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00:00by 1900 a small village on a main island held some of the most concentrated private wealth per acre
00:06found anywhere in the united states more than 200 summer residences stood along its shore
00:13built by families named rockefeller vanderbilt astor pulitzer and morgan
00:20one estate was expanded in 1927 to 80 rooms another was a stone castle with a tower its
00:26owners named the tower of silence the village itself held only a few thousand year-round
00:32residents none of whom owned property on the shorefront the summer people called millionaires
00:37row today that same shorefront is lined with motels in october 1947 within a single week 67 of its 222
00:49summer cottages were destroyed five hotels were destroyed 170 year-round houses were destroyed
00:5723 million dollars in property in the currency of 1947 burned in a matter of days this is the story
01:05of how a private paradise built by america's richest families collapsed in a single autumn
01:10and why the families who could have rebuilt it chose not to chapter one a mountain out of the sea
01:20mount desert island sits off the coast of maine and along the entire length of the american atlantic
01:26seaboard it does something no other land mass does its highest point a granite dome rising to over 1500
01:34feet climbs directly out of the ocean with no foothills to soften the ascent and no gradual plane
01:41standing between summit and shore rock meets water and then rock simply keeps going up samuel de champlain sailed past
01:50it in 1604 ran his ship aground on a ledge nearby and named the place isle des mont desert the
01:58island of
01:59bare mountains for the granite summit scraped clean of trees by wind and altitude for 236 years afterward that
02:10was the extent of its fame a navigational hazard with an evocative french name fished by a scattering of
02:17families ignored by everyone with money what changed it was paint not commerce in the 1840s and 1850s the
02:27hudson river school painters thomas cole first frederick edwin church after him began traveling north to the
02:35island and returning with canvases of its cliffs and light those canvases hung in galleries in new york and
02:43boston where they were seen by exactly the audience capable of acting on what they saw men who had
02:50made fortunes in shipping banking and manufacturing and who now had the leisure and the means to go
02:57looking for the landscapes hanging on their walls they started making the trip themselves by steamer
03:03and then by rail and they gave themselves a name before anyone else could give it to them
03:10they called themselves rusticators a word that flattered its own modesty nothing about what
03:16followed would stay modest for long the village they were arriving in was called eden founded in 1796
03:24as a fishing settlement and not renamed bar harbor until 1918. it had no accommodations built for the
03:32purpose of receiving strangers in 1855 an innkeeper named tobias roberts corrected that opening the
03:40agamont house on the shorefront the island's first hotel built for an audience that did not yet fully
03:48exist but was already by then on its way it existed within a decade by 1868 the rusticators were no
03:57longer content to rent rooms by the week a boston merchant named alpheus hardy built birch point that
04:04year the island's first private summer residence and in doing so he did not simply build a house
04:11he established a precedent a demonstration that a man of sufficient means could own his own piece of
04:17this granite coastline rather than borrow it from an innkeeper and the demonstration was followed it was
04:24followed relentlessly through the 1870s and into the 1880s construction moved along the shore at a pace
04:33the village had never seen and would never fully absorb cottage after cottage rising where fishing
04:40shacks and spruce woods had been the word survived the transition the buildings did not what went up were
04:49not cottages in any sense the word had previously meant they were houses of 20 rooms then 40 then 80
04:56built of shingle and stone by architects trained in boston and new york and the modest word was kept on
05:04purpose a deliberate almost private joke among people who did not need to advertise what they had built
05:11by 1880 the village that had held no hotel 25 years earlier held 30 of them filled every summer with
05:19a
05:19clientele the hotels themselves could no longer contain that clientele was about to stop renting altogether
05:27the families arriving in the 1880s were not merchants and professionals anymore they came from wall street
05:34from standard oil from railroads and steel and they were about to give a stretch of shorefront just west
05:40of the village a name that would outlast every hotel tobias roberts had ever imagined chapter 2
05:49the address that replaced newport in 1886 the town cut a street along the harbor's western edge and called
05:57it without ceremony west street it ran barely half a mile hugging the water at frenchman bay and within a
