The Gilded Age and the Making of Bar Harbor

Abstract

DURING the second half of the nineteenth century, or the Gilded Age as it is sometimes called, elites in the main cities of the United States created an extensive pleasure periphery. The old mineral spas scattered through the Appalachians that had served planter and mercantile families during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were replaced by new resorts in peripheral areas of the eastern seaboard, the Appalachian Mountains, the Canadian Shield, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific coast that catered to the newly emergent urban-industrial moneyed class. Although Newport, Rhode Island, was considered the leading resort of this type, Bar Harbor, Maine, was a close rival that set a pattern of resort development copied along much of the northern New England coast. Three reasons account for the rise of the North American pleasure periphery during the Gilded Age. The rapid rise of industrial capitalism created a vastly expanded affluent elite that increasingly saw itself as a class, even a caste, and sought to insulate itself from the rest of American society. Practical concerns about health and social problems of the inner city, combined with the ideological influence of the romantic movement and its celebration of nature, encouraged the elite to move to the country (Fishman 1987; Schmitt 1990). Rapid improvements in transportation technology, especially the railroad and the steamboat, allowed the increasing differentiation and specialization of space. Though remaining an intensely urban class, the elite created a series of interconnecting social spaces in the countryside: suburban estates, country clubs, prep schools, college campuses, and, at the farthest remove, seasonal resorts (Zelinsky 1980; Wyckoff 1990). Class segregation went hand in hand with spatial exclusion. The penetration of the elite into the remote parts of the continent in search of an authentic experience amid nature led to the rise of an extensive pleasure periphery. Along the east coast, this zone stretched discontinuously from Cape May on the Jersey shore through the Hamptons on Long Island, Narragansett Bay and Cape Cod, along the Maine coast to Campobello and St. Andrews-by-the-Sea and around to Murray Bay. The heat and humidity of eastern summers made the northern New England coast especially attractive. With its cold currents offshore and breezes onshore providing cool summer weather and its rugged scenery satisfying the romantic desire for nature, the area was considered the perfect physical setting for summer vacations. Moreover, the coast was relatively undeveloped, and the local population was old-stock Yankee. A hard, bold Northern (Schauffler 1911) combined with racial purity proved irresistible to an elite fleeing the city and its immigrant population. Bar Harbor is situated on the eastern side of Mount Desert Island overlooking island-studded Frenchman Bay and backing onto the granite massif of Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the American eastern seaboard. In 1840 Bar Harbor was a small community of a few hundred residents, dependent on fishing, farming, lumbering, and shipbuilding. Artists of the Hudson River school discovered the island in the mid-1840s, and landscape paintings of Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island were soon appearing in the fashionable galleries of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (Wilmerding 1988, 1991). Accessible only by trading schooners and a weekly coastal steamer in the 1850s and even more difficult to reach during the Civil War, the island attracted only a few rusticators. After the war, steamer connections improved, and increasing numbers of summer visitors came to the island. By 1885, there was a railroad terminus at Mount Desert Ferry; within a few years, the all-Pullman Bar Harbor Express provided overnight service from Boston and New York to the ferry, and the service was later extended to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington (Buettell 1967). A sparsely settled corner of Maine was then within easy reach of some of the most populous cities on the continent. …

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