Acadia National Park – East

The next leg of our trip took us southwest along the Maine coast towards Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park on Mt. Desert Island.

The “coast” road doesn’t literally run along the coast, so this view was more common than views of the ocean. As can be seen in the map below, the Maine coast doesn’t come close to resembling a straight line; and building roads to follow all these irregularities would be unacceptably costly and expose them too much to the elements.

Mt. Desert Island is the largest island off the coast of Maine with an area of 108 square miles and a year-round population of about 11,000 people. As is obvious from the map above, it anchors an archipelago of smaller islands scattered along the Main coast. We were arriving from the north east and thereby happened, in a totally unplanned way, onto Acadia National Park East, part of the Gouldsboro peninsula across Frenchman Bay from Mt. Desert Island, Bar Harbor, and the central part of the park.

We decided to take a loop around the peninsula and save Bar Harbor for later in the day. The road wound through a peaceful evergreen forest.

and delivered us to a surprise Acadia Park Visitor Center.

Apparently, a private donor felt that this side of Acadia National Park needed its own center and decided to help make that happen. It’s in the good old days log style, but done well and enjoyable to visit.

The model focuses on Frenchman Bay with this park on one side and Bar Harbor across the way on the other shore.

From the visitor center the road took us shortly out to the water and dramatic rocks.

I liked the way that these local rocks had been used for stairs and retaining walls.

There’s no sandy swimming beach in this particular location,

but there’s certainly lots of interesting rock formations, large and small.

It’s impressive how many plants can harbor in among all these rocks,

though enough fresh water must collect to make that possible.

Large amounts of iron show up in the rocks in some areas (but not at all elsewhere),

all of which gets thoroughly clad with seaweed and mollusks along the water.

Up close, it’s impressive how much pressure and movement has affected the formation

of the many layers of the rock, and then in other places how much the action of the

waves has also loosened them up. Running through all this some impressive crevasses

seem to have literally pushed things apart, offering channels for water – and plants.

Higher up on the rocks and away from the waves, the plants have an easier time of it.

Where some soil accrues, plants can spread out; but it’s amazing how they can also manage to survive perched on a ledge.

With this little bouquet we’ll move on to Mount Desert Island and Bar Harbor.

Lubec – West Quoddy Head

The morning of our second day in Lubec I wandered around the town a bit while Jane took her binoculars to see what sort of shorebirds she could see. It’s a small town, with mostly wooden buildings of a variety of – typically – 19th century styles. In some smaller cases, simple, symmetrical forms were chosen.

These translated into full house forms as well,

and were used for details and ornamentation.

In a few cases, more elaborate structures were built – probably in times of prosperity.

The local church exuded significant power –

depending, of course, on your point of view. It could also be seen as modest.

Not far from the church was the town cemetery with its war memorials. Always sad.

At the bottom of the hill perched the once-thriving fisheries buildings

There’s clearly some activity still going on but not what you could call a heyday. Main street has a modest but well cared-for quality.

It’s clear that people have valued the historic aspects of their buildings,

though in some cases modernized and tuned them up.

We had a good seafood dinner at Cohill’s. It was obviously a meet and greet place.

At the end of Main street, near the harbor, sat a memorial to fishermen that had a nice wave quality that seemed to me to join the water to the land.

Here are two other views, one looking to water, the other to land.

The nearby seabirds were mostly paying attention, however, to seafood possibilities.

Lubec grapples with a lot of topography in places. More than a few buildings were perched on steep slopes to gain a view.

It must be a challenge to build on top of all the granite. (Think water and sewer)

Hard to fault people about wanting a look at the view though.

After this last look at the harbor we headed for West Quoddy Head and the Maine coast.

West Quoddy Head, in Quoddy Head State Park, Lubec, Maine, is the eastern-most point of the contiguous United States. Since 1808, there has been a lighthouse there to guide ships through the Quoddy Narrows.

The current one, with distinctive red-and-white stripes, was built in 1858, and is an active aid to navigation. Photographs and paintings of this lighthouse are frequently reproduced. The 3rd order Fresnel lens is the only 3rd order and one of only eight Fresnel lenses still in use on the Maine Coast.

West Quoddy Head is an easterly-pointing peninsula in southeastern Lubec, overlooking Quoddy Narrows, a strait between Lubec and Campobello Island, Canada, that provides access to Passamaquoddy Bay and harbors located on the St. Croix River and other rivers which the empty into the bay. Most of the peninsula is part of Quoddy Head State Park, and the light station is located near the southern end of its eastern face.