06:04season the lots that fronted it were selling for more than any ground in the village had ever brought
06:10merchants and sea captains had built inland on higher ground out of habit and modesty the new buyers
06:18wanted the shoreline itself unbroken so that a man could stand on his own lawn and watch the tide come
06:25in without another roof between him and the horizon the name millionaires row was not official
06:33it did not need to be george sullivan bodoin arrived at bar harbor already carrying two inheritances
06:41he had not earned and one he had he was a great grandson of alexander hamilton and he was a
06:48partner
06:48in the banking house of jp morgan a position that made his signature worth more than most men's entire estates
06:55in 1902 he commissioned a cottage on west street from andrews jacques and rantoul the boston firm that
07:03had already built for half of state street he did not haggle over the design he had not haggled over
07:09much
07:10in thirty years george vanderbilt bought the old ogden property on the same stretch of shore and stripped
07:17it of its name ogden had been a family a modest claim to the harbor going back decades vanderbilt
07:25renamed the estate point dacadie and the new name stuck the way money sticks quietly permanently without
07:35a vote after bodoin and vanderbilt came the rest and they came the way weather comes one front behind
07:43another the asters came carrying a name older than most of the fortunes now arriving beside it
07:50the fords followed their name newer than any of them built in a single generation out of steel
07:56and assembly line behind them came the pulitzers bringing a newspaper empire's worth of opinions
08:03about who else belonged on that street by the last years of the 1880s editors along the eastern seaboard
08:10had started calling bar harbor the one resort colony that could stand beside newport without apology
08:17not its equal in ballroom marble not yet but its only rival in the roster of names willing to spend
08:24a summer there they kept calling their houses cottages the word had described modest wooden buildings
08:31when tobias roberts was renting rooms to harvard professors and it went on describing houses of twenty
08:37and thirty and forty rooms after the professor stopped coming nobody on west street corrected the usage
08:44it was in its way the most expensive word in maine a term of understatement wielded by people who
08:51understated nothing else about their lives and it would outlive most of the buildings it was built to
08:56describe by the time edward t stoatsbury a philadelphia banker with a taste for scale that even his neighbors
09:03found difficult to match took possession of a shingled cottage called wingwood house on that same shore west
09:10street had stopped being a real estate experiment and become a fact of american geography what stoatsbury
09:17would eventually do to that house the wings the room count the year it stopped resembling a cottage in
09:23anything but name belonged to a later decade for now the house stood as built one more roof line
09:30among the new ones rising along the water somewhere in a bar harbor office a young architect named fred savage
09:37was already drafting the plans that would turn this stretch of shore from wealthy into unforgettable
09:45chapter three the cottages become castles fred savage had grown up on mount desert island watching
09:52schooners unload lumber for other men's summers and by the 1890s he was the architect those summers ran
09:58through he did not train in boston or study under the masters who signed the grandest commissions along the
10:04eastern seaboard he learned the coastline itself the granite ledges and the fog patterns and the
10:11particular way northern light fell across a shingled gable at five in the afternoon he would eventually put
10:18his name on dozens of cottages scattered across the island each one a negotiation between a client's ambition
10:25and the rock underneath it reverie cove raised in 1895 in a colonial revival that borrowed its columns
10:34and symmetry from an older calmer america was one answer to that negotiation it would not be the largest
10:43house savage built and it would not be the last what came next was not really building anymore it was
10:51accumulation stotesbury's wingwood house modest by comparison when it was first raised entered the 1920s as one cottage among
11:00many and left the decade as something closer to an institution by 1927 it held 80 rooms including a 30
11:08room wing built for
11:10no purpose but housing the staff required to run the other 50. 56 electric wall heaters were wired into walls
11:19that had never
11:20needed them five separate hot air furnace systems worked in parallel beneath floors no single
11:26family could fill and 26 marble fireplaces carved in europe and shipped across an ocean warmed rooms that
11:35stood empty most of the year wings for the family wings for the guests wings in the end for the
11:42staff whose
11:43sole task was maintaining wings chatwold answered wingwood house with a different argument where
11:51stoatsbury built horizontally in additions and annexes the chatwold cottage built upward in stone until it
