hebacco C The Magazine of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society

HARBORING RELIGION: MISSIONARIES, CONVERTS, AND SOJOURNERS Volume XX 2019 MOUNT DESERT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Executive Director Timothy F. Garrity

Board of Directors William Horner, M.D., President Raney Bench, Vice President Rick Wheeler, Secretary P. Hamilton Clark, Treasurer Ralph Stanley, President Emeritus Marion Stanley, Honorary Member

Timothy Bannon Dru Colbert Susan Edson Elise Frank Julia Gray Kathryn MacLeod Tova Mellen Nicole Ouellette Diana Paine Michael Pancoe Benjamin Pierce Genie Thorndike Anne Walmsley John Wilson Jonathan Winthrop

Administrative Coordinator Leah Lucey

Eliot Fellow Eloise Schultz

Visiting History Scholars Brittany Goetting Darcy Stevens

Cover: "Pine Boughs," 1969, Gabriel Loire, France. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor. Chebacco The Magazine of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society

Volume X X HARBORING RELIGION: MISSIONARIES, CONVERTS, AND SOJOURNERS

2019 Mount Desert, Maine Chebacco Editorial Team

Guest Editors Copy Editor R. Marie Griffith Eloise Schultz Leigh Eric Schmidt Proof Reader Editor Lynne Birlem Tim Garrity Production Manager Artist in Residence Leah Lucey Jennifer Steen Booher

Designer Rebecca Hope Woods

© 2019 by Mount Desert Island Historical Society All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce in whole or in part, in any form, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in a review.

Please address all inquiries to: Mount Desert Island Historical Society PO Box 653 Mount Desert, ME 04660 [email protected] www.mdihistory.org

Printed in Newcastle, ME by Lincoln County Publishing Co. Inc. This publication is made possible by the generous support of Peter and Sofia Blanchard George and Nancy Putnam Members of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society and The participating organizations of the History Trust, who are working to create a collective digital archive and hand down the region's historical collections intact, cataloged, digitized, and fully accessible to future generations. The History Trust participants are the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association, College of the Atlantic, Great Harbor Maritime Museum, Great Cranberry Island Historical Society, Islesford Historical Society, Jesup Memorial Library, Maine Seacoast Mission, Mount Desert Island Historical Society, Seal Cove Auto Museum, Southwest Harbor Historical Society, and Tremont Historical Society

We would also like to acknowledge the Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Archive and the assistance of Charlotte Morrill and George Soules in obtaining many of the historical photographs that illustrate this issue. Detail of south wall window, ca. 1916, artist unknown. St. Edward's Convent, Bar Harbor (currently the Bar Harbor Historical Society) Contents

7 Introduction 77 Elegy at Baker Island: R. Marie Griffith and Leigh Eric Schmidt Charles W. Eliot's Maritime Pastoral David A. Hollinger 17 Stained Glass Windows of Mount Desert Island 87 George Hefflon's Silent Mission Jennifer Steen Booher Tim Garrity 21 Collisions of Faith on New England's 97 From Harvard's Semitic Museum "Pagan Skirts": Protestants, Catholics, to Mount Desert Island and Back and Religious Encounter in Early Maine Mikeal C. Parsons Laura M. Chmielewski 109 The Jewish Presence, 35 "Ter-Centenary": Inventing Tradition or Absence Thereof … for Maine's Catholics, 1913 Judith S. Goldstein James M. O'Toole 121 The Episcopal Church 45 Congregationalists on Mount Comes to Gott's Island Desert Island, Maine Craig D. Townsend Margaret Bendroth 131 Acadia National Park: 55 "He Has Abundantly Poured out His Holy A Soul and Spirit Stretching Place Spirit in Eden and Mount Desert": The Baptist Connection on Thomas S. Bremer Mount Desert Island, 1790–1840 143 "Moment After Moment Brittany Goetting After Moment": Cultivating a Zen Presence on Mount Desert Island 67 The William Foy Story Brook Wilensky-Lanford Mark Silk

5 "Martha and Mary," 1904, Reynolds, Francis & Rohnstock, Boston. Church of Our Father, Hulls Cove

6 Introduction

By R. Marie Griffith and Leigh E. Schmidt

At the Baptist Church in Seal Cove in in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 2016, a "missionary evangelist" from Texas A reputation for irreligion can obscure a lot had posted a card on a signboard outside of things, not least the opposing reactions that the meetinghouse detailing some "FACTS the ostensible absence of religious involvement ABOUT MAINE" that made apparent generates. As in the case of the missionary evangelist why he considered his transplanted from Texas, the perceived prevalence of religious ministry to be both so crucial and so indifference regularly becomes a powerful motivation challenging: "The least religious State in to redouble efforts to awaken those who slumber. In the nation … 48th in concern for God and one Protestant narrative after another in American the Bible." Recent survey data, from both religious history, the lack of interest in religion serves Pew and Gallup, certainly gives credence as the prologue to revival, a primary incitement to to the evangelist's estimates of the state's pursue sundry projects of redemption, conversion, irreligion. While Vermont usually comes and moral reform. Hence, the religious life of a place out on top as the state where religion is often made all the more varied and strenuous figures least prominently in people's through the very specter of irreligion. That dynamic lives, Maine certainly holds its own has been on display in much of Maine's religious along with New Hampshire in helping to history, including on the island. To take one example: mark northern New England as the least at a meeting of the Mount Desert Temperance religious region in the country. About half Society in 1832, a Baptist preacher bemoaned the the people in the state seldom or never rum-soaked infidelity that he saw all around him attend a religious service; most Mainers in coastal Maine. "Everything that floats upon the rarely bother to read scripture; and fewer sea," he concluded, was a perfect school for "making still join a Bible study or prayer group. drunkards," but that only meant that "the cold Those without any religious affiliation at water folks" needed to work all the harder for the all now constitute a larger block (31%) righteousness of their cause.2 So it goes: missionaries than those who still identify with one and converts have recurrently tried to remake the of the two next largest groups, mainline island's social and moral terrain in Christian terms, Protestants (21%) and Roman Catholics while various other inhabitants and sojourners have (21%). For enterprising evangelists in met those projects with indifference, resistance, or the twenty-first century, Maine can recalibration. From Wabanakis negotiating their still look like a forbidding missionary way between French Jesuits and English Protestants field — much as it did to Catholics and to Jews struggling against the exclusiveness of Protestants assessing the reaches of the summering Protestants or spiritual seekers hallowing North American colonial landscape Acadia's landscape on New Age terms, Christian

7 endeavors have always been only part of the story. fame in these evangelical circles was that Equally partial, though, has been any story about the celebrated Methodist Bishop David religion's marginality in the region's past and present. Wasgatt Clark had come of age among a Maine was a missionary and frontier borderland small knot of Methodists on Beech Hill through the eighteenth century. A conflict-ridden in the 1820s. By the middle decades of the contact zone of British and French empires, the region nineteenth century, the island had been was only slowly incorporated into New England's woven into a grand Protestant history orbit as the eastern fringe of the Massachusetts of the advancing work of redemption.3 Bay Colony. The arc of that colonial history shaped After the Civil War Congregationalists, the early religious history of the region: the initial Baptists, and Methodists were still jostling of Wabanakis, French Catholics, and plentiful on the island, but another English Protestants gave way, officially at least, to a note had crept into news coverage, even Congregational establishment, an inheritance of the in the religious periodicals formerly so standing order in Massachusetts. In the District of enamored of accounts of revival meetings. Maine, though, the Congregational way never had A column from August 1869 in the the same authority as it did in Boston or New Haven. Christian Mirror, a Congregationalist Certainly, Congregationalists had a significant head newspaper in Portland, contained a single start on other church groups in the region (thirty- line of news about the island: "About eight of fifty-four churches in Maine in 1780 were 250 pleasure tourists landed at Mount Congregationalist; the Quakers were second with six Desert during the week ending July 10th." meetings). Over the next generation, however, that A couple of years earlier, the same paper denominational environment changed dramatically recommended Mount Desert on the Coast in Maine as it did elsewhere in the country with the of Maine, an "unpretending little pamphlet sweeping growth of the Baptists and Methodists. of 36 pages," designed "for tourists" as Hancock County mirrored, in miniature, that larger a "convenient guide and companion" to transformation across the region and the nation: six the "points of interest in this resort, the of seven churches were Congregationalist in 1800; fame of which is fast extending." Bar by 1820, twenty-seven out of thirty-six were Baptist Harbor was bursting with new hotels by and Methodist. The swelling ascent of evangelicalism 1870, and the island was blossoming as in the early republic came to Mount Desert just a summer retreat for the prosperous and as it did every corner of the country. By the 1820s well-connected. This fundamental shift in and 1830s, wondrous accounts of revival meetings the island's economy toward Gilded Age dominated religious news from the island. In the fully travel and leisure massively affected the conventional vernacular of evangelical awakenings, religious culture of the island as well. A the King of Glory was pouring out his Spirt on the number of more genteel church edifices island's townships. Among Mount Desert's claims to arose in Bar Harbor, and a whole new

8 North wall window, 1986, Nancy O'Neal. Beth Abraham Orthodox Synagogue, Bangor

9 denominational presence was built through the Catholics looked back on that colonial development of several Episcopal parishes from the Jesuit history in Maine to make a case 1870s through the 1910s. Mount Desert was now for their primacy in the region's religious held up as a place for ministers to go in the summer history. Celebrating the three hundredth to relax and recuperate while attending to the modest anniversary of 1613, when the first Mass religious needs of their vacationing flocks. "Mount ever performed in Maine took place on Desert is attractive to ministers," the Christian Fernald's Point and the ill-fated French Register reported from Boston in 1871. "It has a grand settlement of Saint Sauveur began (and tonic for exhausted nerves and brain; and while our quickly ended), Bishop Louis Sebastian ministers are breathing in the ocean's might, it is Walsh gathered Catholic dignitaries to well for them … to keep their hand in the work." Bar Harbor, including even an apostolic While there were still local revivals (and would be delegate sent by the Vatican to represent more once Pentecostalism came to the island in the Pope Pius X. Both of these essays next century), they were no longer what caught the offer a forceful reminder at the outset eye of cosmopolitan editors. The island was now of the considerable lengths to which of interest because it had been incorporated into European missionaries, settlers, and their a new gospel of recreation, healthfulness, and the descendants went to claim the island on outdoors. Those new religious blessings would then Christian terms and at the expense of its be sealed in the spiritualized renderings of America's indigenous inhabitants, the Wabanakis. national parks, with Acadia as a prime exemplar.4 Margaret Bendroth next tells of The religious history of Mount Desert Island the difficulties faced by New England's is rich and complex, hardly to be contained fully Puritan progeny, those who built up a in one collection of essays, however full and wide- Congregational heritage on Mount Desert ranging. Necessarily unable to cover the waterfront, beginning in 1792. Their story is driven this assemblage is nonetheless broad and diverse in by the laypeople, women and men alike, its scope. Laura Chmielewski opens this volume by who innovated in remarkable ways when illuminating the colonial world of religious encounter they confronted challenges such as clergy in which French Jesuits vied with English Protestant shortages, theological disagreements, and emissaries in a fraught landscape of mission and bitter splits, the results of which remain empire. Within that combative environment, visible in the island's numerous and often Chmielewski suggests, cooperation and courtesy very different Congregational churches. were hardly impossible across the Protestant-Catholic Brittany Goetting chronicles the Baptist divide; in fact, surprisingly friendly estimates of revivals that occurred on the island in the Christian rivals emerged in the Maine borderlands early republic as part of a national upsurge where interreligious associations were commonplace. in evangelical Protestantism, often referred James O'Toole examines how early twentieth-century to as the Second Great Awakening. Her

10 South wall pictorial window, ca. 1916, artist unknown. St. Edward's Convent, Bar Harbor

11 "Nativity," ca. 1908, Mayer & Company, Germany (now Franz Mayer of Munich, Inc.). Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Bar Harbor

12 narrative attends closely to the rich array near Seawall; working outward from that artifact, of benevolent organizations that flourished he discloses the moving story of George Henry amid the Baptist impulse to do God's work Hefflon, the minister of the Southwest Harbor in the world, societies focused especially Congregational Church at the end of the nineteenth on missions, temperance, and religious century. Hefflon would eventually settle elsewhere education. Mark Silk tells the fascinating and develop a substantial ministry serving the Deaf, tale of the nineteenth-century African- but he later returned to Mount Desert — "Happy American evangelist William Foy, in Silk's Memories!" he wrote poignantly in his diary — and view likely the most significant religious was fondly remembered by his island parishioners. figure ever to live in Hancock County. Returning to the "summer people," Mikeal A highly formative influence on Ellen Parsons chronicles the friendships nourished on the White, who later founded the Seventh- island among the Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff, day Adventist Church, Foy settled in Harvard's President Eliot (a Unitarian), and two Otter Creek as a Freewill Baptist minister Baptist biblical scholars at Harvard, Crawford Howell and later in Sullivan, where he became Toy and David Lyon. Among the most visible and "one of the local fixtures" and "a pillar of enduring results of those summer friendships was local religion" until his death in 1892. the creation of the Semitic Museum at Harvard, an Our travels through the island's institution designed to study ancient Near Eastern religious history continue with David civilizations and also, especially in Schiff's view, Hollinger's searching inquiry into Charles to stand against the long history of European and Eliot's classic 1899 book, John Gilley of American anti-Semitism. This particular alliance Baker's Island, a text that imbued Gilley between Schiff and a handful of liberal Protestants with the self-sufficiency and simple virtues was a hopeful sign of interfaith collaboration, but still that summering rusticators yearned to find a relatively small one in the larger culture of the time. in the island's hardscrabble local citizenry. Anti-Semitism remained a reality among the elite The Harvard president's portrayal, meant white Protestant summer residents of Mount Desert, to rescue "one of the forgotten millions" Judith Goldstein reminds us, even as the Ku Klux from historical obscurity, sought to remind Klan flourished locally. Her narrative follows three the urban elite of the frugal, industrious, leading figures of the American Eugenics Society, close-to-nature souls who had sustained including the founder of the Jackson Laboratory, all the early nation and who embodied its of whom spent significant time on the island, took time-tested values amid the industrializing, Anglo-Saxon superiority as a given, and hoped to frontier-waning fluctuations of the late preserve the island as "a refuge from diversity." Victorian era. Next, Tim Garrity takes The Episcopalians next enter the scene in Craig his inspiration from a mysterious set Townsend's rendering of the denomination's scattered of initials carved into a granite slab missions across Mount Desert Island, including their

