OPPOSITE POINTS OF VIEW

In my boyhood, two iconic pictures defined the sense of place and history in our community .  The first was a painting, 'A Morning View of Bluehill Village, 1824' by the Reverend Jonathan Fisher, a Yankee polymath who had come here fresh out of Harvard in 1795 to be the first settled minister of the village.  The other was a late 19th century 'Bird's Eye View' lithograph, published, coincidentally, 100 years after Parson Fisher's arrival.

Fisher's painting is a summary of his life and career in the town.  Although Blue Hill, originally New Andover, was settled in 1762 near the tidal falls at what is now South Blue Hill, the young village at the head of the Bay that Fisher later painted had barely existed before his arrival, but for a couple of houses, and grew and developed in those thirty subsequent years. Fisher's journals carefully record his progress on the painting, including traipsing to the Treworgy farm on the next hill (now known  as Greene's Hill, after later owners), with his homemade camera obscura, to make the first sketches in September 1824, and then note progress on the work until its completion in April 1825.  

Parson Fisher's home-made camera obscura

The village spreads out below the hill, quiet in the morning light.  In the foreground a man (Fisher?) drives a snake from this Eden.  There were probably roosters crowing, maybe hammers and saws working on the boats under construction at the edge of the harbor, but we can't hear those sounds.  All is quiet, frozen in time.  

Detail of the Fisher Farm from A Morning View of Blue Hill

The Fisher House from the same perspective today.

Opposite where he sat surveying the scene, on the top horizon, was Fisher's raison d'etre for choosing this perspective: his own farm, with its tidy orchard, and just downhill to the right, the meeting house where he preached, with the parade ground before it. It is a scrupulously honest picture. In the right middle ground is the Baptist meeting house, to which Fisher, a stern Calvinist, had lost much of his flock when it was founded a few years before. In a village near the Eastern Frontier, far removed from the centers of art, this painting was considered a marvel, and was  revered locally long before it found its way into the collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum.  Considered the first true depiction of a Maine coastal scene, it has been published in countless books about American folk art and early 19th century culture.

A late 19th century photograph captures the view originally painted by Fisher

And on the opposite hill, one looks across to the spot (indicated by box) from  which  Fisher painted his view.  The photograph, actually two joined,  is from the series used in the creation of the bird's eye view

The second view was created by an artist using dozens of photographs taken in panoramic perspective, then mechanically re-aligned so as to appear taken from the air--a dozen years before the Wright Brothers would go aloft, and aerial photography become commonplace.  What fascinates and compels me to write about these pictures this morning is that each depicts the view from almost exactly the opposite center of the other--they literally look across to each other. In the bird's eye view, the Treworgy Farm is on the horizon about a third way from the right, and in the Fisher painting, one looks across to the spot that would be directly below the airborne viewer.

Bird's Eye View of Blue Hill, 1896.  For a full-screen version, please click HERE

The village has become quite a different place in the bird's eye view. Fisher's meetinghouse burned in 1842, and was replaced with a new Congregational Church downhill, closer to the center of the village.  The Baptist meeting house has become a church, with a spire echoing that of the Congregationalists.  A main street of stores, with post office and restaurants has grown up at the edge of the harbor.  

The Town Hall, designed by George Clough

A new town hall, designed by the architect son of a local shipbuilder, has just been constructed, Colonial in idea, but its Roman arched frontispiece clearly inspired by the newly popular classical ideas of the great Chicago Exposition of a couple years before.  As with Fisher's painting, a schooner is coming into the harbor, but despite sails, this one has smoke or steam rising from a stack on its deck.  Although Fisher's village still mostly survives, the 20th century is around the corner, and in the foreground is a harbinger of things to come---a big shiny new summer hotel for the newest Maine industry, rusticators.

The hotel, the Blue Hill Inn, was designed by William Ralph Emerson, the Boston architect who practically invented the shingled style of summer architecture favored on the Maine coast, and was the latest marvel of the town, complete with its own electric power plant, and supplanted the boarding houses and modest village hotels of earlier years. The Inn was not a success, and with the removal of a wing, was converted to use as a summer cottage by a new owner, Judge Chauncey Truax of New York, in the early 1900s.  Later, it served as a temporary hospital, and in the early years of the Depression, it went up in flames.

The 21st century is not being kind to the village of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Poor planning, lack of zoning, changing tastes, a little greed, changing economies and myriad other factors are wreaking changes on a scale that is unprecedented in our collective memory.  Change used to be gradual, and somewhat organic (South Street, new home of both roundabout and Dunkin' Donuts, was still a narrow gravel lane as recently as my childhood).  In recent years, the change has come faster, more forcefully, and has been more destructive.  Even as I type this, a rotary is being constructed at the dusty crossroads to the left of the Inn, and a Dunkin Donuts is going up on the inn site, across from the supermarket and Rite Aid drugstore that started the commercial sprawl.  