11:58resembled less a summer residence than a fortification against a siege that never came
12:04its towers rose over the tree line in a way no shingled roof line could and the tallest of them
12:11earned a name
12:11of its own the tower of silence a phrase visitors used without quite explaining what the silence was for
12:19or from what the tower was meant to guard a castle on a coastline built for cottages said something about
12:27the colony that no ledger of room counts could it said the imitation of old world permanence had
12:34become the point all of it required somewhere to be seen the bar harbor club supplied that stage
12:41a clubhouse where tennis courts and a saltwater pool and a dining room did the ordinary work of any resort
12:48association except that the membership rolls read like a registry of american fortune itself rockefeller
12:55sat beside pulitzer on those lists banking beside publishing one generation's railroad money beside
13:01another's newsprint money all of it filed alphabetically as though proximity on a page could make old money
13:09and new money indistinguishable for a few hours each evening it nearly did by the late 1920s bar harbor
13:19had built itself past the point of return past the boarding houses of the 1870s past the first shingled
13:27experiments of stoatsbury's neighbors into a landscape of towers and marble and 56 heaters warming rooms no
13:35one occupied past september somewhere down west street past the last of savages gambrel roofs the club's
13:43lit windows would still be burning after most of the cottages had gone dark for the night
13:47a different kind of visitor was already walking that same shoreline with a different question in mind
13:53not what the island's summer people had built but what the island itself might need protecting from
13:59chapter four the man who bought the view picture west street on an august evening in the 1900s
14:07the cottages stand lit window after window their reception rooms bright with electric light that had
14:13reached the island only a few summers before gas lamps and open flame already a memory for the families
14:19who could afford to forget them beyond the lawns the harbor holds its own constellation schooner yachts
14:26riding at anchor lanterns strung along their rails brass fittings catching what light spills from the shore
14:34carriages wait at the curbs drivers idle in the dark beside them and behind the houses a second population
14:42moves without being seen maids carrying trays up back stairs coachmen walking horses to cool them kitchen
14:50boys hauling ice from the sheds the music from one drawing room reaches halfway down the block before it
14:57meets the music from the next and the two blur into something neither host intended somewhere in that noise
15:04and light a rocky wooded interior of the island sits entirely dark unlit and unclaimed by anyone's ledger
15:13waiting to be logged subdivided or ignored whichever came first it was that darkness not the light that
15:21occupied george b door born into a boston family whose fortune had already been made before he was old
15:28enough to add to it door had spent his early decades as a gentleman horticulturist tending gardens cultivating
15:36rare plants living the unhurried life available to a man who never needed to work for money
15:43in 1901 at an age when most of his class had settled into permanent leisure he began doing something almost
15:49no one else on the island was doing buying land not to build on it but to leave it alone
15:56he bought parcels threatened by timber sales accepted donations from owners persuaded to give rather
16:03than sell and spent his own fortune down protecting acreage that produced no income and never would
16:10petitioning and organizing in whatever hours were left over door did not work alone he found in charles w
16:18elliott the president of harvard and a summer resident himself a partner who understood how to move an idea
16:25through institutions he found in john d rockefeller jr a partner who understood how to move money
16:32rockefeller did not simply write checks he personally financed and helped design 52 miles
16:38of carriage roads across the island's interior graded and stone bridged for horse-drawn travel
16:45built on the explicit condition that no automobile would ever be permitted to use them
16:51where the cottages down west street measured their worth in marble and heating capacity
16:56this land trust measured itself in acres kept empty by 1916 doran elliott's land company had transferred
17:04more than 6 000 acres to the federal government first designated a national monument then in 1919
17:11established outright as lafayette national park the first national park east of the mississippi river
17:18carved not from wilderness the government already controlled but from land one private citizen had
17:25spent 15 years quietly assembling parcel by parcel door who had never built a cottage or hosted a ball on
17:33west street became the park's first superintendent a title that suited a man who had spent his fortune