13 spread onto nearby Gott's Island. The story on Gott's Garrity for inviting us to put this volume Island is a reminder of the disruptive potential of together, Jenn Booher for her resplendent denominational competition as the new Episcopalian photographs, and the excellent staff at the presence unsettled the Methodist community, Mount Desert Island Historical Society hitherto the lone church on this sparsely populated for careful editing and other assistance. island — an ecclesial divide that then led to wider It is our hope that you, our readers, will conflicts. Thomas Bremer brings Acadia National take as much pleasure as we have in these Park into focus as a place where millions of visitors assorted offerings, deeply researched pieces and sojourners have experienced a sense of wonder chronicling a number of engaging stories, and awe, a feeling that many interpret in spiritual which, taken together, help illuminate or religious terms. The lens here is trained on a the surprisingly consequential religious variety of ritualized tourist activities and religious history of this island we all cherish. programs within the park, from Protestant worship — services held on Sundays during peak tourist season Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished to a program called "The Spirit of Acadia" that paid Professor in the Humanities and Director of the homage to Acadia's inspiring landscape during the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics park's centennial in 2016, and even to the ritual at Washington University in St. Louis. She taught at Princeton University for over a decade, serving as of experiencing a sunrise atop Cadillac Mountain. Professor of Religion and Director of the Program in Finally, Brook Wilensky-Lanford recounts the the Study of Women and Gender. She later taught at history of three groups that are part of the manifold Harvard University as the John A. Bartlett Professor expressions of Buddhism on the island: the Whole of New England Church History. She serves as Editor of the online journal Religion & Politics and Health Center, the Kanzeon Zen Center, and the has authored or edited several books, most recently True Nature Zen Sangha. Intersecting and at times Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American competing with one another, sometimes flourishing Christians and Fractured American Politics (2017). and occasionally faltering, these communities She is a summer resident of Southwest Harbor. represent a crucial turn in the island's religious Leigh Schmidt is the Edward C. Mallinckrodt history in which new alternatives to Christianity have Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities increasingly opened up over the last four decades. at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, he All of us writing for this issue of Chebacco taught at Harvard University where he served as the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in have ties to Mount Desert Island, in one form or America and at Princeton University where he was another, and love of this place is a connecting thread the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor throughout the essays. We, the co-editors, want in the Department of Religion. He is the author of to thank all the contributors for their enthusiasm several books on American religion, most recently Village Atheists: How America's Unbelievers Made and their excellent work. We also thank Tim

14 Their Way in a Godly Nation (2016). He is a 3. For an excellent overview, including county-by-county tables summer resident of Southwest Harbor. on church statistics, see Stephen A. Marini, "Religious Revolution in the District of Maine, 1780–1820," in Charles E. Clark, James Acknowledgments: We are grateful to have had this S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic opportunity to edit this special issue of Chebacco (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 118–45. For four examples of revival accounts, see "Revivals of Religion," New- and to explore the religious history of Mount Desert York Observer, Aug. 2, 1823, 2; "Revival in Mount Desert," Zion's Island, a place that means a great deal to us and to Advocate, Jan. 15, 1829, 1; "The Churches in Hancock County," our three children: Zach, Ella, and Jasper Schmidt. Christian Mirror, July 18, 1833, 1; "Revivals," Boston Recorder, April The colleagues we assembled to work on this with us 24, 1840, 67. Stories of Bishop Clark's pious island youth were have been extraordinary — generous, conscientious, common, especially after the appearance of a glowing biography and ever insightful — and we extend our warmest in 1873 by Daniel Curry, a prominent Methodist editor. See, for appreciation to every contributing writer. Additional example, H.C. Farrar, "The Life-Story of Bishop Clark," Vermont thanks to Tim Garrity and Jennifer Steen Booher for Christian Messenger, Feb. 19, 1874, 1. The basic ecclesial outlines of their outstanding work on this volume and also to the nineteenth-century Protestant story are captured well in George the members of the Mount Desert Island Historical E. Street's chapter on "Mount Desert Churches" in his Mount Desert: A History, ed. Samuel A. Eliot (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Society who support this publication. We offer a and Co., 1905), 227–80. special word of thanks as well to John L. Merrill, a long-time friend, who shared in more than one 4. "About 250 Pleasure Tourists," Christian Mirror, Aug. 10, journey around the island to see what we could 1869, 4; "Book Notices," Christian Mirror, July 9, 1867, 3; "State discover about the area's religious history. Items," Christian Mirror, May 24, 1870, 2; "Missionary Work in Eastern Maine," Christian Register, Aug. 26, 1871, 3; "Pleasant Retreats," New-York Observer, Aug. 3, 1871, 5. For indications of — later Pentecostal missions and revivals on the island, see James 1. Leigh Schmidt and John Merrill noted the card, E. Peters, Prevailing Westerlies: The Pentecostal Heritage of Maine announcing the ministry of evangelist Chuck Barnes (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 1988), 431–33, 437. Sr., at the Seal Cove Baptist Church on September 3, 2016. For the data on Maine's religious life, see http:// www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/state/ maine/ for a 2014 survey and http://www.pewforum. org/religious-landscape-study/state/maine/ for a 2017 survey. 2. James Gillpatrick, The Nature and Remedy of Intemperance (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1832), 13.

15 West sanctuary window, ca. 1904, artist unknown. St. Ignatius of Loyola Catholic Church, Northeast Harbor

16 Stained Glass Windows of Mount Desert Island

By Jennifer Steen Booher

This photo-essay was initially inspired windows with an article on Episcopalian history). by the religious theme of Chebacco XX, I freely admit that some of my pairings are a bit of but as I became more and more obsessed a stretch and claim artistic license. Furthermore, with the topic, it developed as a parallel it seemed to me that pairing Christian windows and only loosely associated work. I with an article on the Jewish presence on Mount photographed eleven buildings in the Desert Island would add insult to injury, and since course of my studies (and am acutely I was only able to find one example of stained glass aware of the ones I was not able to access Judaica on the island, I expanded my brief to include in time), and created more than five Beth Abraham Synagogue in Bangor. It also seemed hundred photographs, most of which, critical to me that the Wabanaki tribes be represented obviously, will not fit in this magazine. for the article about early European contact, and as I The historical society is planning to exhibit was unable to find any stained glass by a member of some of those photos at the Selectmen's those tribes, I contacted the Abbe Museum, explained Building in Somesville this summer, and my dilemma, and asked for "something translucent." we have discussed making many more The remarkable bitten-birchbark piece by Bonnie available on the website as a scholarly Newsom, Penobscot, was the result. This type of work resource. I hope the society didn't regret is made by folding the birchbark and biting gently to taking me on as artist-in-residence when create symmetrical patterns. Birchbark is remarkably I produced this embarrassment of riches! pliable, and the bite marks compress without piercing, In planning this issue of Chebacco, allowing light to shine through the thinner areas. the editors and I have attempted to place Before I undertook this project, I knew, as do a sampling of these photographs with most of us, that Saint Saviour's has several windows articles on which they have some bearing, by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Other than some half- either by way of their subject (a view of remembered bits from college art history classes the Bear Island Light with an article on about Chartres and Saint-Denis, that was the Acadia) or their location (Episcopal church beginning and the end of my knowledge of stained

17 glass. I tell you now that there is a thesis waiting As you look through these to be written on the stained glass of our island. We photographs, you may notice that some have marvelous examples of several late nineteenth- are primarily documentary while others century glass styles, most notably the Gothic Revival are purely artistic, but I hope you will windows at Church of Our Father, the Munich-style be inspired by the message inherent windows at Holy Redeemer, and the Art Nouveau in all: "Look how beautiful this is! windows at Saint Saviour's. These three churches Go forth and see it for yourself." include work by some of the most important glass artists of the nineteenth century. We also have — Jennifer Steen Booher is an artist and photographer some wonderful pieces from the twentieth century from Bar Harbor. — I especially love Susan Dunlap's work at St. Saviour's, with its witty details and local references. Acknowledgements: Thank you so much to all the Of course, many of our local buildings are people who loaned objects or helped me gain access to buildings: Debbie Dyer of the Bar Harbor Historical fitted with simple colored glass panels — of these, Society; Jodi DeBruyne and Cinnamon Catlin the Otter Creek Hall, the Tremont Congregational Legutko of the Abbe Museum; Rabbi Chaim Wilansky and Southwest Harbor Congregational churches are of Beth Abraham Synagogue; Helene Tuchman for the represented in this photo-essay. It proved impossible loan of her artwork and Jean Warren for arranging access; the Reverend John Allison of Church of Our to find much information on these windows, as Father; Muffet Stewart at Church of Our Father this type of glass was mass-produced and usually and Saint Saviour's; Christine Witham at Holy ordered through builders' catalogs. You may notice Redeemer and Saint Ignatius; John Macauley of the in some of the photos that these windows are much Otter Creek Aid Society; Michele Daley of St. John the Divine; Ted Freeman of the Southwest Harbor more translucent than the more elaborate type, Congregational Church; Barbara Miles, archivist for which has to do with how the pigments are applied. the Diocese of Portland; and Jay McNally of Tremont The light coming through the plain windows colors Congregational Church. everything it falls across, and I photographed a whole series of spiderwebs and window frames glowing in the sapphire and amber light.

18 "The Visitation," ca. 1908, Mayer & Company, Germany. Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Bar Harbor

19 Dream catcher, unknown Passamaquoddy artist, 2002. Courtesy of the Abbe Museum. 2015-03-005

20 Collisions of Faith on New England's "Pagan Skirts": Protestants, Catholics, and Religious Encounter in Early Maine

By Laura M. Chmielewski

What would become the Province and, later, the State of Maine, was weakly defined in a geographical sense, and both France and England wanted it. The object of a territorial tug-of-war between these two colonial powers, it remained a dangerous place for much of its colonial past. The religious cohesion of the more densely-populated centers of New England and New France could not be achieved in such a volatile region. Instead, the province's vague boundaries made it the home to a surprisingly diverse array of believers, many of whom had beliefs or characteristics that made them undesirable to the more religiously-homogeneous regions of the colonial world. There were Calvinists, whose ideas didn't quite fit with "the New England Way"; Quakers and Baptists, whose beliefs few could comprehend and even fewer orthodox Calvinists liked; Anglicans, who were treated like outsiders despite living in the King's colonial dominions; and French- speaking Channel Islanders, who claimed to be Protestants but spoke the language of the papists. And then there were real papists. The province was also home to cunning French priests whose perceived goal in life was to destroy everything Protestant, and Indian people who tended This is the title page from an early (1614) edition of the Jesuit Relations. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France to ally with the despised French while maintaining non-Christian beliefs as well and resisting full religious transformation.