A stone sign describes the lighthouse as the “eastern-most point in the U.S.A.”

It is the easternmost building in the United States (a nearby sign proclaims the “easternmost gift shop in the U.S.”), but the actual easternmost point is at the edge of rocks extending eastward from the shore. The present light station includes a tower, former keeper’s quarters, service building, and oil house. The tower is circular and is 49 feet in height, with the beacon at 83 feet above sea level.

The light, magnified by a third-order Fresnel lens, has a range of 18 miles. The tower is built of brick and painted in alternating horizontal red and white stripes. A small gabled entry vestibule, also brick, projects from the tower. The keeper’s house is a wood frame structure, 1-1/2 stories in height. You can’t go up in the tower – too bad – but it doesn’t look as if you could see out the windows anyway.

See you next time, farther south along the coast.

Lubec – Campobello

Following a somewhat circuitous route from St. John, NB we made our way across the Canada – US border and into Maine, headed for Lubec, the most north-easterly town in the continental United States. It was a lovely day and we finally got to see at least the beginnings of some fall color – but this was about it.

On the map below we were coming south from Robbinston at the top of the map, along the green route to Whiting on the lower left and then east on 189 to Lubec.

Located on a peninsula overlooking an excellent ice-free harbor, Lubec was first settled about 1775. Originally part of Eastport, it was set off and incorporated on June 21, 1811, and named for Lübeck, Germany. Following the War of 1812, Lubeck was the site of considerable smuggling trade in gypsum, although principal industries remained agriculture and fisheries. By 1859, there was a tannery, three grist mills and nine sawmills; by 1886, there were also two shipyards, three boat-builders and three sail-makers; and as noted below, some extra-entreprenurial investment types.

From 1897 to 1898, the town was the site of a swindle in the sale of stock in the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, the brainchild of Reverend Prescott Jernegan and Charles Fisher of Martha’s Vineyard. Jernegan claimed to have developed a method of using “accumulators” to get gold from sea water and bought an old grist mill to turn it into a factory. The scheme attracted an abundance of investors, who were all too eager to funnel money into the company after being promised astronomical returns. In the summer of 1898, work was suspended without explanation at the factory. Jernegan and Smith vanished, and the fraud was gleefully exposed by newspapers across New England.

Lubec reached its population peak in the 1910s and 20s, hovering a little above 3,300 during this era. Since then, the population has generally been in a gradual but steady decline, and currently sits at a little over 1,300.

We checked into our small motel, a refurbished fish-processing plant.

It was comfortable, if a bit spartan, and had a good restaurant and view from our room, directly out over the fishing pier,

and a little closer up, a view of the crab pots stacked at the ready on the dock.

On closer inspection I discovered that in addition to each pot having its own individually color-coded bouy, the arrangement of openings into the pot, shape of the netting traps, and openings for bait food were all also uniquely designed. It’s obviously a mixture of science and mysticism.

We decided to use the nice weather that afternoon to visit Campobello Island, where the Franklin D. Roosevelt summer home is located. The island is actually in Canada; so we had to go through Customs and over the Roosevelt Memorial Bridge to get there.

It was definitely odd, having just come from Canada, to turn around and go over and back for such a short visit; but it’s an unremarkable trip for the locals. During the summer it is possible to island-hop from mainland New Brunswick to the north end of Campobello Island by ferry. That would have been an interesting and more direct way to get there; but we were too late in the season, so the ferry was no longer in service.

In 1770, a grant of the island was made to Captain William Owen (1737–1778) of the Royal Navy, who renamed it Campobello. The island’s name was derived from Britain’s Governor of Nova Scotia, Lord William Campbell, by Italianizing/Hispanicizing his name Campbell (which is really of Scottish Gaelic origin meaning ‘crooked mouth’), alluding to campo bello, which in Italian means “beautiful field” and in Spanish “beautiful country(side)”.

The creation of the colony of New Brunswick in 1784 saw the island transferred to the new jurisdiction, and by the end of the 18th century the small island had a thriving community and economy, partly aided by Loyalist refugees fleeing the American Revolutionary War. Smuggling was a major part of the island’s prosperity after the Revolution, a custom to which local officials largely turned a blind eye. During the War of 1812 the Royal Navy seized coastal lands of Maine as far south as the Penobscot River but returned them following the war, except for offshore islands.

