Sonogee Estates EDEN STREET ROUTE 3 BAR HARBOR, MAINE 04609 12071 288-5800 A BRIEF HISTORY OF SONOGEE One of Bar Harbor's most famous summer cottages was this Eden Street home. It was built in 1903 for Henry Lane Eno (1871-1928), poet and author and research associate in psychology at Princeton. This remarkable man was also an expert on birds and was appointed Chief Ornitho- logist at Lafayette (Acadia) National Park in 1919. The most famous occupant of Sonogee was Atwater Kent, a self-made man whose extravagant ways came to symbolize the era of the twenties. Born in Burlington, Vermont, young Kent manifested his precocity by taking out his firt patent - for an electric top - at the age of ten. In the early 1900's he was producing electrical systems for automobiles and in 1923 he began building radios. A diminutive man, he was affable but quirky. In an interview with a TIME reporter, he said he wished to enjoy "the simple life on a grand scale.' His parties were, and are, legendary : three orchestras, thousands of guests, launches carrying guests back and forth to the Kent yacht. Nothing like it was seen before in Bar Harbor, nor, it goes without saying, since. Kent's company suffered during the depression, and in 1937 he rid himself of everything: business, estates, wife. He moved to Bel Aire, California where he continued to entertain on a lavish scale. When he died in 1949, his estate had dwindled to $8,000,000, much of which he left to his new-found Hollywood friends. Sonogee was sold in 1942 and again in 1947 and finally was purchased in 1970 by a Maine corporation named Sonogee. It was the intent of this corporation to preserve Sonogee as an historic site, typical of Bar Harbor in its Hey Day. For the next few years, Sonogee was open summers for the inspection of the general public. In 1974 construction began to incorporate the first floor of Sonogee with two new patient wings to form Sonogee Estates, the inter- mediate health care facility we have today. During construction, the top floors of the house were removed, allowing all services to be on one floor. On November 2, 1976, A-Wing was completed and admitted our first patients. C-Wing was then completed and admitted its first patients on February 9, 1977. There are accomodations for 82 patients. INTERMEDIATE HEALTH CARE FACILITY 7/85