21 Finally there were fishermen and timbermen from founded, Saint-Sauveur, and his later Cornwall and Portugal and as far away as Greece. picaresque adventures focus more on These were men without clear beliefs, "whose gods logistical challenges and troubles that were fish and pine," as Cotton Mather claimed.1 nearly robbed him of his life and the Clearly, Maine was the home of religious indignities he had already suffered. diversity, but tolerance and coexistence were other The demands placed on this would- things entirely. Still, religious encounter, the likes be mission priest should have come as no of which one rarely saw outside of the borderlands surprise. Biard was an ordained priest of and frontiers of early America, was at times a the Society of Jesus (the formal title of the routine feature of life in early Maine, and led to Jesuit order). To be in the world, but not some surprising outcomes. We know about many of it, was one of the order's basic ideals, of these encounters thanks to French Jesuits. Like and could only be achieved through a long their Puritan counterparts, these Catholic priests and complex course of study in Europe. were highly literate and literary, with a mandate Such training blended theology, natural to write about their New World adventures. Also science, languages, classical literature, and like Puritans, Jesuits were convinced they were history. Heavy emphasis was placed on the making history. One of these, Pierre Biard, gives Society's sense of corporality as envisioned us a glimpse of early religious encounter on Mount by its founder, Ignatius of Loyola.2 Desert Island. Biard's story wasn't pretty, but its very Only those men who demonstrated the existence underscores the idea that colonial spiritual best combination of spiritual sincerity, boundaries were as permeable as geographical ones. practical and theoretical knowledge, and The New World's Jesuit missionaries have a commitment to Catholic orthodoxy were reputation, at least in Catholicism, as pious, learned, sent out into the world with the Society's and self-sacrificing men who bravely and stoically blessing. In France, Pierre Biard must have accepted whatever fate God had in store for them. met that mark, or he never would have They endured, even craved, every inconvenience been chosen as a missionary to Indians. and discomfort as a test of their spiritual fortitude His opportunity to serve came in and commitment. Martyrdom was not out of the September, 1610, when he and a fellow question, and even embraced. The accounts of Jesuit, Énemond Massé, were sent to the Jesuit lives and deaths are preserved for scholars new French settlement of Port-Royal thanks to the Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia).3 seventy-one volumes of Jesuit writings spanning Interfaith trouble arose before they even over one hundred years of colonial North American left France: the vessel meant to convey the work and encounter. Notable Jesuits from Isaac priests was owned by Huguenots (French Jogues to Jacques Marquette wrote of their desire Protestants) who refused transport to for martyrdom in this holy cause, and their words Catholic missionaries. Eventually paid and deeds are preserved thanks to the Relations. off by a pious and wealthy Catholic Jesuit Biard, however, does not give the laywoman, Madame de Guecherville, the impression he craved martyrdom. Instead, owners continued to deride the priests his voluminous writings about the mission he and "were very obstinate, swearing with

22 Bitten birch bark by Bonnie Newsom, Penobscot, undated. Collection of Cinnamon Catlin- Legutko, Hall Quarry

23 their loudest oaths."4 Once aboard, Biard suffered winters. No bother — the Jesuits were from the predictably extreme physical discomforts there for souls, not vacation. But the of a transatlantic passage — seasickness, cramped arduous tasks of building a mission from quarters, bad food, a suspension from the rhythms scratch forced Jesuits to reassess what types of daily life, and having to care for himself. of "work" they were actually suited for. Worse still from Biard's perspective, the ship was Pierre Biard was now in a tiny colony, with filled with Protestant passengers. Yet this provided limited defenses, food, and a handful of lay an opportunity for Biard to test his skills. Though he settlers with fraying tempers. Biard, Massé, converted no one, familiarity and corporate activity and another Jesuit companion, Gabriel eased contempt between the priests and Protestant du Thet, had to work as carpenters, labor crew members and passengers, who reportedly coordinators, and farmers. This presented came to view the priests as "honest and courteous a stark contrast to their companions who men, of good conduct and pure consciences."5 remained in France, who looked forward Tensions arose again when the vessel arrived to lives as professors, preachers, and at Port-Royal, but this time Biard ran afoul of his intellectuals. Biard must have been grateful fellow Catholics. Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt, that his companions included Énemond the French governor at Port-Royal, claimed to Massé, a less intellectual though cheerful have converted local Indians to Catholicism. Biard and happy man who possessed carpentry declared Poutrincourt's efforts ineffectual. An skills. Nicknamed "Père Utile" ("Father outraged Poutrincourt threatened to hang Biard; Useful"), he reportedly "wielded a tool Biard threatened to deny Biencourt the sacraments.6 more readily than a pen."9 Observing Now alienated from his Port-Royal protectors, Biard Massé build a boat almost single-handedly, again turned to pious rich women in France to bail a Saint-Sauveur settler remarked, "Father him out. Would they help him escape the spiritual Énemond can do anything; and in case of mess of Port Royal? Yes, they would — and this need he will be found to be a good Sawyer is where Mount Desert Island comes into play. of planks, a good caulker, and a good In May of 1613, Madame de Guecherville's agent, Architect." When asked how Biard could René de Coq de la Saussaye, arrived to evacuate possibly contribute anything useful to the the Jesuits and a few additional settlers from Port- shipbuilding enterprise, the same colonist Royal. He took them to the large, sheltered island remarked "Dost thou not know that at the mouth of Frenchman Bay. Struck by its when the boat is done he will give it his stark, simple beauty, Samuel de Champlain had blessing?"10 The contrast was clear; among called the island "l'isle des Monts-deserts." Here their fellow colonists, Biard used his hands the Jesuits began anew. They immediately erected a for prayer and dispensing sacraments, cross demonstrating their intentions as Old World while Massé put his to building. Christians claiming land.7 They also engaged in Despite its desirable mix of skilled thanking God for bringing them safely ashore people, the settlement on Mount Desert to Mount Desert's "large and beautiful port."8 Island was extremely short-lived, a victim While beautiful, the island posed great of fierce colonial and religious competition. challenges, promising fly-ridden summers and frigid In August 1613, an English fleet under

24 Samuel Argall of Virginia searching for cod massive scale. It was a way of life voluntarily chosen, came upon the unsuspecting French and for the most part, by large numbers of men who attacked them. Argall and his crew wasted directly challenged the ways of the society from little time in destroying the little they which they excepted themselves."12 Pirates were had managed to build, including a flimsy some of the Atlantic World's most dangerous people, little chapel. In the process, they killed and accusing someone of piracy was potentially Gabriel du Thet and took the surviving fatal for the accused. Certainly being carried to Jesuits — Biard, Massé and a Brother Virginia as a Frenchman, a Catholic priest, and an Quentin — captive. The charge: piracy. accused pirate lessened Biard's and his companions' Biard described the incident in detail: chances of leaving the English colony alive. Biard and his fellow Jesuits were, of course, not Our brethren approached [Argall]; pirates, and though he used the charge as a pretext frankly revealed themselves to him, for capturing them, Argall likely recognized that. as he was still ignorant of their The English captain extended various courtesies to identity; and begged him not, in them, allowing them to bury their dead, offering elation over his easy victory, to the services of an English Catholic doctor, and adopt severe measures against their inviting the captive priests to dine at his table.13 In colony; they earnestly warned him a more unusual offer of interfaith cooperation, his to remember the conditions of French-speaking Protestant pilot named Bailleur human life, saying that just as he "came by night to Father Biard, and, taking him would wish his own interests mildly by the hand, with many protestations bade him handled, if a similar calamity had and the other Fathers to expect from him … to fallen upon him, so he ought to act employ his aid freely, and consider what they humanely in the case of others.11 should decide upon, as to making their escape."14 Argall's reaction to the priests and the courtesies Argall listened to their pleas with he extended to them are all the more remarkable patience, but remained unconvinced of when assessed against the conventional negative their innocence. Priests or not, the men image that English Protestants harbored of Jesuits. were clearly up to no good on Mount The New World's English Protestants in particular Desert Island, and their fate would feared and despised Jesuits, a reaction that would only need to be settled according to English fester and grow stronger as the seventeenth century law. This was serious, as conviction for wore on. Throughout the early modern period, piracy carried the penalty of hanging English writers derided Jesuits as equivocators, liars, throughout English territory. Pirates murderers and regicides who possessed supernatural were enemies of legitimate power and powers and dabbled enthusiastically in various utterly lacking in scruples or honor as dark arts, all aimed at destroying God's true, they used various guises and pretexts Protestant church.15 Such biases were transported to legitimize plundering the property to the New World, and took on an even more of others. As historian Marcus Rediker urgent meaning as a means of forming identity notes, piracy "represented 'crime' on a in Europe's fragile, lightly-populated colonies.

25 Why then, would an English Protestant, who held the power of life and death over these hated minions of the Church of Rome, feed them well, solicit their company, and even promise them fair treatment by the governor at Jamestown? The possible answers are numerous. Yet perhaps the most compelling for the purposes of this essay is that Argall was like many Atlantic travelers whose travels provided opportunities to encounter their enemies face-to-face. Catholics and Protestants, Englishmen and Jesuits, were oppositional tropes that existed on paper, in speech, and in popular rhetoric. Yet the actual people behind these stereotypes often displayed a different, unanticipated human reality. By the time they arrived at Jamestown, the Jesuits had "converted" Samuel Argall — not to Catholicism, but to the belief that the priests were innocent pawns in the complex game of colonial borders.16 Virginia's governor, Thomas Dale, wanted to deal harshly with the Territorial claims of the English and French overlapped, with neither priests, but Argall pleaded with him to regarding the fact that Indians already occupied North America. refrain from executing his newfound This map is from the Historical Atlas of Maine, edited by Stephen Catholic friends. Freedom was far from Hornsby and Richard Judd. Courtesy of University of Maine Press imminent — Biard was sent to England, imprisoned there, pressured into anti- French espionage, and through a series of maritime mishaps, blown around the Atlantic from the Azores to West Africa to Wales. But the interfaith interlude that began with violence and imprisonment on Mount Desert Island segued into the type of nuanced, often-surprising religious encounter that would come to characterize Maine's colonial period.17

26 Biard faced a world of religious represented changing times. Rale tracked with unknowns and encounters on Mount keen interest the growth of France's and England's Desert Island and beyond. Subsequent colonies and their overlapping boundaries, and was Jesuits with ministries in Maine had determined that the Indians would remain tied to interfaith experiences with different results. the French. In temperament and goals and preferring Much of their missionary activity centered diplomatic power to martyrdom, Rale represented around Narantsuoak (Norridgewock to the key transition that separated eighteenth-century the English), a large Wabanaki settlement Jesuits from their seventeenth-century counterparts. on the banks of the Kennebec River about He wasn't alone in wanting to live and put his 100 miles west of where Pierre Biard imprint on the region's future, holding the English first attempted to set up his spiritual in tremendous contempt. But when he fell from shop. Jesuits were attracted to this region the Narantsuoak chapel's steeple (an unambiguous by stories of earnest Native American spiritual mark on the landscape), he consulted an interest in Catholic Christianity.18 One English Protestant doctor, Hugh Adams, who set up of these was Gabriel Druillettes, a gentle shop on Arrowsic Island some eighty miles away.21 linguist and philosopher whose ability There, priest and Protestant got to know and like to build relationships across confessional one another, and Adams became convinced that lines became the stuff of frontier legend. Rale would use his influence among the Kennebec Druillettes was so renowned as a Wabanakis to ensure peace in a fractious region. reasonable and learned man that he was The doctor was ultimately disappointed. In the accepted as a diplomat to the Puritan year that followed, Rale actively and mischievously Separatist colony of Plymouth in 1651. His undermined the efforts of Joseph Baxter, a travel companion to the heart of Puritan Massachusetts minister who hoped to gain some New England was John Winslow, who converts among the Wabanakis. Rale aggressively ran a local trading post at Cushnoc and derided the minister's conversion techniques and had become a valued friend. Through training. In one notable incident, the puckish Rale Winslow's intervention, the Jesuit enjoyed sent Baxter a one hundred-page treatise on the virtues a visit to Plymouth marked by courtesies of Catholicism in Latin and instructed the Wabanaki sensitive to his status as a Catholic and a messenger to wait for a response! Outraged, the priest.19 These included meatless dinners minister wrote back a few lines about being above the to conform to the Catholic calendar's priest's games; Rale, in turn, criticized the quality of dietary laws and provisions for a private Baxter's Latin. Though overlapping territorial claims space to say Mass for himself in secret. The to Maine put them in each other's paths, Rale could diplomatic goal of the mission (a union clearly take or leave the English (and the feelings, against the Iroquois) was not achieved, but at least for a while, were mutual). Yet he loved his Druillettes recalled his time with his friend life among the Kennebecs, claiming, "As for what Winslow, Edward Gibbons, and "John concerns me personally, I assure you that I see, that Brentford" (Bradford) with affection.20 I hear, that I speak, only as a savage."22 Whether or Half a century later, the misadventures not the Kennebec people loved him is less certain. of another Maine Jesuit, Sebastien Rale, Rale was useful in protecting them from English

27 This bell is said to have announced the mass in Fr. Rale's chapel at Norridgewock. Its catalog listing says that after the raid that killed Fr. Rale, "One of the Indians helping to bury the dead hid this bell. It was found in 1808 under a decayed hemlock, taken to Norridgewock and later given to the Maine Historical Society." Maine Memory Network, item 7918. Courtesy of the Maine Historical Society

28 This engraving, published in 1856, shows the death of Father Sébastien Rale at the hands of English and Mohawk fighters in 1724. Maine Memory Network, item 7530. Courtesy of the Maine Historical Society,

encroachments, but when it became more disregarded it. Cotton Mather referred this frontier convenient to consider negotiating with as the "pagan skirts" of New England.23 When the English, the Jesuit became a liability. war between France and England spilled out into By the early 1720s, some Kennebecs were Maine (and it frequently did), Maine's status as a encouraging him to leave. Rale refused borderland between French and English colonists, — and paid for the decision with his Catholics, and Protestants led to a complex religious life, and those of several other mission intermingling of family trees. Two of the most vivid Indians, in 1724's Dummer's War. examples of these Maine interfaith families were The parts of early Maine in the English the Storers and the Wheelwrights. Mary Storer was sphere of influence were home to many one of three young women from the same family Protestant non-conformists, including taken captive from Wells during Queen Anne's War Quakers, Baptists, and Calvinists, who and, approaching marriageable age, converted to were either deficient in their orthodoxy or Catholicism and married into a wealthy Montreal