Bird's eye rendering of the new Dunkin' Donuts

As to the Fisher homestead, it is preserved as a museum, its original orchard replanted a few years ago (for an article about the Fisher Orchard, click HERE.) But, now only a thousand feet from a car wash and a new commerical parking lot with clear development intentions, the Fisher house's integrity and isolation, which lasted for most of the 20th century, is clearly coming to an end as it approaches its 200th anniversary.

On another note, the photograph below, from the George Stevens Academy on-line student paper, 'The Procrastinator', both sums up the local ambivalence about the arrival of Dunkin' Donuts, and on a more personal note, brings the Dilettante up short, for 43 years ago he was the editor of that school's paper, then called 'The Eagle's Nest'.  At that time it was a mimeographed four-sheet (my great contribution was sharper stencil graphics), and the slick advances in technology and content make me feel very, very old indeed.

Photoshop image of Blue Hill Mountain from GSA Procrastinator, credited to William Hilliard

As for Jonathan Fisher, a current exhibit at the Farnsworth Art Museum explores Fisher's ongoing fascination with the natural world in his art and writing, culminating in the book, 'Scripture Animals' (1833).  Click HERE for more.

MISS SPENCE DISAPPROVES. Dilettante Writes Again

Before movie stars became the tabloid currency of choice, Society figures were America's chief tabloid obsession.  One of 1911's major tabloid fixations was the marriage of 47 year-old John Jacob Astor IV, recently divorced and one of the richest men in America, to 18 year-old Madeline Force, a Bar Harbor summer resident.  Thousands of columns of newspaper ink were expended on the their courtship.  The marriage was denounced from the pulpits, and from Bar Harbor, the redoubtable Clara B. Spence founder of Miss Spence's School for Girls, (who herself had an opinion or two about the proper raising of a Society girl),  weighed in with a letter to the Editor of The New York Times:

Miss Spence had formerly summered across the bay at Sorrento, but now spent her summers at Bar Harbor with her longtime companion, Miss Charlotte Baker, the assistant principal at Spence, an heiress to the fortune left by her aunt's husband, John Steward Kennedy. Two years later, Spence and Baker, with their four adopted children, would move from a cottage on the Kennedy estate to 'The Willows' a beautiful Regency style cottage designed for Miss Baker by the Boston firm of Andrews Jaques & Rantoul on Eden Street. "The Willows" would eventually pass to Miss Baker's sister, Mrs. Francis Kellogg, and later be sold to Canadian mining tycoon Sir Harry Oakes, but that's another story, which can be found HERE

The Misses Spence & Baker, with adopted daughters Margaret Spence & Ruth Baker (Spence School)

Despite Miss Spence's disapproval, the Astor marriage went ahead, only to be cut short when Col. Astor perished aboard the Titanic in April of 1912.  In August of 1912, three of the survivors, Madeline Astor, Mrs. George Widener, and Mrs. John B.Thayer, were in Bar Harbor as the guests of Mrs. A.J. Cassatt at "Four Acres", the Cassatt estate, which abuttied the property where Miss Baker and Miss Spence's new cottage was rising.  

'The Willows', the Bar Harbor cottage of Miss Baker

The next summer, even as the Misses Baker and Spence were moving into "The Willows", Mrs. Astor was also moving, into a nearby cottage also designed by Andrews, Jaques & Rantoul, a few carefully raked gravel driveways up Eden Street from the famed educators.

La Selva, ocean front in better days

That house was 'La Selva', built in 1903 for Pennsylvania coal baron Andrew Davis.  During Mrs. Astor's occupancy members of the press were frequently seen lurking at the gates in search of news about Mrs. Astor and her new baby, John Jacob Astor VI. 

In 1916, Harper's Bazaar caught Mrs. Astor at Bar Harbor as she was about to be remarried.

A few years later, Mrs. Astor would depart "La Selva" for a more secluded cottage on the George Vanderbilt estate, but "La Selva" would soon attract another colorful tenant, Mrs. Leonard Thomas, formerly Blanche Oelrichs of Newport, known professionally as the playwright, poet, and actress Michael Strange. Sometimes referred to as 'the most beautiful woman in America', Mrs. Thomas was already planning to leave her banker husband to obtain a Paris divorce, that she might run away with her lover, John Barrymore, one of the most famous actors of his day.

La Selva's next tenant was the beautiful Michael Strange (nee Blanche Oelrichs), seen here with her lover and later husband, John Barrymore.

'La Selva' is currently for sale, its condition more than a little reminiscent of 'Grey Gardens'.  I have written its colorful history for 'House of the Month' in the current issue of Portland Monthly.  The article may be read HERE.  More pictures HERE.

La Selva, views of entrance front taken two weeks ago

DRIVING AROUND: HANCOCK POINT

Mt. Desert Island from Hancock Point (photograph, Ivy Main via Wikimedia Commons)

I'm afraid I've been a bit boring lately.  As the manuscript for the book starts to take shape, my focus has been narrowed to near obsession, on the architecture of the 27 different summer colonies that fan around this section of the coast, from Rockport to Winter Harbor, as I continue to visit archives and individuals in the search for interesting material.  Once a Dilettante who knew a little bit about a great many trivial topics, I now know a great deal, much of it trivia, about one topic.