17:40buying the one thing on the island not for sale to anyone else
17:44in 1929 the park took the name it still carries acadia national park a designation meant to outlast
17:53any single donor's memory that same year a different kind of transaction was working its way through the
17:59ledgers of the men who had built the cottages doors land now framed chapter five a fortune erased
18:07that transaction when it closed was smaller than what had come before it a lot sold a staff reduced
18:15an insurance policy allowed to lapse it was not the only one 16 years earlier in 1913 the ratification of
18:24the 16th amendment had introduced the federal income tax a mechanism that reached for the first time
18:31directly into the fortunes that had built west street's 200 cottages the tax began modestly it did not stay
18:39modest by the time the stock market collapsed in october 1929 the households that had once treated their
18:46summer expenditures as beneath calculation were doing arithmetic they had never needed before the erosion did
18:52not announce itself it moved through the household ledgers the way water moves through limestone unseen until
19:00the structure above it gives way families that had employed a hundred servants across kitchen stable
19:06and garden began quietly to close wings and a guest wing shuttered for one season became a guest wing
19:13shuttered permanently then a cottage itself 30 rooms built for a summer that no longer required 30 rooms
19:22went dark for good its furniture under sheets its staff let go with references and where the
19:29family could still manage it a final month's wages none of it was announced the colony's social
19:36calendar continued to function on its surface the same regattas the same receptions the same names
19:43printed in the same newspapers underneath the ledgers told a different story the paradox sharpened in 1930
19:51when the village of eden renamed bar harbor at the turn of the century
19:56recorded its highest population in its history 4 486 residents the peak of a curve that had risen
20:06steadily since the first cottages went up the number arrived precisely when the economic foundation beneath
20:13it had already begun to crack a village grows on the wages of building serving and maintaining a colony of
20:22fortunes it does not immediately register when those fortunes stop expanding only when they stop altogether
20:30in 1930 bar harbor was by the census at its fullest it was also by the ledgers few residents could
20:37see already
20:39hollowing the next 16 years passed with the appearance of continuity and the fact of subtraction
20:46cottages changed hands or did not change hands and simply closed their owners paying taxes on structures
20:53they no longer opened some were sold for a fraction of their construction costs to buyers who wanted the
21:00land and not the building others sat empty through winter after winter heated just enough to keep the pipes
21:08from bursting staffed by a caretaker where a hundred servants had once worked the colony grew smaller in
21:15substance while its address remained the same in 1946 the pattern reached chatwold the stone castle with
21:23its tower of silence was demolished timber stone facing and a turret built to shut out sound reduced to a
21:31cleared lot on a hillside that had once held one of the colony's most singular houses it was among the
21:38first
21:38of the great cottages to go a demolition carried out deliberately on the owners terms at a moment of
21:44their choosing no fire took it no accident forced the decision it came down because the fortune that had built
21:52it
21:52could no longer justify keeping it standing and because there was by then a growing list of cottages
21:59meeting the same end by the same quiet calculation chatwold's demolition closed out 1946
22:08what came for the rest of the colony would not wait for anyone's calculation and would not come quietly
22:15it was one year away chapter six smoke over the barons at four o'clock on the afternoon of october
22:2417th 1947
22:27a woman living near the edge of what was becoming acadia national park noticed smoke rising from a cranberry bog
22:34on the boundary of her property and telephoned it in no one would ever settle what had started it
22:42the two theories that circulated afterward a cigarette dropped by a cranberry picker and left to smolder in
22:50the peat or a town dump left to burn unattended for too long were never confirmed and the bog itself
22:58offered no evidence either way it simply smoked thin and gray above ground that had gone weeks without
23:05meaningful rain drought conditions that had settled over the whole of mount desert island that autumn
23:12without anyone treating them as an emergency by the time a crew reached the site the fire had already
23:19worked its way past the standing water of the bog and into the dry duff of the barrens beyond it
23:25for three days it behaved like a fire that intended to be forgotten men cut lines around its edges
23:33watched the sky and by the third day had reason to think the matter closed 169 acres burned the perimeter