29 family, the Gaulthiers. As adults, however, Mary and her Protestant brother Ebenezer exchanged letters and offers of business connections and, despite disagreement over their father's will, visited one another. In this case, blood mattered more than confessional difference.24 Even more surprising is the life of Esther Wheelwright, or Soeur Esther Marie-Joseph de l'Enfant Jésus. Also abducted from Wells in 1703, Esther lived in a Jesuit mission as an adopted Indian child for several years until she was ransomed to the home of none other than Philippe Rigaud de Vaudreiul, the colonial governor of French Canada, and was sent to the Ursuline convent to be educated with Vaudreiul's daughter. When the time came for her to leave, she rejected both marriage and return to her birth family in Maine. Undeterred, the birth family determined to maintain contact. They sent Soeur Esther gifts in the form of communion silver; Esther sent a portrait Esther Wheelwright, was abducted from her Wells, Maine home in 1703. She grew up among Indians and French and became a Catholic of herself in return and offered to educate nun. For the rest of her life, she refused repatriation. Courtesy of the her grandnieces in the Ursuline convent. Massachusetts Historical Society Esther became culturally French, but she never lost her ability to speak English — a skill that proved helpful to the Ursulines when the English conquered Quebec in 1759. Esther, now the superior of the entire convent, was able to negotiate with the invaders to assure the safety of her institution, school, and fellow sisters. Early American studies often accept religious identification as hard and rigid. And yet Maine's early history demonstrates it often was not, chiefly because the religious "other" was a human reminder in your region, your neighborhood,

30 Earring, unknown Passamaquoddy artist, pre-2000. Courtesy of the Abbe Museum. 2000-25- 004 A-B

31 Detail of "Christ the Fisher of Mankind," 1966, Susan Dunlap, USA. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor

32 or even your family. The human 4. "Biard's Relation," in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations relationships teased out of this religious and Allied Documents (hereafter "JR") 3: 173. complexity confound simplistic ideas of 5. JR 3: 183. early American religious identity and 6. "Biard," DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/biard_pierre_1E. html. coexistence. Perhaps some of Maine's early 7. JR 3: 265. settlers even preferred things this way. 8. Ibid. — 9. "Énemond, Massé," DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ Laura Chmielewski teaches early American, masse_enemond_1E.html Atlantic world, and public history. She is also 10. JR 3: 257. the author of three books: The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American 11. Ibid. Frontier (2011), The Atlantic Experience: Peoples, 12. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Places, Ideas (with Catherine M. Armstrong, Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American World, 1700– 2014), and Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet: 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 255. Exploration, Encounter and the French New 13. JR 2: 253, 255. World (2017), as well as numerous essays, book 14. JR 2 :259. chapters, and reviews, and public presentations. Chmielewski is also a historian-in-residence at 15. For an extensive treatment of the tradition of anti-Jesuit rhetoric History Hudson Valley, a consortium of house in early modern English literature, see Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth (New York: Oxford University Press, museums, and frequent contributor of book reviews 1995). to America magazine, the national Jesuit weekly.​ 16. JR 2: 267. Acknowledgments: 17. JR 2: 265. Biard eventually managed to return to France and This article is derived from my doctoral dissertation resumed his work as a university professor. and subsequent book, The Spice of Popery: 18. "Noel Negabamat," DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ Converging Christianities on an Early American negabamat_1E.html. Frontier (2011). I thank the supporters of that project 19. Winslow's brother, Edward, was one of the founders of the who were with me every step of the way — Carol colony and had served a prison term in England for preaching Berkin, the Colonial Dames of America, the staff at opposition to England's high-church archbishop, William Laud. University of Notre Dame Press, and the late Edwin Richard Gildrie, "Edward Winslow," American National Biography Burrows, whose family roots are in Maine. I also 23: 648. thank Herman and Maria, as always, for their help, 20. Laura M. Chmielewski, The Spice of Popery: Converging patience, and love. Christianities on an Early American Frontier (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 24–5. — 21. James Phinney Baxter, Pioneers of New France in New England 1. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana or the (Albany, NY: Nabu Press, 1894), 67; Calvert, Black Robe on the Ecclesiastical History of New England (London: Silas Kennebec (Madison, ME: Monmouth Press, 1991), 172–3. Andus, 1702), 15. 22. JR 67: 93. 2. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540 –1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 23. Qtd. in James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in 1998), 31. the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 276. 3. Lucien Campeau, "Biard, Pierre," Dictionary of Canadian Biography 1 (digital version; hereafter 24. For the complete story of Storer children's interactions, see "DCB"), University of Toronto/Université Laval, Chmielewski, The Spice of Popery, Chapter Three passim. 2003, accessed February 1, 2019, http://www. biographi.ca/en/bio/biard_pierre_1E.html.

33 Detail of "Christ the King," ca. 1929, Franz Mayer of Munich, Inc. Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Bar Harbor

34 "Ter-Centenary": Inventing Tradition for Maine's Catholics, 1913

By James M. O'Toole

Clergy and laity, including Wabanaki people (at left), celebrate the Ter-Centenary. Courtesy of the School of Theology and Ministry Library, Boston College

As spectacles go, this was not the Catholic Church. They had come to dedicate a new grandest ever, but it was still "a notable one parish church building and, as a crowd of about one in every respect," said an account, "solemn thousand looked on, they began by walking around it and inspiring" according to another. The in procession, reciting "the prescribed prayers whereby participants had mostly arrived the day the material edifice is dedicated and sanctified for before, and on the morning of Wednesday, Divine services." Next, they went inside for a solemn August 6, they assembled, clad in the Mass, during which one of the prelates preached for elaborate liturgical robes of the Roman nearly an hour on a text from 1 Corinthians ("God

35 it is who giveth the increase"). The Mass concluded, a formal banquet began in a nearby hotel, featuring toasts, speeches, and accompanying music. "Though the audience was already well fatigued with the long exercises," an observer commented, "yet they listened most attentively." Then it was back to the church for a service of vespers with a shorter but still substantial sermon and, by the time everything ended at around ten o'clock that night, the "impressive exercises" had been deemed an unalloyed success.1 The perhaps unlikely setting for these ceremonies was the town of Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island, in the summer of 1913. Clergy and laypeople, both locals and seasonal visitors, had assembled to bless the new Holy Redeemer church, built of stone to replace a smaller wooden structure. But the event had been designed to be something more than that, nothing less than a three hundredth anniversary — "ter-centenary" was the awkward word used — of the establishment of the Catholic Church in Maine. The day after the dedication, the notables went over to Fernald's Point on the western shore of Somes Sound, the site (they believed) of a short-lived French colony. There, in 1613, what was Louis S. Walsh served as Bishop of Portland from 1906 described as the first Mass ever said in what later to 1924. Courtesy of the School of Theology and Ministry Library, became Maine had been celebrated by a missionary Boston College Jesuit. Calling the new church's dedication a three hundredth anniversary skipped over a great deal of intervening history. A substantial Catholic population in Maine was of much more recent vintage. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century were theirs was a pedigree at least as long as Catholics numerous enough in the state to constitute that of those tempted to view them with a noticeable and continuous presence. Largely suspicion. The tradition they celebrated immigrants from Ireland and French Canada, they in 1913 might have been, to some degree, and their children had often faced nativist hostility invented for the occasion, but it served and even violence, recurring signs that they might the purpose of making a statement not be entirely welcome. But the Catholic leaders about both the past and the present.2 of 1913, now claiming a sustained heritage that was Organizing and presiding over the three centuries old, hoped to make an important ceremonies in Bar Harbor that bright point about themselves and their community: summer day — it was he who delivered

36 the "interesting, historical and spiritual" about fifty people, including Fathers Pierre Biard morning sermon — was Louis Sebastian and Énemond Massé, landed on Mount Desert in Walsh. A native of Salem, Massachusetts, May 1613 and started to build a settlement, which he had studied for the priesthood in they called Saint Sauveur (Holy Redeemer). "First Montreal, Paris, and Rome, and after they planted a cross," the eminent historian Francis his ordination had returned to America Parkman would say of them, "then they began to teach at a newly opened seminary their labors." Knowledge of the local geography was in Boston, later serving as the first spotty, and several European rulers had, from afar, superintendent of the city's fledgling claimed the territory as their own. These settlers parochial school system. In 1906, he was thought that this part of the New World belonged appointed to the position of bishop of to them, the gift of Henry IV of France, but within Portland, the fourth leader of a diocese a matter of weeks, other claimants arrived. Captain that encompassed the entire state. There Samuel Argall from Virginia, bearing the warrant were about 115,000 Catholics in Maine, of James I of England, sailed into view at the end of roughly 15 percent of the population, the summer. By September, he had taken Biard and most of them concentrated in the cities of Massé prisoner, destroyed the half-finished colony, Portland, Biddeford, and Lewiston, with and dispersed its inhabitants. The Catholic presence others scattered from Fort Kent to the New in Maine had ended almost as quickly as it began.4 Hampshire line. In addition to addressing Even so, this was enough of a basis on which the religious needs of this widely dispersed Bishop Walsh, three centuries later, could stake his flock, Walsh also maintained a lifelong own claim, this one to historical precedence. He interest in history, and he wanted to use might, with reason, have chosen other foundations the "ter-centenary" to promote interest to commemorate, but there were problems with all in it. To this end, he established and of them. There was, for example, another French published a monthly journal, the Maine Jesuit, Sébastien Rasle (sometimes spelled Râle), Catholic Historical Magazine. Besides who worked among Native American tribes near reporting news of current church events present-day Norridgewock and had been martyred — parish fairs, school graduations, special there, falling victim, a later Catholic writer said, "to collections for worthy purposes — the the hatred of the English for the Catholic faith and magazine promised to publish "whatever their greed for the Abnakis' [sic] territory." But the is important in person, fact or document, bicentennial of that sad episode would not come until regarding origin and growth of the 1924, and the centennial of a monument to Rasle Catholic Church in the present state of that was subsequently put up on the spot would not Maine."3 In its pages, he hoped, the state's come until 1936 — both dates too far away to be Catholics would discover a usable past, useful. Another possibility, Saint Patrick's church in a past of which they could be proud. Newcastle, just outside Damariscotta, was the oldest He was particularly interested in the Catholic church building in New England, and it French missionaries and colonists who had turned one hundred in 1908. But that left Walsh, arrived in small, uncertain expeditions who was not installed as bishop until October 1906, in the seventeenth century. One party of too little time to plan any larger festivities around

37 it. Finally, a brief French settlement on Sainte Croix Kyrie Eleison" as early as the tenth century, Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, nine years before Saint he was nonetheless content to claim for Sauveur, would not do either. Its three hundredth his church "only the 300 years" since anniversary had already come and gone in 1904, Saint Sauveur. That "only" spoke volumes. before Walsh's arrival in the state.5 Not wanting Yankee elites in Maine and elsewhere to pass up an opportunity to demonstrate the long liked to think of their ancestors as the history of his church in Maine, the bishop settled first European settlers in this corner of on Bar Harbor as the site for his celebration. North America. A couple of hundred There was a small Catholic population in the miles to the south in Massachusetts, plans town, "at first composed nearly entirely of maids and were already well underway to mark, in men of work" (as Walsh's magazine called them) 1920, another "ter-centenary," that of the who came seasonally with well-to-do visitors. The arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. congregation might grow from 350 in the winter (Closer to home, 1920 would also bring to more than 4,000 in the summer. A priest from the centennial of Maine statehood.) Walsh Ellsworth had begun visiting Mount Desert in the was not so subtly suggesting that those 1870s, and a resident pastor was appointed for the settlers were newcomers and parvenus, first time in 1881. With the help of wealthy seasonal that Catholics had in fact been here first. benefactors, he built a little wooden church on Kebo Tensions between the Yankee and Catholic Street, "just above the Malvern Hotel," and called communities had been persistent, and it Saint Sylvia's. (The mother of one of his patrons they remained alive, at least in memory, in was named Sylvia.) It was described as "modest, 1913. In some quarters, Catholic loyalty but inviting." There was "nothing grand about it," a to the pope (a foreign prince, after all) reporter thought; "indeed that was its special charm." had been grounds for regarding them as By the turn of the century, the pastor was also less than reliable American citizens. A occasionally saying Mass in little affiliated chapels priest, Father John Bapst, had been tarred in Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor; sometimes he and feathered in Ellsworth in 1854, and would cross Frenchman Bay to say Mass in private some people remained wary of Catholic homes in Winter Harbor, "whenever there is a group institutions half a century later. Two of people there." Construction of the new stone years after the Bar Harbor celebration, church on Mount Desert Street in Bar Harbor, to be a representative from the small town called Holy Redeemer, had begun in 1906. Finished of Eliot, Maine, introduced a "convent four years later, it awaited formal dedication as the inspection" bill in the state legislature, parish for the entire island and this, together with authorizing public commissioners to plans to open an elementary school (staffed by the show up, "unannounced," and search Sisters of Mercy), confirmed Walsh's intentions any "sectarian seminary, school, or to make this the scene of his "ter-centenary."6 institution" in hopes of exposing the He announced his program in a letter to all the nefarious deeds that were sure to be going priests in Maine right before Christmas 1912. Citing on inside.7 In such a climate, a three- a possibility that "Christian Norsemen" had perhaps hundred-year Catholic tradition in Maine "knelt before the Cross and Altar and chanted the

38 The other bishops of New England join Walsh and the papal delegate. Courtesy of the School of Theology and Ministry Library, Boston College