As the concept of summering, or as it was know then, rusticating, gained momentum in Maine in the 1880's, and as Bar Harbor became one of the most fashionable destinations in the country, a resort boom gripped the lonely shores across Frenchman's Bay from that gilded place. Large tracts of oceanfront land were gobbled up by real estate speculators hoping to repeat the momentum at Mt. Desert.  Land companies were formed, lots were laid out, those dual necessities---steamship wharves and hotels---were built, illustrated brochures were printed, tennis grounds laid out, and the race was on to attract wealthy city dwellers to each Arcadia.  Despite those common characteristics and amenities--including the imagination-defying views across to Mt. Desert perhaps without peer on the Atlantic coast---each of these colonies developed differently, each with its unique character.

Cottages at Hancock Point, c. 1895 (Courtesy Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society)

Today, those little colonies, far closer to Canada than to Kennebunkport, seem remote---as their inhabitants prefer it---but in the day, when steamship and train were the chief modes of travel, one could take a day boat to Bar Harbor--each community had service----go shopping, have lunch, or attend a concert or a ball, and be back home on the opposite shore in time for bed.   

Mt. Desert Ferry Landing, at Hancock Point, The Bluffs hotel in background

Hancock Point was, I think, the earliest of these developments (the others were Sullivan Harbor, Sorrento, Winter Harbor, Grindstone Neck and Petit Manan Point), and  geographically the first encountered as one sails 'down east' up the coast.  It was conveniently adjacent to the train and steamship landing at Hancock Ferry, where later the crack Bar Harbor Express, originating at Grand Central in New York, had its terminus, trailing behind it the private railroad cars of the plutocrats who then would board a ferry for Bar Harbor.  It was laid out in 1883 by Joseph Curtis, a pioneering landscape architect and conservationist who summered in Northeast Harbor.  It was a far smaller development than the others---125 lots as opposed to the ambitious 2,000 proposed for Sullivan Harbor, for example.

This octagonal cottage, with its rustic porch of natural cedar , was built by a  Mr. Johnson in  1887.  In 1914, his daugher Lettie donated it for use as a library, which it purpose it still serves today.

An early farmhouse, converted to summer use after the development of the Point, with a restraint too seldom seen today.

Many of Hancock Point's earliest summer residents were not from far cities, but were lumber merchants and bankers from Bangor.  They were soon joined by college professors such as Charles Homer Haskins, the great Harvard medievalist, and by  quietly well-to-do urbanites who preferred to avoid the flash of Mt. Desert (I've been to maybe a dozen cocktail parties on Hancock Point over the years, and unfailingly, at each one someone has pointed out how 'we' are not 'fancy' like 'them' over on Mt. Desert).  At any rate, Hancock Point, after two World Wars, a great depression, and changes in travel, is a sleepy little place with big views and some very fine smaller summer cottage architecture along its gravel lanes.

A water tower at one of the cottages

This cottage, which sometimes shelters a noted politician, was designed by Fred Savage

The earliest cottages were gingerbread designs, closely sited.  By the end of the 19th century, comfortable but not vast shingle style cottages, on larger lots were the norm.  Landscapes were kept simple, with respect for the natural landscape---very few of the elaborate gardens that characterized some of the summer estates of other resorts were laid out on Hancock Point.

The last built of the pre-Depression summer cottages is also the grandest

A recent guest cottage delightfully references the earliest cottages on the Point

Although the Point layout included a central chapel lot, the current chapel was built around 1900 to designs by the great Maine architect John Calvin Stevens, one of the chief innovators in what we know today as the shingle style.  As with many of the summer colonies, it is one of the finest bits of architecture in the place---and Anglican, of course...

PS.  I was reminded this morning that Hancock Point has another attraction, listed in the National Register of Historic Places---the spot where Nazi spies landed from a U-boat, one of only two places where the Germans breached the US during World War II (Obviously, it was off-season, otherwise the summer folk would never have allowed it)  That story here: 

OF LOBSTER PRODUCTS AND AGAIN WITH THE WEATHER

Once again, for those who may ever have wondered why Maine has 'Summer People' not 'Spring People', I present the answer.  It's the middle of April, for crying out loud.  Even with our lowered Spring expectations, this is cruel.

Today

41 °F

Ice Pellets

100% chance of precipitation

Tonight

34 °F

Ice Pellets

100% chance of precipitation

Tomorrow

45 | 28 °F

Ice Pellets

40% chance of precipitation

Sunday

41 | 28 °F

Chance of Snow

40% chance of precipitation

Monday

50 | 37 °F

Mostly Cloudy

Tuesday

54 | 39 °F

Chance of Rain

50% chance of precipitation

Ever wonder why Yankees are dour?  Wonder no longer.  Apparently April is the New March up here.

In other news, the Maine lobster branding thing sometimes goes beyond the t-shirts and key chains.  these were spotted in a local grocery store.  Yuck. The 'Lobster Tracks' ice cream can be found in another aisle.  Since when is 1/2 cup a single serving of ice cream?  Puhleeze.  When was the last time you saw a 1/2 cup carton of ice cream?