23:42holding the smoke thinning rather than thickening bar harbour's hotels stood shuttered for the season
23:49its cottages what remained of them after the demolitions of the previous winter sat empty behind hedges
23:57nobody was trimming the fire in those first three days was a local matter the kind of story that made
24:03the inside pages of the county paper and nothing more a nuisance for the men holding shovels and
24:08rakes along its edge rather than a threat to anything the town still valued enough to protect
24:14the wind changed that arithmetic on october 21st it came out of the northwest with a force the fire lines
24:21had not been built to withstand carrying sparks well ahead of the flame front and dropping them into timber
24:27that had been drying since midsummer what had been 169 acres became more than 2 000 before the day was
24:35finished
24:37the fire was no longer a contained problem creeping along a bog's edge it was moving through standing
24:43forest at a pace the crews could not match jumping the brakes they had spent three days digging as though
24:50the brakes were not there at all men who had gone home the previous evening believing the worst was behind
24:56them
24:56returned to find the worst had not yet introduced itself there was no dramatic collapse to mark the change
25:04no single hour that crews could point to afterward as the moment it got away from them
25:09it was simply a gap that widened all day the distance between where the fire had been that morning
25:15and where it stood by dust growing faster than any line could close it faster than trucks could be routed
25:23faster than men could be told where to stand by nightfall on the twenty first more than two thousand
25:29acres had burned and the fire showed no inclination toward the kind of exhaustion that had made it seem
25:35finished three days earlier somewhere beyond the smoke the wind was still blowing chapter seven the wind that spared
25:43the shops by the morning of october 23rd the fire no longer behaved like something that could be reasoned
25:51with gusts reached 65 miles an hour and the flames covered five to six miles in a single day as
25:59much
25:59ground as they had taken in the two days before combined roads out of bar harbor closed one after
26:05another until the town found itself cut off on every side fire standing where the highways used to run
26:11men who had been planning escape routes since the 17th now watched those routes disappear on the map in
26:17front of them there was no longer a direction that led safely away from the smoke fishermen from winter
26:23harbor gouldsboro and lemoyne brought their boats in against the wharves and took people off by water
26:29four hundred of them loaded in whatever order they arrived the harbor doing the work the roads no longer
26:35could others gambled on the land routes while gaps still existed cars strung into caravans and driven
26:42fast between walls of fire that had not yet closed the gap between them reaching ellsworth in the hours
26:49before that gap sealed shut both escapes worked because they were attempted at the last possible moment
26:56and not before a day earlier the boats would have gone out with the town still calm enough to wait
27:02a day later there would have been no water route left to use soldiers sailors airmen from dow air force
27:10base and the national guard unit out of augusta arrived to reinforce a defense that had run out of local
27:17numbers they took up positions alongside the town's own firefighters and forestry students sent down from
27:23the university of maine forming a line around the business district with the specific intention of holding
27:28it above the harbor the cottages continued to fall to the fire regardless it was a defense drawn narrowly
27:34around a few blocks of shops and hotels rather than the town as a whole because narrow was what the
27:40remaining manpower allowed then the wind turned it was the same kind of shift that had ended the fire's
27:47quiet spell on the 17th this time working the other way and it moved the flames off the business
27:54district before the line committed to holding it was tested past its limit the shops and hotels of
28:00downtown bar harbor survived the day the fire had been aimed at them above the town the summer cottages
28:06did not have the same fortune and neither did the grand hotels that had defined the island's summer
28:11season for 60 years and neither did the year-round houses of people who had never owned a cottage at
28:17all
28:18three different kinds of buildings three different kinds of loss burning on the same afternoon
28:24for the same reason five residents died as a direct result of the fire two were killed in a single
28:30car crash driving in conditions no one would have chosen to drive in two more died of heart attacks
28:36brought on by the strain of the days just passed the fire did not distinguish between these deaths and
28:41the buildings it took the count simply grew until the wind stopped feeding it when it was finished the fire
28:48had
28:49burned 17 188 acres roughly half of that total inside the boundaries of acadia national park of the