39 neatly trumped the Protestant one in Plymouth, advance regarding decoration of the church a mere two hundred and ninety-three years old. for the ceremony and other matters. Local The bishop hoped that the anniversary would lay leaders were featured, too, including prompt interest in a variety of historical activities, the regular summer visitor, Edward de and he made several suggestions. Sisters in charge of Veaux Morrell, a former congressman parochial schools throughout the state, for instance, from Pennsylvania who had married into might have their pupils write and stage pageants on the prominent Drexel banking family the "First Mission of St. Sauveur"; these could be and who donated the property on which performed as part of graduation exercises. Pastors a convent for the sisters at the proposed could devote Sunday sermons to the subject. A "Ter parish school was to be built. (The school, Centenary [sic] Fund" was established to raise money named Saint Edward's in tribute to for support of the education of future priests and Morrell, operated from 1915 to 1968.) general "missionary extension in Maine." Besides Leading the list of invitees was Archbishop the ceremony on Mount Desert in August, there Giovanni Bonzano, who was the apostolic would also be a "civic celebration" in Portland delegate (effectively though not formally in the fall, to which the governor and the mayor, an ambassador) from the Vatican to the neither of them Catholics, would be invited.8 United States, and he was there as the All this would broadcast the claim to historical personal representative of Pope Pius X. 9 precedence far and wide, but the events in Bar With this notable cast of supporting Harbor were to be the principal focus of attention. characters, Walsh used the celebration An impressive list of dignitaries was assembled for to drive home his larger point about the the occasion. Walsh invited the seven other Catholic priority of the Catholic stake in New bishops of New England and, with one exception, England. His emphasis was evident from they all came. Conspicuously absent was Cardinal the opening words of his morning sermon. William O'Connell of Boston. He and Walsh had "Three hundred years ago today," he maintained frosty relations throughout their careers; began, the intrepid French missionaries O'Connell briefly served as Walsh's predecessor had celebrated their precedent-setting as bishop of Portland, and the latter suspected the Mass. It was curiously precise dating: there former of mismanagement of diocesan accounts. was no documentary evidence that Mass As one of only three cardinals in the American had been said, or indeed that anything in church at the time, O'Connell might well have particular had happened, on August 6, been expected to be there, but he took the occasion 1613. Alluding once again to the notional of a convention of the fraternal order, Knights of but "hardy Norsemen" who had perhaps Columbus, held in Boston at the same time, to stay been there already, he pushed further back home. All the other New England bishops were to express his hope that proof would one present, led by Matthew Harkins of Providence, day be found showing that the legendary the longest serving of them and a personal friend of explorer, Saint Brendan, had come ashore Walsh. Father James O'Brien, who had been pastor in the sixth century. But it was the settlers of Saint Sylvia's/Holy Redeemer since 1884, naturally of Saint Sauveur who "established on New had a prominent role, consulting with the bishop in England soil" a colony — stretching the

40 Detail of "Christ the King," ca. 1929, Franz Mayer of Munich, Inc. Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Bar Harbor

41 facts a little more, he even called it "permanent" of the importance of history, but this — that was "Catholic in name, Catholic in spirit, was not merely history for its own Catholic in aspirations." He had to acknowledge that sake. Rather, it was history put to a the colony had been destroyed, but happily "all is now distinct purpose, using the past to say restored, better than one hundred fold in grandeur. something significant about the present. … Am I not right, therefore," he concluded in ringing — tones, "in saying that the vision of 1613 in France and James M. O'Toole holds the Clough Millennium 10 on this Island has been more than fulfilled in 1913?" Chair in History at Boston College and is The celebration had made its point. The civic the author of The Faithful: A History of ceremony that followed in the auditorium of the Catholics in America (2008). He spends part Portland City Hall in October further underlined of every summer in Spruce Head, Maine. the theme. Both Governor William Haines and Acknowledgments: Mayor Oakley Curtis — Haines would be defeated Thanks to Stephen Dalton, head librarian of the for reelection by Curtis the following year — praised School of Theology and Ministry Library at Boston College, and to the anonymous parishioner of Holy the good work that the institutions of the church Redeemer who showed me through the church during did for the community at large, while another my visit in August 2018. speaker sought to lay to rest any suggestion that Catholics were less than full-blooded Americans. — "Fidelity to the teachings of the Catholic church 1. "The Ter-Centenary Celebration," Maine Catholic Historical Magazine 1 no. 3 (September 1913): is loyalty to the American Republic," he said. 33–54; hereafter MCHM. See also "The Catholic Walsh, who would continue to serve as bishop Ter-Centenary," Bar Harbor Record, August 13, 1913; until his death in May 1924, got the last word. "Maine's Catholic Ter-Centenary," Sacred Heart Review, August 16, 1913; and "North Shore Society Remembrance of the heroic men of Saint Sauveur Busy with Dances and Dinners," Washington Post, had secured for them "a fitting place in the history August 4, 1913. of the church," marking them as the "advance 2. "August 1913, Diocesan Chronology," MCHM: 22–24. See also Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: guards of the Catholic Church and her children, Inventing Traditions," in Hobsbawm and Terence to-day so numerous and so influential both in the Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: religious and civic life of Maine." The conclusion Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14. was clear: "if there is any privilege in birthright, 3. "Preface," MCHM 1 no. 1 (July 1913): 5–6. For 11 Walsh's tenure as bishop, see William Leo Lucey, there can be no question of our place in Maine." The Catholic Church in Maine (Francestown, NH: "Our place." Walsh had built on the short, Marshall Jones, 1957), 282–326. fragmentary history of the seventeenth century 4. Parkman's account is in Pioneers of France in the a tradition that was useful to the flock he led in New World (Boston: Little Brown, 1910), 300–320. See also Tim Garrity, "The Histories of Saint the twentieth. It was now a flock both numerous Sauveur," Chebacco 12 (2011): 21–39, and "Real and and influential: politicians, take note. These Imagined France in Acadia National Park," Chebacco, commemorations of past events were what we 18 (2017): 100–121. Parkman is generally credited with identifying Fernald's Point as the site of Saint today call "public history." They reminded people Sauveur.

42 5. See accounts of these other anniversaries in "Ecclesiastical Notes," Sacred Heart Review, September 21, 1907, and August 1, 1908; see also Lucey, Catholic Church in Maine, 291–293. Walsh did celebrate an anniversary Mass in Saint Patrick's; see "Centenary of New England's Oldest Catholic Church," Sacred Heart Review, July 25, 1908. For a brief history of the Sainte Croix settlement, see David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), ch. 8. 6. "St. Sylvia," MCHM 1 no. 2 (August 1913): 24–28; Vincent A. Lapomarda, The Catholic Church in the Land of the Holy Cross: A History of the Diocese of Portland, Maine (Strasbourg: Editions du Signe, 2003), 105. See also "Catholic Church Summer Missions," MCHM 6 no.3 (March 1916): 6. The convent for the sisters attached to the school is today the headquarters of the Bar Harbor Historical Society. 7. "Third Centenary of the Catholic Church in Maine," MCHM 1 no. 1 (July 1913): 12–14; "Convent Inspection Bill," ibid., 4 no. 3 (March 1915): 18–21; the inspection bill was given "leave to withdraw" in the legislature and never came to a vote. On Bapst, see John T. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), ch. 2. On the importance of "being first" "Communion," ca. 1904, artist unknown. St. Ignatius of in historical commemorations, see David Lowenthal, Loyola Catholic Church, Northeast Harbor The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 8. For the reception of immigrants on Mount Desert, see Tim Garrity, "Immigrants in the Borderland, 1880 –1920," Chebacco 17 (2016): 59–79. 8. "Third Centenary of the Catholic Church in Maine," MCHM 1 no. 1 (July 1913): 12–14. 10. "Sermon on the Ter-Centenary of the Catholic Church in 9. On the tensions between Walsh and O'Connell, see James M. O'Toole, Militant and Triumphant: Maine," MCHM 1 no. 2 (August 1913): 10–23. The Bar Harbor William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church Record (August 13, 1913) apologized to its readers for not printing in Boston, 1859–1944 (Notre Dame, IN: University the entire text of Walsh's sermon, noting that it would take up two of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 53–55 and 195–202. full newspaper pages of agate type, contenting itself instead with The perfunctory notice that O'Connell's diocesan excerpts. newspaper gave the Bar Harbor event is in "First Mass 11. "The Ter-Centenary Civic Celebration," MCHM 1 no. 4 in Maine," Boston Pilot, August 9, 1913. For some of (October 1913): 22–23. For a full account of the event, with the advance planning, see Walsh to O'Brien, July 13, excerpts of speeches, see "Significant Anniversary Appropriately 1913, Walsh Papers, Archives, Diocese of Portland. Observed," Daily Eastern Argus, October 13, 1913.

43 Detail of sanctuary window, ca. 1885, artist unknown. Southwest Harbor Congregational Church

44 Congregationalists on Mount Desert Island, Maine

By Margaret Bendroth

John Winthrop and his crew of weary they choose their minister and have direct say in Puritans got their first scent of land in running church business. Yet in isolated frontier June, 1630, wafting across the ocean from communities, beyond the confines of Massachusetts the hills of Mount Desert Island. After and Connecticut, local independence was a luxury seemingly endless days of spare food, few could afford. While Congregationalists in cramped quarters, and cold North Atlantic Maine might have had more theoretical freedom gales, the fragrance of fir trees was to the to run their own affairs, in practical terms, they tired travelers like "the smell of a garden." needed each other's help and support far more.2 They had finally reached New England.1 A century and a half later, the First Founders descendants of Winthrop's band would The fifteen laypeople who organized Mount return to make an indelible mark on Desert's first Congregational church in 1792 did Mount Desert Island. They founded so largely without benefit of clergy. This was thirty churches and gathered communities, many years after Abraham Somes first built his cabin in of which persist to this day. Over the past Somesville, three years after the town of Mount 200 years or more, the Congregational Desert was incorporated. Though Maine's population churches have been integral to community had been growing rapidly, the population was life, both spiritual and social. Though they scattered, poor, and transient. Ministers were few and embody a tradition that goes back to New far between; according to one estimate from 1816, England's founding, they have weathered roughly two-thirds of all the churches in Maine had constant change, along with the island's no pastor.3 Yet those fifteen laypeople still followed people. The Congregational story is one standard Puritan practice, drawing up a church of struggle, endurance, and adaptability. covenant that bound them "to the Lord and to Of course, Congregational churches each other." In language echoed in churches across on Mount Desert were never completely southern New England, the small band promised Puritan. The English settlers who came to "renounce the vanities of this present evil world," to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s and and "love one another as brethren in charity." But 1640s wanted to run their own affairs, they could only go so far. In Puritan polity, the free from outside control by kings congregation's next order of business would have and bishops. Though they differed on been calling one of their number to be minister. In particulars, the New England churches fact, they would not have even begun organizing all upheld one basic principle, the self- without an obvious candidate in the wings. Mount sufficiency of individual congregations. Desert's laypeople were largely on their own, By definition, a Congregational supported only by sporadic help from neighboring church is governed by its members: clergy. In 1794, according to church records, the

45 Reverend Daniel Merrill of Sedgwick administered Somewhere about this time (the records are the sacraments and helped the congregation write a not clear) Mount Desert finally installed a new covenant, longer and more doctrinally specific pastor. By most accounts, Ebenezer Eaton than the first. Deer Isle's Reverend Peter Powers was a reluctant candidate, certainly not came to preach for several Sundays in 1798. At the austere patriarch of Puritan lore. From that time, the congregation brought in some thirty what we know, he was keenly aware of his four new members. By 1800, it had grown large lack of education or formal ministerial enough to build two meetinghouses, one in Pretty training; the record book describes Marsh and the other in Southwest Harbor.4 him only as a "brother in this church." Still, we can guess at some anxiety. Without Nevertheless, Eaton served for the next a minister, the people could not baptize their three decades, licensed but not officially children or celebrate the Lord's Supper, much less ordained until 1823, when he was in his receive pastoral care and religious instruction. The mid-60s. Eaton was apparently a gentle congregation also had to settle their own disputes, soul who avoided confrontation. In 1803, some fifty cases in the first fifty years, and exercise the congregation found him "guilty of a what discipline they could over the straying and fault, though not intentionally," of being sinful. Beyond the usual run of human frailty too lenient with an offending church — adultery, intemperance, and neglecting the member. But their reproof was equally Sabbath — the young church also had to parse mild: "At the same time," the records its way through some highly charged theological read, "the church considered that they disagreements. In 1799, Captain Davis Wasgatt, have been guilty of similar misconduct."6 a pillar of the congregation, announced his desire to be re-baptized. The Congregational practice of Help from Outside infant baptism suddenly made no sense to him, and After Eaton retired in 1833, the church he worried for his salvation. In Massachusetts or once again faced the challenge of finding a Connecticut he would have simply become a Baptist minister, but by this time they had outside (though with some penalties), but in Mount Desert he support. The Maine Missionary Society had to come up with his own solution. In September had been formed by Congregationalists 1801, Wasgatt went to the Baptist Church in Eden in 1807 "to send the glorious gospel to and was baptized by plunging. That, in turn, set up those who are destitute of the public and a problem for the congregation. After Wasgatt came stated means of religious instruction."7 to church the following Sunday and made a "great Like similar societies in Massachusetts noise" about his beliefs, they put him on probation. and Connecticut, it deployed pastors He obliged by continuing to attend, even accepting to isolated rural churches, where they their right to discipline him for being "overtaken with itinerated between several different drink." In fact, Wasgatt stayed until a Baptist church pulpits, sometimes over many miles of was organized in 1816. Once a Congregationalist, harsh terrain. The Maine Missionary always a Congregationalist, however. That same year, Society went a step further, however. the Mount Desert church elected him clerk and met Wherever possible, they settled pastors in at his house to vet candidates for membership.5

