Ages ago the area that is now the Town of Bar Harbor was the year round home of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot.
Eventually, it was incorporated as the Town of Eden, back in 1796. Samuel Adams signed the incorporation documents. We don’t know if there was beer involved.
The town’s name change officially happened in March 1918 according to the Bar Harbor Historical Society and old newspaper accounts.
”Bar Harbor’s fascinating history as a summer resort began long before Champlain’s visit in 1604. Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes inhabited the island year-round. In the 1850’s, painters such as Frederic E. Church, Thomas Cole, Fitz Hugh Lane, William Hart, and Thomas Birch popularized the area through their exhibits of the island’s beautiful mountains and seascapes. The first Hotel on the island was built in Bar Harbor by Tobias Roberts, the Agamont House in 1855. Alpheus Hardy was the first summer resident to build a ‘cottage’ called Birch Point in 1868. More and more hotels and cottages were built as ‘rusticators; as summer visitors and residents were called, came to the island by train and the Mount Desert Ferry to dock at Bar Harbor,” the Bar Harbor Historical Society’s website states.
It continues, ”The land boom continued until the 1880s when such notables as Joseph Pulitzer, William Proctor, Mary Cadwalader Jones, Frederick Vanderbilt, George Vanderbilt, and Evelyn Walsh McLean came and built magnificent ‘cottages.’ Photographs of these and other summer ‘cottages’ are on display in the museum.
”It was at this time that Boston native George B. Dorr worked tirelessly with Charles W. Eliot and later with John D. Rockefeller Jr. to bring about the National Park, which was organized in 1916 as Sieur de Monts monument. The name was changed in 1919 to Lafayette National Park and in 1929 to Acadia National Park. George B. Dorr was the first Superintendent of the Park. A selection of Dorr’s letters and articles are on display in the museum.
