Mount Desert — Uncover the Patrons' Secrets

Your quest begins at Bar Harbor's Village Green, established in 1808 as the town's central public park. This community gathering place, located at the intersection of Main Street and Mount Desert Street, covers approximately 1 acre in the heart of downtown. It is here that the Bar Harbor Music Festival attracts thousands of visitors annually since 1961, perpetuating the spirit of collaboration and exchange that marked Bar Harbor's golden age. Here you will unearth the first clues left by the Rockefeller family, of which John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a great benefactor to the region, actively contributing to the creation of the Acadia National Park gateway.

Continue to the Bar Harbor Town Pier, built in 1905 as a commercial wharf for passenger steamships connecting to Boston and New York. At 400 feet long, it now accommodates over 200 cruise ship visits per year, with a capacity for up to 4,000 daily passengers in peak season according to 2023 Bar Harbor Port Authority records. This historic landing point is a testament to Bar Harbor's prosperity and its key role in Maine tourism. Here you will discover fragments of information about philanthropists who invested in local infrastructure, figures like Charles W. Eliot who also contributed to land preservation.

Walk along the Shore Path, a 1.1-mile pedestrian trail laid out in 1881 by the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association to provide scenic waterfront access. This path, lined with historic mansions and featuring granite curbing and iron lampposts installed in the 1880s, is a preserved element of the National Register of Historic Places. It is along this route that you will find connections to St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, consecrated in 1886. Built from native granite in Richardsonian Romanesque style, it features 32 stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany installed between 1887 and 1929, one of the few structures to survive the 1947 Great Fire that destroyed most of the Gilded Age mansions in the district.

Your itinerary will then lead you to the ruins of the Reef Point Estate Gardens. Developed between 1922 and 1927 by Mary Cadwalader Jones and her daughter Ruth P. de C. Brown, philanthropists from the Rockefeller circle, these 3-acre gardens were designed by Beatrix Farrand and housed over 50 varieties of rhododendrons. Although now in ruins near Shore Path, these remnants, donated to the Maine Sea Coast Mission in 1958, are visible elements of the historic landscape and the heritage of the Maine Historic District. They reveal the vision of these patrons for the beauty and conservation of Mount Desert Island, a central aspect of your investigation.

The trail concludes at the Abbe Museum, founded in 1927 by Mary Cabot Wheelwright to showcase Wabanaki Native American artifacts, with its current building opening in 2009 at 26 Mount Desert Street. With 18,000 sq ft of exhibition space, it houses over 60,000 artifacts dating back 12,000 years, including rare birchbark items from Mount Desert Island. This site, near Village Green, represents the confluence of cultures and preservation efforts in Bar Harbor. By completing this thematic circuit, you will have not only uncovered the secrets of Bar Harbor's patrons but also discovered the many facets of its history and heritage, an essential interactive tour to understand the development of this Maine town.