46 individual churches, often supplementing their salary until the congregation could manage on its own. The effort was surprisingly successful, especially after the opening of Bangor Seminary in 1817 ensured a regular stream of recruits. In fact, over the next several decades, the Missionary Society proved a reliable ally. In 1831, the Mount Desert congregation asked the Missionary Society for help, this time with considerable pathos. "When you consider the poverty and the population of this town," they wrote, "the inhabitants scattered over so large an extent of territory, around the shores, creeks, coves, harbors, valleys and hills, of this mountainous island, and other islands of the sea belonging to this town, … we hope and trust and believe, you will afford us the aid desired."8 The Missionary Society sent Micah Strickland, a Bangor student, who served until his retirement in 1841. After that, the Society supported the pastorates of Charles M. Brown, an eccentric figure affectionately known as "Uncle Charlie," who arrived in 1842, and Samuel Bowker, who came to the Island in 1855.9 Bowker actually served two churches. In 1840, residents of Somesville, weary of traveling to church in Southwest Harbor, had voted to form a new congregation. With a gift of land from John Somes

The Somesville Union Church has been a mainstay of the community since 1851. Mount Desert Island Historical Society

47 but no minister in residence they erected a church were simply too local and decentralized to building, complete with a bell brought up from speak in a unified voice. The Somesville Boston, and began worshipping together. After Church, for example, denounced Bowker's arrival, a succession of ministers served slavery in 1834, resolving that "the act both Southwest Harbor and Somesville until the of holding human beings as property congregation formally organized as a separate to be bought and sold is absolutely church, adopting its own covenant in 1876.10 unjustifiable and highly criminal, and Yet even when clergy were in regular supply, ought, therefore, to be immediately laypeople, especially women, stepped in to provide abandoned." At the same time, however, key leadership. In 1861, women on the Cranberry the congregation recognized that "great Isles organized a Mutual Improvement and numbers of professing Christians not Benevolent Society, open to all "ladies" for the cost only apologize for slavery and speak and of a twenty-five-cent subscription. With only thirty- write in its defense, but also perpetuate its eight original members (and a secession that took abominations."13 Yet in the national realm, nearly half in 1862), the Society managed to raise leading Congregationalists like novelist over three thousand dollars toward a new church, Harriet Beecher Stowe, philanthropists which was completed in 1866. Like their neighbors Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and newspaper in Somesville, the Congregational Church of the editor Elijah Lovejoy, as well as laypeople Cranberry Isles did not formally organize until 1899, in local churches across the country, took decades after church services began.11 The same was up the antislavery cause in the years before true of the Congregational Church of Tremont, the Civil War. Once war began, seven which was founded in 1890. The Ladies Guild men from Mount Desert, some as young raised money to purchase the land by holding bake as eighteen, enlisted in the First Maine sales and "public suppers." The sanctuary was built Calvary, most serving for the duration.14 "with the sweat of the men of the congregation."12 The spirit which animated laypeople to organize Vacationland and fund local churches, central to Congregational By the late nineteenth century, identity in the nineteenth century, also informed Mount Desert was less Puritan than ever. their view of the world. One example is the Back in 1859, a visiting Congregational temperance cause. Most Congregational churches pastor actually mourned the island's enforced abstention well before the passage of the natural beauty, a "pernicious" distraction Maine Law in 1851, which essentially prohibited from church matters that "enfeebled all sale of alcohol in the state. Their motives the heart" and led "to the very brink were no doubt complex, but for many, a dry and of voluptuousness."15 But his tribe was sober society was a just and peaceful one, where decreasing. Congregationalists were workingmen did not spend paychecks on drink, coming to terms with the joys of leisure, and women and children would be free from though still a bit carefully. The first domestic violence. It would be a mistake, however, summer cottage on Mount Desert was to place Congregationalists at the forefront of every built by a Congregationalist, the Boston campaign for social justice, not least because they

48 In the 1920s and 30s, many churches, such as the West Tremont Methodist Church pictured here, combined resources to form interdenominational Larger Parish organizations. Photograph by LaRue Spiker, Mount Desert Island Historical Society merchant and ship captain, Alpheus religious traditions, with Episcopalians constructing Hardy. And in 1894, the Congregational a church building in 1878, Roman Catholics in Sunday School and Publishing Society 1881, Methodists in 1882, and Unitarians in 1888. published a novel about summer life In 1883, thirteen Congregationalists organized in Bar Harbor. Mildred Fairfax's the Bar Harbor church and called Joseph Torrey Mount Desert: A Summer's Sowing was from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be their a tangled and only marginally religious pastor. "Under his guidance," as an early twentieth narrative of flirtations, rejections, and century church historian wrote, the congregation outings on rowboats, sailboats, and recognized "the splendid possibilities of a strong Green (now Cadillac) Mountain.16 church both locally and for the summer residents." The Bar Harbor Congregational Again with generous outside support, the Bar Church embodied that late nineteenth Harbor congregation erected an imposing granite century reality. In 1887, the island's building, designed by a Boston architect and "summer people" had worked with locals graced with a Hutchins-Votey pipe organ.18 to build and finance a nondenominational Then the church looked outward. Under the Union Church in Northeast Harbor, twenty-year pastorate of Angus MacDonald, the designed in the Shingle Style by leading Bar Harbor congregation established an endowment Boston architects Peabody and Stearns.17 that provided aid to the year-round residents of Soon, however, the town had grown the seacoast region. With his brother, Alexander, large enough to support a range of he organized the Seacoast Missionary Society in

49 Detail of sanctuary window, ca. 1885, artist unknown. Southwest Harbor Congregational Church

50 1905. As the story goes, the two men pastor of the Mount Desert Island Larger Parish, were standing on Cadillac Mountain, as it was called, was a Presbyterian, Lee Hanchett, looking across the beautiful vista of islands and the next a Baptist, Ernest McKenzie. In 1930, and bays, when Alexander clapped his when the Maine Conference organized another brother on the shoulder and declared, Larger Parish in Southwest Harbor-Tremont, it also "Angus, what a parish!"19 The result became interdenominational, bringing together was a permanent legacy. First with the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists.22 tiny sloop "Hope" and later with the "Sunbeam" (lovingly known as "God's Today Tugboat"), the Maine Seacoast Mission Congregationalists occupy a much different has ferried ministers as well as doctors, space today than in 1792. Old habits persist, of nurses, and teachers to isolated fishing 20 course, especially in regard to the social order: the towns up and down the Maine coast. Bar Harbor church, like its parent denomination, Yet even while a new Maine was the United Church of Christ (the result of a 1957 emerging (the state became "Vacationland" merger), has taken public stances on civil rights, in 1936) Congregational churches LGBT issues, and religious tolerance, yet much has found themselves hampered by old and changed. Mount Desert Island is more religiously familiar frustrations. Though vacationing diverse, host to everyone from Episcopalians and ministers often filled pulpits in the Baptists to nondenominational evangelical and summertime, the year-round situation Pentecostal churches. But Congregationalists are still was dire. A denominational report from a mainstay. They remain the largest single religious 1919 found that twelve of the twenty- group in Hancock County, with eighteen individual three Congregational churches in 21 churches. Baptists are a close second at sixteen, Hancock County were without pastors. with Methodists at eleven and Roman Catholics at Once again, limited resources inspired nine.23 The overall picture is cloudier, however. As innovation. In the summer of 1925, is true across the western world, church attendance when both the Federated Church at is declining. Only 17% of Hancock County's Northeast Harbor (which was Baptist and population consider themselves religious "adherents," Congregational) and the Congregational according to a 2010 survey. The majority are mainline Church at Seal Harbor were without Protestants (4691), with Roman Catholics (2523) and ministers, the state Conference organized evangelicals (1288) a fairly distant second and third, the Mount Desert Larger Parish. This with "other" (Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim) experimental solution, increasingly constituting only 820. Yet over 45,000 residents popular among rural churches in Maine, are, in the language of the survey, "unclaimed."24 established a single Parish Council to Across the long haul, of course, the situation see to the pastoral needs and business is a familiar one: Congregationalists on Mount affairs of both churches. Cooperation Desert Island have been weathering adverse soon crossed denominational lines, with statistics since the 1790s. They have consistently the Eden Baptist Church and the Eden faced clergy shortages, transient populations, and Union Church joining by 1936. The first

51 outside competition on all sides, from Baptists to (Portland: Congregational Christian Conference of Maine, 1935), 325–326; Mrs. Seth S. Thornton, the tourist trade. In the past, deep community ties Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor and and a willingness to improvise along with changing Somesville, Mount Desert Island, Maine (Bar Harbor: times have allowed them to survive, even to flourish. Acadia Publishing Co., 1988), 45f. If history is any guide, those same qualities will 5. McGiffert, "Godly Discipline," 12, 15–20. see them not only through the challenges of the 6. According to one observer, he "never took the pastoral care of the church." See Eliphalet Gillett, present day, but those of the future as well. Complete List of the Congregational Ministers, Pastors of Churches, in the State of Maine, from the Settlement — of the Country to the Present (September 1840) Margaret Bendroth is the Executive Director of the (Hallowell, 1841), 262; A Record of the Church of Congregational Library and Archives in Boston and a historian Christ in the Town of Mount Desert, 30. Today, the of American religion. She has written widely on American church is the Southwest Harbor Congregational fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Her most recent book, The Church, a member of the Conservative Conference of Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Congregational Churches. Past (2015), tells the story of how Congregationalists engaged 7. Calvin Clark, History of the Congregational Churches with their storied history to shape their modern identity. in Maine, Volume One: The Maine Missionary Society, 1807–1925 (Portland: Southworth Press, 1926), 26. Acknowledgments: See also Mervin Deems, The Maine Missionary Society, The author thanks Tim Garrity, as well as Marie Griffith and 1807–1957 (Portland: Marks Printing House, n.d.). Leigh Schmidt, for careful, often life-saving editorial support, and 8. Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Maine the staff of the Congregational Library for research assistance. Missionary Society … in Fryeburg, June 22, 1831 (Portland, 1831), 17. — 9. Congregationalists in Maine were consistently 1. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John more organized and connected than other Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1958), 54–55. churches in the denomination. They formed local associations of ministers early on and were the first 2. On Congregationalism generally, see John Von Rohr, The Congregationalists to organize statewide, with the Shaping of American Congregationalism, 1620–1957 (Cleveland: founding of the Maine Conference in 1826. Pilgrim Press, 1992). 10. Thornton,Traditions and Records, 244–248. By the 3. In 1816, there were only 120 Congregational churches in 1850s, church life looked to be flourishing, with 120 the entire District of Maine, serving a population around members by 1854, two houses of worship, and nine 270,000; two-thirds of those churches were without pastors. Sunday schools operating during the summer. With David Thurston, Sermon Delivered in Saco, June 26, 1816, Before Bowker's departure in 1855, the church was pastorless the Maine Missionary Society at their Ninth Annual Meeting and membership declined. By 1865, membership had (Hallowell: N. Cheever, 1816), 4. See also Shelby Balik, Rally the dropped to eighty-nine. Scattered Believers: Northern New England's Religious Geography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 91–97. 11. Velma Teel, "Founding of the Ladies Aid," The Book of Remembrance, Congregational Church 4. The Mount Desert congregation was only the third to form in (1960), accessed February 10, 2019, http:// the region, after Blue Hill and Deer Isle. Samuel MacClintock www.cranberryisles.com/photos/teel_report. from Blue Hill and Samuel Eaton of Harpswell also assisted with html; "Cranberry Isles Mutual Improvement and the founding. A Record of the Church of Christ in the Town of Mount Benevolent Society (1861–1899)" Cranberry Isles, Desert, When Gathered and by what order, 2–13. See also Michael http://cranberryisles.com/photos/sew_constitution. McGiffert, "Godly Discipline and Charitable Walking: The html; "Union Meeting House, also known as Great Congregational Church of the Town of Mount Desert The First Cranberry Island Congregational Church," http:// Fifty Years," Chebacco 6 (2004): 9–40; Jonathan Greenleaf, Sketches cranberryisles.com/photos/gci_church.html. of the Ecclesiastical History of the State of Maine, From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Portsmouth: Harrison Gray, 1821), 12. "Our Story," Tremont Congregational 162–165; Calvin Clark, History of the Congregational Churches in Church, accessed February 10, 2019, http://www. Maine, Volume Two: History of the Individual Churches, 1600–1826 tremontcongregational.org/about-us.html.

52 13. George S. Brookes, These Hundred Years: History of the Hancock Association of Congregational Churches and Ministers, 1825–1925 (Ellsworth, ME: n.p., 1926), 10, 12; Henry S. Club, The Maine Liquor Law: Its Origin, History, and Results (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1855). 14. Tim Garrity, "John Gilley Fell at the Battle of the Wilderness," Chebacco 12 (2011): 72. 15. "A Day on Mount Desert," Maine Evangelist, September 10, 1859, n.p. 16. Mildred Fairfax, At Mount Desert: A Summer's Sowing (Boston: Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society, 1893). 17. This church would become the United Church of Christ of Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor, later renamed and reorganized into the Seaside United Church of Christ. The building is listed on the National Historic Register of Historic Places. The Seal Harbor Congregational Church, built in 1902 in the Shingle Style, is also on the National Historic Register. 18. Yearbook and Directory of the Bar Harbor Congregational Church (n.p., n.d.); Rodney W. Roundy, "Twenty Five Years at Bar Harbor," Maine Christian Pilgrim (December 1947): 30–32. See http://barharborucc.org/. 19. Judith Burger-Gossart, "Maine Sea Coast Mission Hooked Rugs," Chebacco 11 (2010): 33–48. 20. Orville Guptill, "Along our Far-Flung Maine Coast in the 'Sunbeam,'" Congregationalism in Maine 14 (April 1927): 24; "Mission Boat Brings Spiritual and Material Help to Islands Off Maine," New York Times, May 29, 1978. See also www.seacoastmission. org. 21. "Hancock Association," Congregationalism in Maine, (October 1919): 604, and Nelson, "Some Handicaps Confronting Union or Federated Churches," Congregationalism in Maine 10 (April 1923): 26. South sanctuary window, ca. 1895, artist unknown. Tremont 22. Lee Hanchett, "The Mount Desert Larger Parish," Congregational Church Congregationalism in Maine 13 (April 1926): 32–33; "Mount Desert Larger Parish," Maine Christian Pilgrim 22 (October 1935): 105–6; 23. Association of Religion Data Archives, County Membership Report (2010), accessed February 10, 2019, http://www.thearda.com/rcms2010/r/c/23/ rcms2010_23009_county_name_2010.asp 24. Ibid.

