Customer Reviews

Bar Harbor's Gilded Century: Opulence to Ashes

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Over 250 historic photos, some never before published, follow a light documentary of Bar Harbor from the 1850s, when it was established as a farming and fishing community, to modern times when mansions and resorts made it famous. Any familiar with the region will find this a lovely pictorial history blending local color with trivia and offering a carefully researched, historically accurate story.

Bar Harbor's Gilded Century, Opulence to Ashes, 1850-1950, Lydia Vandenbergh; Down East (2009)


The book's initial attraction was to be able to take home a historical account of the great Maine forest fires of 1947, which, unchecked, burned down nearly half of the residences of Bar Harbor. The vivid oral account of this traumatic event - told to me by an elegant saleslady who was a child at the time of the fires - clinched the sale.

But BGC sadly disappoints. "A lively chronicle of the town," despite its perfect presentation (legible, articulate, & knowledgeable), it is not. Why?

Those wealthy enough to vacation there were generally witless business boobs without depth or personality. The accounts of the lives of the earliest island settlers, & the succeeding generations who morphed into hoteliers, are surprisingly pedestrian. This is what a competent & dedicated author & editor largely had to work with, judging by their results. And adding to the book's overall static immobility are the numerous photographs of empty hotels or mansions. Few if any of them feature their owners or guests - human beings that lend an indispensable vitality.

Sealing the disappointment was a probable condition of publication: economy. All the photographs are dull black-&-white reproductions (surely, some of them taken in the last third of this "gilded century" had to have been color photographs). Vitality again is visually absent. And what does not possess vitality cannot be "lively."

One fact intrigued me. The earliest hotels on the island had mattresses stuffed with old, dried corn cobs. My own hotel bed, judging by the degree of comfort it afforded (zero), is probably the last mattress on the island with the deceased vegetarian contents that drove the pioneer Bar Harbor hotel guests nuts, in 1840!