., Mrs. Lodge, President Benjamin Harrison, Mrs. Blaine, Secretary of State Blaine and Margaret Blaine Damrosch. F "The Turrets," the Eden Street cottage of Mrs. J. J. Emery, was built after the plan of a French castle. Bar Harbor Kent, a multi-millionaire of radio fortune, owned "Sonogee," a three-story Italian-style villa, graced by formal gardens and 700 rosebushes. Relatively modest in Life size - a mere twenty rooms, a dozen bathrooms and twenty servants' rooms - his estate was dotted with eight other cottages and a garage large enough to accommodate a small city taxi fleet. By the late 1920s, Bar Harbor's period of platinum pleasures slowly began to decline. Then, further impaired by the Depression of the 1930s and ever-mounting income taxes, it ground to a halt in World War II when services - and especially servants - became unavailable. There was no possible way to staff the great houses nor, under a New York financier John S. Kennedy's "Kenarden Lodge on the Shore Path cost $200,000. Later owned by Mrs. John T. Dorrance of Philadelphia, it was torn down in 1960. Social Notes September, 1902 Mrs. J. Pierrepont Morgan, who has been occupying one of the Foster cottages on West Street through the season, left on Tuesday. Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Van Rensselaer gave a luncheon Wednesday on board the handsome steam yacht May. Count and Countess de Laugier-Villars gave a sailing party on the Mascot Tuesday afternoon. The yacht Emerald with Mr. William Iselin on board came Monday from a cruise to the eastward. Adrian Iselin left a few days ago in the yacht Cherokee for Newport. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison I. Drummond have returned from their yachting trip. Mrs. Drummond's sister, Mrs. H. Clay Pierce, is with them. Mr. and Mrs. Ernesto G. Fabbri have given a series of elaborate dinners at Corfield in the past week in honor of their guest Count Coster of Florence. Mr. and Mrs. John Hays Hammond, who have recently returned from South Africa, are guests at the Malvern. 62 of Miss Ann Archbold "Devilstone" on the Bay Shore was owned by Clement B. Newbold of Philadelphia, later by J. T. Woodward. food-rationing system, were there enough delicacies to Social Notes adorn tables which, SO few years before, could set out July, 1920 sumptuous repasts for a hundred or more dinner guests. The finishing stroke was delivered in October 1947, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick W. Vanderbilt are expected to arrive when Maine's "Great Fire" destroyed seventy out of a total this week to occupy Sonogee. of 220 cottages and one-third of Acadia National Park. Mr. and Mrs. William G. Beale of Chicago are again at Krag-Myr. Mr. Beale is the leading member of a well known Publicized nationally as a great tragedy, the fire merely law firm in Chicago. He is one of many Maine sons who have marked the death of a Bar Harbor era that had been gone out into the world from the Pine Tree State and made a lingering in a comatose state for some time. Many of the national reputation. houses, now white elephants, would, in any event, have had "La Rochelle," the summer home of Miss Edith Bowdoin, to be torn down or left to deteriorate. takes its name from the town in France from which her More important, a new style of living emerged as a result Huguenot ancestors came to this country more than three hundred years ago. of World War II: a return to relative simplicity and more The Newport, Malvern, St. Sauveur and Belmont are all well modest living. Bar Harbor will perhaps never again be as booked and predict the best season in their history. Spartan as in the days of its early settlement by artists and There has been an unusual amount of life on the streets this hardy Bostonians, but it is equally doubtful that it will ever week owing to the presence of the British officers and sailors. again reach the opulent heights of its old Gold Coast days. The natty uniforms of the former and the wide flapping trousers of the latter are attracting much attention. "La Rochelle," the former Bowdoin-Colket home, now houses the Maine Sea Coast Mission Society. 63