53 Doorknob, date and maker unknown. Eden Baptist Church, Salisbury Cove

54 "He Has Abundantly Poured out His Holy Spirit in Eden and Mount Desert": The Baptist Connection on Mount Desert Island, 1790–1840

By Brittany Goetting

A considerable religious revival swept New England. To understand the evolution of across Mount Desert Island between the Baptist churches of Mount Desert Island, one the winter of 1832 and spring of 1834. must look to this wider denominational context. The intensity of the movement deeply At the same time, the Baptist churches of impressed twenty-nine-year-old school Mount Desert Island actively participated in nearby teacher and Mount Desert resident Simeon religious societies, attended regional conferences Milliken. He remarked in his diary that, and associations, and wrote to various publications. "For months past, in every prayer, I have Members from these churches moved to other towns prayed the Lord to humble me. He has and regions and brought with them the traditions of abundantly poured out his Holy Spirit: their home congregations. The history of the Baptist in the conversion of my companions churches helps us to understand not only the societal both in Eden and Mount Desert."1 evolution of the island, but also the ever-evolving The revival was led by newly settled religious culture of northern New England in the minister Calvin L. Carey and Elder late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Elisha Bedell of Cooper, Maine. Bedell had travelled nearly one hundred miles The Growth of Baptists in Maine to preach the word of God to the The rise of the Baptists on Mount Desert Island people of Mount Desert Island. The mirrored the growth of evangelical Protestantism combined efforts of the two ministers throughout New England. Baptists had existed in reportedly led to the baptism of ninety- 2 North America since the seventeenth century but did two converts. The revival could not not gain momentum until the eighteenth century. have occurred if it had not been both The Congregationalists and other denominations for the participation of the people of supported infant baptism, while the Baptists Mount Desert Island and the influence believed that only adults could be baptized and of Baptists from other parts of Maine. receive the eucharist. The Baptist emphasis on a The Baptist churches of Mount "believer's baptism" paired well with the fervor Desert Island and their members had of the First and Second Great Awakenings. a keen awareness of wider Baptist Congregationalists and Baptists competed for connections. The founding members of congregants throughout New England in the late these churches were inspired by existing eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mount churches and missionaries and influenced Desert Island was a hotbed of denominational by the issues and trends that affected competition. Congregational missionaries many like-minded congregations in

55 reportedly arrived on the island as early as 1792 and helped plant the Southwest Congregational Church in 1794.3 They were soon followed by the Baptists in 1798. Baptist missionaries arrived on the island around 1798. Elder Isaac Case reported to the Massachusetts Missionary Society that he visited Mount Desert from 1802–1803 while Elder James Murphy of New Brunswick labored in the region in 1804.4 He noted that the inhabitants of Eden "spared no pains to attend on the word, some of them coming through water and splash above their ankles, a considerable distance."5 It is difficult to track membership numbers, but several residents of Mount Desert Island left Congregational churches to join with the Baptists. The Mount Desert Island Baptist Church was formed by fourteen former Congregationalists who declared that infant baptism was not supported by the Bible. Captain Davis Wasgatt, one of the founders of the Mount Desert Island Baptist Church, contended that "he had been unsatisfied with his Nineteenth-century Baptists argued that baptism was only for adult professing believers and required full immersion. Detail infant baptism until he read the covenant from "Bible Baptism" engraving by O. Pelton, 1843. Courtesy of and examined the proofs cited in said the Library of Congress covenant, and they convinced him that infant baptism was wrong."6 Those who felt compelled by the Baptist arguments left the Congregational church and did not return. The Congregationalists responded by excommunicating dissenters.7 The Southwest Harbor Congregational Church grew throughout the early nineteenth century, but they continued to fear the call of the Baptist siren. The two denominations were not able to unite under a common cause until the

56 emergence of the benevolence movement in the mid-nineteenth century. The Mount Desert Island Congregationalists and Baptists then began to participate together in organizations like tract, temperance, and Sunday school societies.8

Early History of the Eden Baptist Church The Mount Desert Island Baptists formed into churches to strengthen their community of believers. The Eden Baptist Church was the first Baptist organization on the island. Its first meeting was held on July 5, 1799 at the home of Levi Higgins and was attended by thirty members.9 Of the Baptist Church in Center, George Street wrote, "The present Worship at the Eden Baptist Church was meeting-house at Center was built by this church in 1837 as a primarily led by missionaries and visiting distinctively Baptist house of worship, the church rejoicing that now it ministers until 1817. In total, sixteen had one meeting-house all its own." Courtesy of Tremont Historical Society ministers preached at the Eden Baptist Church during this time. They hailed from as far south as North Windsor, Maine, and as far north as New Brunswick.10 the settled minister of the church shortly after Enoch Hunting was the first long- this large revival. His April 1818 ordination was term settled minister of the Eden Baptist attended by Elder Amos Allen of Brooksville and Church. Hunting hailed from New Elder Ebenezer Pinkham of Sedgwick. Hunting London, New Hampshire, and served retired from the ministry in 1833, and there would as a missionary for the Massachusetts not be another settled minister until 1860. Missionary Society. In 1817, he wrote to the American Baptist Magazine and Early History of the Mount Desert Baptist Church Missionary Intelligencer that "I visited The Mount Desert Baptist Church was established Eden on Mount Desert last September. on September 11, 1816 by fourteen members and Some mercy drops have fallen on this a council of churches. The members had primarily place. It is through that about 100 been associated with the Southwest Congregational souls have been brought to a knowledge Church. The council included participants from of the truth. I baptized a number of Sedgwick, Eden, Bluehill, Trenton, and Readfield.12 truly penitent sinners; and had the The church was able to quickly secure a settled happiness of seeing a church of Christ minister. Missionary Lemuel Norton visited established according to the apostolic Mount Desert in 1818 and noted that "there had plan."11 Hunting was invited to be been some religious interest among the people,

57 Detail of "Baptism," ca. 1908, Mayer & Company, Germany. Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Bar Harbor

58 and a goodly number had found the November for the purpose of [appointing] a place Savior precious to their souls."13 Norton to hold the association the next year."16 Hunting visited the church several times and and representatives from the church greatly affected was invited to become their minister in the actions of the association. Hunting preached 1820. Norton served the church until sermons at the association's annual meetings, 1828 when he dedicated himself to the served as an officer on several subcommittees, theology of the Freewill Baptists. and acted as a missionary for the association. The Mount Desert congregation The Eden Baptist Church even hosted the ordained Calvin L. Carey on July 2, association's annual meeting in 1829. The records 1833. His ordination was attended by noted, "Many things of important interest to Zion representatives from Sedgwick, Brooksville, engaged the attention and received the support of Bluehill, Surry, Ellsworth, Eden, and the Association among which were Bible and Tract Deer Isle. Representatives from Hampden, Societies, Missions, the cause of Temperance, etc."17 Corinth, and Trenton were invited but The church remained active in the association even unable to attend the ordination.14 Carey after Hunting's retirement. Representatives were served the church until 1843. Like the sent to the annual meetings until at least 1836. Eden Baptist Church, the Mount Desert The Mount Desert Baptist Church was also congregation remained without leadership involved in the regional associations, but they for most of the mid-nineteenth century. did not adopt a leadership role. The church did not attend the conference when they were Growth and Connection to Regional without a minister, but they did at least send Associations yearly letters. Norton and Carey attended the The Baptist churches on Mount annual meetings, but they preferred to absorb Desert Island were deeply connected to information and network with their colleagues. their regional associations. Associations The associations allowed Mount Desert Island offered advice, financial aid, missionaries, churches to learn from their fellow congregations and access to education and publications. and influence regional culture. Churches that had In 1817 the Eden Baptist Church voted enthusiastic ministers like Enoch Hunting could to join the Lincoln Association, an take charge of significant voluntary movements. organization comprised of churches in Congregations such as the Mount Desert Church modern-day Knox and Waldo counties.15 used the associations to remain connected to their The church was instrumental in fellow Baptists. The associations fostered relationships the establishment of the Eastern Maine between the Mount Desert Island Baptists and Baptist Association, an organization that their far-flung denominational compatriots. was focused on modern-day Hancock Sabbath School, Missionary, Temperance, County. In 1818, Elder Enoch Hunting Mite Societies and a few other representatives attended "the association at Bluehill on the first The Baptists were active participants in a Thursday after the second Wednesday in variety of voluntary societies. These organizations

59 suggest what forms of benevolence mattered to the "a thorough friend to Sabbath Schools; community. Local societies were also connected and all the benevolent institutions of the to their sister societies and parent organizations. present day."21 Many Mount Desert Island Several Mount Desert Island societies were religious institutions focused on adults, but involved with domestic and foreign missions during the Sabbath Schools were a way to spread the 1820s. Religious periodicals and the records of the Baptist religious culture to children. the Eastern Maine Baptist Association reported that missions donations were received from the Eden Baptist Publications Female Mite Society, Eden Baptist Cent Society, The Baptists were active participants Eden Religious Benevolence Society, Eden Female in the New England Christian print Primary Society, and the Mount Desert Female culture. Religious periodicals from the Mite Society throughout the 1820s. Money was period included reports from regional collected through direct donations and fundraisers associations, societies, missionaries, such as a concert sponsored by the Eden Religious 18 and letters from Mount Desert Island Benevolence Society in 1821. These funds supported residents. The Baptists were able to missions throughout northern New England, the learn what was occurring in other western United States, and the British colonies in parts of the world and share their own Asia. Many of these mite societies were connected news with a larger community. to larger regional organizations. The Hancock Magazines were particularly eager to Auxiliary Foreign Mission Society was formed in publish any news of a revival. Rebekah 1827 to support the missionary movement and was Christian Watchman 19 Pinkham wrote to the endorsed by the Eden Female Primary Society. in 1823 that "God was pleased to bow Temperance and Sabbath School societies the heavens of his love, and come down received fewer donations but remained important by the influence of his Spirit, upon voluntary institutions on the island. Elder Enoch another isle not far distant, called Mount Hunting organized a Temperance Society at the Eden 20 Desert and Eden." The periodicals Baptist Church in 1825. The society comprised allowed the Baptists of Mount Desert fourteen members and faced serious opposition Island to share local developments from other church members. Organizations like and to connect their experiences with the Eden Temperance Society encouraged Maine to Baptists throughout the world.22 become one of the first states to prohibit liquor. Several Mount Desert Island Baptists The Eden Sabbath School Society was established published their own autobiographies and in 1826. Sabbath schools were religious school memoirs. Elder Lemuel Norton published sessions for children that were intended to teach the his autobiography a year before he died. basics of the Bible and tenets of a good Christian life. His work included references to his travels They were often difficult to maintain because they as a young sailor, his work as Calvinistic necessitated people to select and teach curriculum, Baptist on Mount Desert Island, and his and for parents to send their children to these missionary work as a Freewill Baptist in schools. Mount Desert resident Simeon Milliken was Maine. Norton's transformation from delighted in 1832 that Elder Calvin L. Carey was

60 The Eden Baptist Church issued a commemorative plate to mark its bicentennial. Mount Desert Island Historical Society

61 62 Altar window, date and artist unknown. Eden Baptist Church, Salisbury Cove

Left: Detail of altar window, date and artist unknown.Eden Baptist Church, Salisbury Cove

63 an irreligious young man to a fervent Freewill 1799 and 1837. They wrote letters of Baptist was likely recognizable to other New dismission and recommendation for Englanders who experienced similar journeys.23 departing members to join congregations Rebekah Pinkham also published a work based in Hampden, Lyman, Mariaville, Mount on the journals of her father Simeon Milliken. Desert, Surry, Trenton, and Waterville.26 Milliken frequently wrote about Mount Desert Like the Mount Desert congregation, there Island revivals, sermons, and voluntary societies. His are gaps in the record. The church did journals provided readers a glimpse of religious life on not record whether they received letters the island and knitted his experience into the larger of recommendation from other churches. story of God's redemptive work in New England.24 The membership records of the Publications kept Baptists informed about the Eden and Mount Desert churches reveal world outside of their hometowns. They were able that the Baptists were not chained to to read about revivals, missionaries, and the social their home churches. The churches of issues that affected their brethren. Nevertheless, Mount Desert Island welcomed members the Baptists were not just readers. They wrote to and sent communicants to a variety of the publications and published their own works to congregations throughout New England. share their news and perspectives with the larger denomination. Publications widened the Baptist The Baptists of Mount Desert Island world and linked believers from around the globe. The Mount Desert Island Baptists engaged with associations, formed Movement and Migration voluntary societies, and read and wrote The Baptists of Mount Desert Island were to publications alongside their fellow connected to the greater northern New England Baptists. The Baptist movement was movement not just through the leadership of their quickly growing in the United States churches, but through the migration of everyday and the islanders embraced many of congregants. The membership records of the Eden the wider evangelical trends of the era. and Mount Desert Baptist churches are rather However, the Mount Desert Island spotty but provide a general idea of those who Baptists did not merely mimic their entered and left the churches. Members of good brethren. The Baptists were profoundly standing would be provided a "letter of dismission connected to late eighteenth- and early and recommendation" if they wanted to move to a nineteenth-century religious culture, and new town and attend its church. According to the contributed their own perspectives and records of the Mount Desert Baptist Church, the experiences to all they were involved in. congregation welcomed members from Brooksville, 25 — Ellsworth, Sedgwick, and Surry from 1817 to 1834. Brittany Goetting is a Ph.D. candidate at the The church clerks did not report whether their University of Maine. Her research examines the dismissed members joined other congregations. evolution of Protestantism in Maine and the The Eden Baptist Church received members Canadian Maritimes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She most recently worked from Groton and Hebron, New Hampshire, between alongside the Castine Historical Society to develop a