28:57islands 222 summer cottages 67 were gone five of the great hotels that had made bar harbor a name beyond
29:05maine were gone with them so were 170 houses belonging to people who lived there in every season not just
29:12the
29:12fashionable one the damage came to approximately 23 million dollars counted in the dollars of 1947
29:20the fire that had started as a brush blaze on a dry october afternoon had by the time the wind
29:26finally
29:26let it go redrawn the outline of an island that summer visitors had spent 60 years building into something
29:34they called permanent the smoke would clear within days what replaced bar harbor's cottage colony would take
29:42considerably longer to determine and not everyone who had built there intended to build again
29:48chapter eight the inventory of what remains the rebuilding split cleanly along a line that had
29:57already been forming for 20 years year-round residents returned to their lots within a season or two
30:03framing new houses on old foundations because the town was where they worked and where their children went to
30:10school the summer families did not a house that stood empty 11 months of the year had been a burden
30:18even before the fire took it and the fire gave those families a reason they could state plainly
30:24instead of one they had been quietly weighing since the stock crashed the income tax had already made
30:32the old arrangement expensive to sustain the depression had already made it difficult to justify
30:38estates on millionaires row had stood closed for entire summers through the 1930s their owners unwilling to
30:45open them and unable to staff them at the scale a cottage of that size required the fire did not
30:52end
30:52an era so much as complete a sentence that taxation and economic collapse had already begun writing what
30:59burned in october 1947 had in a practical sense been dying since 1929 millionaires row itself did not
31:09disappear as a place only as an institution where a single continuous wall of private cottages had once
31:16faced the harbor motels and small hotels rose in its place over the following decade built for a different
31:23kind of visitor the automobile tourist who stopped in bar harbor for a night on the way to somewhere else
31:30replaced the financier who had wintered on fifth avenue and summered here for the entire season
31:37the address stayed the same the clientele did not the forest told its own version of the same story
31:45the mature spruce and fir that had shaded the island for a century burned with the cottages and in its
31:51place came birch aspen and oak trees that grow fast and cleared ground and do not require the century the
31:59conifers had needed to reach their height every october now hundreds of thousands of visitors arrive
32:06to see the red and gold that covers acadia's hillsides a display that exists in its present form
32:13because the fire cleared the ground for the trees that produce it the forest the fire destroyed would
32:22not have burned this color bar harbor today counts roughly 5244 residents a figure higher than the town
32:32ever reached at the height of the gilded age the number alone would suggest recovery even growth it
32:40describes a different town the 19th century version was a closed summer address its population of
32:46cottagers counted in the low hundreds and its gates effectively private the current version is a gateway
32:53the point of entry for a national park that draws millions of visitors a year open to anyone who
32:59can afford a room rather than reserved for anyone who could afford to build one
33:05a handful of the great cottages survived the fire outright and a few of those still stand under new
33:11purposes wingwood house and reverie cove operate today as a hotel and a museum their rooms and grounds
33:17available to whoever pays the rate posted at the desk neither was designed for that use both now serve it
33:24without apparent difficulty which says something about how little the architecture cared in the end who was
33:31allowed inside rockefeller's fifty two miles of carriage roads still wind through the second growth
33:38forest above the harbor gravel surfaces maintained for a form of travel that had already gone out of
33:44fashion by the time the roads were finished horses and carriages once moved along them past cottages
33:50whose owners had specifically excluded automobiles from their private world the roads outlasted that
33:57exclusion the automobiles and most of the cottages somewhere along one of them a granite foundation sits
34:06low in a stand of young birch nothing marks whose house it was moss has taken the north facing stones
34:14and morning light comes through the birch canopy thin and white rather than the deep green shade the old
34:20spruce forest would have thrown the foundation was built to hold up a cottage designed to last for
34:27generations of a single family it now holds up nothing in a grove of trees that would not exist if
34:34that
34:35the cottage had not burned granite remains wood does not
34:40you
34:40you
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