Campobello has always relied heavily on fishing as the mainstay of the island economy; however, the Passamaquoddy Bay region’s potential for tourism was discovered during the 1880s at about the same time as The Algonquin resort was built at nearby St. Andrews and the resort community of Bar Harbor was beginning to develop. Campobello Island became home to a similar, although much smaller and more exclusive, development following the acquisition of some island properties by several private American investors. A luxurious resort hotel was built and the island became a popular summer colony for wealthy Canadians and Americans, who built homes along its beaches and, as below, its lake fronts.

Among those with estates were Sara Delano and her husband James Roosevelt Sr. from New York City. Sara Delano had a number of Delano cousins living in Maine, and Campobello offered a beautiful summer retreat where family members could easily visit. From 1883 onward, the Roosevelt family made Campobello Island their summer home.

Their son Franklin D. Roosevelt would spend his summers on Campobello from the age of one until, as an adult, he acquired a larger property — a 34-room “cottage” — which he used as a summer retreat until 1939. It was at Campobello, in August 1921, that the future president fell ill and was diagnosed with polio, which resulted in his total and permanent paralysis from the waist down.

Roosevelt Campobello International Park preserves the house and surrounding landscape of the summer retreat. The park is owned and administered by the Roosevelt Campobello International Park Commission, created by international treaty signed by Governor General Georges Vanier, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, and President Lyndon B. Johnson on January 22, 1964. The park was established on July 7, 1964. Both countries provide financial support to the park. It is an affiliated area of Parks Canada and of the U.S. National Park Service. A visitor center provides orientation.

It’s a bit of an odd combination of visitors’ center, museum, personal memorabilia, and presidential connections that makes you feel entitled, as if in a museum, to take it all in; and at the same time constrained, as if you’re snooping into someones private life.

Sailing was a popular pasttime in the summer – this is a model of a favorite boat.

We decided to see the house first and then come back for the museum tour.

The 34-room “cottage”, built in the Shingle Style and completed in 1897, was designed by Willard T. Sears. The gambrel roof gives it a renovated-barn scale and character; but there are enough details up close to render it comfortably residential.

Continuing the museum / residence analogy, the house contains a pretty complete set of personal furniture and possessions accompanied by photos to give a sense of history.

Things were set up as if to convey that the Roosevelts had just stepped away, as with this model sail boat “under construction”,

or these games temporarily abandoned, the chairs pushed casually back as if the children had rushed off to some other activity.

Eleanor kept up a regular correspondence; so her desk anchored a key position,

the key position being along the main hall that ran the length of the house, and near the stair to the second floor, from which she could keep an eye on everything.

She also worked to music when the mood struck her.

The living room comfortably looked out over the bay, with several seating groups.

The view had been created by cutting a swath through the woods down to a dock.

Sailing was commemorated as well as enjoyed.

There was also a view from the dining room; but it appeared not to have been as much of a focus – though the summer days would have been long enough this far north.

Upstairs, the accommodations were comfortably tucked under the roof shapes, facing the bay view for the adults,

and smaller and simpler on the land side for the children.

Even though the Roosevelts were here only in the summers, they paid attention to keeping up with their children’s educations, using a small, upstairs room for classes.

Back downstairs, we exited at the kitchen end of the house.

Farm-style kitchen but with a copper hot water boiler, and a small dining room for staff or perhaps, on occasion, the children.

We exited through the kitchen door and headed down towards the water. The rear of the house looks much like the front.

It looks out over lawn that runs all the way to the beach.

The view back has a similar telescoped view quality.

A map shows the extent of the park and location of the cottage on the upper left.

Down by the water, a small porch-like platform graces the edge of the beach.

It provides some seating, but also a series of information panels on a wide variety of subjects related to the island, from history to fisheries to current acquaculture efforts.

We made our way back to the Visitors’ Center for a look at the history displays. One wall contained essentially a scrapbook of family summer activities.

Another area though, gave showed just how different travel was in those days.

It was a long, slow train trip from Boston to Portland and then via smaller railroads, first inland to Bangor and then back out along the coast to Eastport, where the family plus their staff and 30-40 trunks of clothes and supplies would transfer again to the small shuttle railroad across the bay to Lubec.

Once you arrived and settled, though, life took on a more familiar feeling.

We headed back across the bridge to Lubec, partly to be practical and do our laundry, partly to try out one of the restaurants in town, and finally take one last look at our view as the day drew to a close.

Next time we’ll explore the town a bit, check out the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse and officially start down the Maine coast towards Boston.