64 historical walking tour app and published in ABC- 12. Records of the Mount Desert Baptist Church, 1816–1834, Clio's The World's Greatest Religious Leaders: How Collection of the Northeast Harbor Public Library, SCB 286. Religious Figures Helped Shape World History. 13. Lemuel Norton, Auto-Biography of Lemuel Norton: Including an Account of his Early Life, Two Years in a Printing Office, Eleven Acknowledgments: Years at Sea in which he was twice Shipwrecked, and Experienced I would like to thank the staff of the Mount Desert Several Narrow Escapes from Death and His Christian Experiences Island Historical Society, Tremont Historical Society, and Labors in the Gospel Ministry (Portland, ME: Brown Thurston, 1862), accessed September 13, 2018, https://archive.org/details/ Maine Historical Society, Ellsworth Historical autobiographyofl00nort. Society, Southwest Harbor Public Library, Northeast Harbor Library, Bangor Public Library, University 14. Records of the Mount Desert Baptist Church, 1816–1834. of Maine Special Collections, Eden Baptist Church, 15. Records of the Eden Baptist Church, 66. Southwest Harbor Congregational Church, and the 16. Ibid, 73. Maine Seacoast Mission, and especially my husband, Christopher Goetting. This article is dedicated to 17. Ibid, 123. my parents, Gina and Shane Wickwire, who always 18. American Baptist Magazine and Missionary Intelligencer 3 (1821): encouraged curiosity. 238, accessed September 18, 2018, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ mdp.39015039721777. — 19. "Formation and Annual Meetings of Mission Society in 1. Rebekah P. Pinkham, ed., Memoir of Simeon J. Maine," American Baptist Magazine 7, no. 6 (1827): 188–189. Milliken, esq., of Mount Desert, Maine (Boston: James 20. Eben M. Hamor, Copy of the Plantation of Mount Desert, Loring, 1836), accessed September 25, 2018, https:// Early Records, 1776–1796, Part I (1903), Collection of the Maine archive.org/details/memoirofsimeonjm00pink. Historical Society. 2. George Edward Street, Mount Desert: A History, ed. 21. Ibid, 45. Samuel A. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), accessed September 29, 2018, https://archive.org/ 22. Pinkham, "Revivals of Religion," Christian Watchman 4 (1823): details/mountdeserthisto00stree. 138. 23. Auto-Biography of Lemuel Norton 3. Gregory Gilpin, ed., "Transcription of A Record Norton, . of the Church at Mount Desert" (Southwest Harbor, 24. Pinkham, Memoir of Simeon J. Milliken, Esq., of Mount Desert, ME), 11. Maine. 4. Henry S. Burrage, History of the Baptists In Maine 25. Records of the Mount Desert Baptist Church, 1816–1834. (Portland, ME: Marks Printing House, 1904), 26. Records of the Eden Baptist Church. accessed September 29, 2018, https://babel.hathitrust. org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89067955567;view=1up;seq=9 5. James Murphy, "Letter from the Rev. James Murphy to the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society," Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Magazine 5 (1804): 54. 6. Gilpin, "Transcription of A Record of the Church at Mount Desert," 18. 7. Ibid., 67. 8. Ibid., 68. 9. Records of the Eden Baptist Church, Collection of the Eden Baptist Church, Bar Harbor, ME, 1. 10. Ibid. 11. Enoch Hunting, "Domestic Mission," American Baptist Magazine and Missionary Intelligencer 1, no. 10 (1818): 37.

65 Detail of south vestibule window, ca. 1904, artist unknown. Otter Creek Hall

66 The William Foy Story

By Mark Silk

Around 1867, according to George consumed with the prophecies of William Miller, E. Street's 1905 history of Mount Desert, a farmer and lay Baptist preacher who predicted "a colored evangelist, Rev. William E. that Christ's return was imminent. The date was Foy, organized at Otter Creek a church initially set for some time between March 21, of twenty-five members to be known 1843 and March 21, 1844, and then, after a series as a 'Christian Church.'"1 That is the of recalculations, fixed on October 22, 1844. extent of what Street, a Congregational Like a number of other antebellum Protestant minister, has to say about perhaps the groups, the Millerites condemned sectarian most consequential figure in American divisions in the name of restoring the Primitive religious history ever to reside in Hancock Church. The movement drew from many County. But we should not be surprised. denominations, and there was no shortage of Foy had made his mark more than two opposition among the denominational clergy. decades before he appeared in Otter Foy was not initially a believer. But on January Creek, and his historical significance is 18 and February 4, 1842, he collapsed during even today recognized by very few. church services, lying inert for two and a half William Ellis Foy was a native Mainer, hours the first time and subsequently for twelve born in the small town of Belgrade just and a half hours. Both times, when he came to, north of Augusta in 1818.2 In 1835, he he was able to relate detailed visions of the arrival experienced a religious conversion under of the saved in heaven. These visions persuaded the preaching of Silas Curtis, a Freewill him of the doctrine of Jesus' "near approach," Baptist minister. Freewill Baptists and turned him into a celebrity preacher.3 rejected the Calvinist view that people In city after New England city, he appeared are predestined to be saved or damned, before thousands in the garb of an Episcopal priest, believing instead that all are capable recounting his visions and preaching the Millerite of availing themselves of God's grace. gospel with eloquence and erudition. Critics did In Maine, they were strongly opposed not scruple to employ racist language against him. to slavery, and Curtis was among their "When will wonders cease?" asked the Portland leading advocates of emancipation. Tribune in a story on February 10, 1844. "The By 1840, Foy was living in Boston Millerites of this city have recently imported a great with his wife Ann and their young bull nigger, who has been rolling up the white of daughter Amelia, having apparently his eyes, showing his ivory, and astonishing the decided to advance his education by good people by his dreams and prognostications."4 studying for the Episcopal priesthood. Foy had moved to Portland after receiving his At the time, many New Englanders were visions, and among his eager auditors was a teenager

67 named Ellen Hammond, whose father century American Protestants sought. In took her to hear him in Beethoven Hall on places, her descriptions of what she experienced Congress Street and on Cape Elizabeth. closely track what Foy described.7 In due course, the young woman claimed to have her own visions, and was invited Foy: White: to speak about them. As she recalled "The angel raised his "Jesus raised His many years later, "While I was talking right hand, and laid mighty, glorious I heard a shout, and he is a great, tall hold upon the gate, arm, laid hold of man, and the roof was rather low, and and opened it; and the pearly gate, he jumped right up and down, and oh, as it rolled upon its swung it back on he praised the Lord, praised the Lord. glittering hinges, he its glittering hinges, It was just what he had seen, just what cried with a loud voice, and said to us, 'You he had seen." Afterwards, the two spoke to the heavenly host, have washed your with each other. "But they extolled him 'You're all welcome.'" robes in My blood, so I think it hurt him, and I do not know "I then saw in the stood stiffly for My what became of him," she said. "He was a midst of the place an truth, enter in.'" very tall man, slightly colored. But it was innumerable multitude, "Here on the sea remarkable testimonies that he bore."5 arrayed in white of glass the 144,000 Hammond's encounter with Foy raiment, standing in a stood in a perfect took place in 1845, when the faithful perfect square, having, square. Some of that remained after Christ failed to crowns of unfading them had very bright return — "The Great Disappointment," glory upon their heads." crowns, others as they called it — were seeking a way not so bright." forward. In January, Foy had arranged Adventists have regarded these and other with two Millerite brothers who ran a textual parallels as evidence that Foy was a bona Portland printing house to bring out an fide forerunner of White, a prophetic "herald autobiographical pamphlet titled The and mouthpiece" of the earliest members of their Christian Experience of William E. Foy. community.8 To an outsider's eyes, however, it "My object in publishing these visions," looks as though White took Foy's words and gave he wrote, "is to comfort the saints."6 them a conventional Christian spin, for example The leader of the saintly remnant would by substituting Jesus for his angel and by replacing in due course be none other than Ellen "innumerable" with 144,000 — the number of Hammond, who in 1846 married a the saved specified in the Book of Revelation. Millerite preacher named James White Unlike Foy, White was not very literate, and and, as Ellen White, went on to establish when she began to publish her visions in 1846, the Seventh-day Adventist Church. her better educated husband edited them for White owed her prominence to publication. In later life, she had a propensity to her visions, which, like Foy's, provided appropriate the writings of others.9 It is hard to the kind of empirical proof of divine avoid the conclusion that her published visions authorization that many nineteenth-

68 dismissed Foy as a failed prophet, writing, "He finally became exalted over the revelation, and thus lost his simplicity, hence the manifestation of this gift to him ceased, and soon after he sickened and died."10 But Foy didn't die. Public records indicate that he rejoined the Freewill Baptist fold, taking charge of a racially mixed congregation in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the late 1840s. By 1855 he was back in Maine, serving as an itinerant Freewill Baptist pastor in Chelsea, Brunswick, and Burnham, where the 1860 Census shows him boarding with a young farmer named Riley Whitten. Foy's wife Ann seems to have died before 1850, about which time his newly widowed mother Elizabeth, known as Betsy, came to live with him. In 1851, he married Caroline Griffin of Gardiner, who gave birth to two children, Orrin in 1852 and Lauraitta (also called Laura) in 1856, before she herself died. In 1863, Lauraitta died and perhaps not coincidently, Foy left Burnham, living some miles to the east before arriving in Otter Creek. George Street, who began vacationing on Mount Desert in the 1870s, had good sources for his sentence on the "colored evangelist." He got Ellen G. White, ca. 1875. Courtesy Ellen G. White Estate, Inc. Foy's name right and placed him among the Island's Freewill Baptists. That the church Foy organized at Otter Creek was "known as a 'Christian Church'" were in part plagiarized from Foy. But points to the rejection of denominational divisions beyond the question of plagiarism, Foy that he would have retained from his Millerite days. appears to have profoundly influenced her Finally, Street's dating of Foy's activity fits with what career as a religious leader. Would Ellen we know from other evidence of his whereabouts. White even have had that career if she In 1868, Foy purchased a piece of property from had not been inspired by his preaching? William Johnson on what is now Route 183 near Foy did not join White's church, Little Tunk Pond in East Sullivan, in the section of and only recently, thanks to the land then called Plantation 7. The following year biographical research of the African- he bought a nearby parcel from Isaac Bunker. His American Adventist leader Delbert Baker, mother Betsy died in 1870, and the 1870 Census has he earned a place of honor in the identifies him as a preacher living on the property twenty-million-member denomination. with his son Orrin, identified as a mariner. In J.N. Loughborough, its first historian, 1873, he married a cook and housekeeper from

69 Nathan Shaler Lithograph of Otter Creek, ca. 1880. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Acadia National Park

the Portland area named Parcentia Rose, and two brought visitors to the island terminated at years later deeded the Plantation 7 property to Hancock Point, whence steam ferries made her. To support his family, he seems to have done regular trips to Bar Harbor. The island's some farming. He also built a neighbor's house. newspapers made it their business to report The Bangor Daily Whig and Courier mentions on what went on in Sullivan and environs. his holding services in Augusta, Sidney, and Two decades after leaving Otter on Hurricane Island in 1874, and conducting a Creek, Foy himself retained a connection funeral service on Court Street in 1875. By 1880, with Mount Desert. The following he had changed the spelling of his name to Foye. item was published in the Mount In the late nineteenth century, the part of Desert Herald on April 16, 1886. Hancock county where Foy lived was closely connected to Mount Desert. The railroad line that

70 On Saturday last a horse attached once entwined in daily life and separated by a vast to a buggy standing near the socioeconomic gulf. On August 9, 1889, Aulick house of Mr. David Thomas, at Palmer hosted a lavish banquet on his cottage Otter Creek, ran away and about grounds for President Benjamin Harrison and some destroyed the carriage. The horse 250 invited guests, including governors, senators, belonged to Mr. Aulick Palmer, and various foreign dignitaries. "FEASTING THE of Washington, D.C., and was in PRESIDENT," reads the headline in the August 10 charge of Mr. Thomas Savage; the edition of the New York Times. "BAR HARBOR wagon belonged to the Rev. Wm. E. SOCIETY AGLOW." According to the story, Foye. Mr. Savage paid for the wagon. the president's table (which was inside the house) was adorned with a two-foot-long seashell from Who were these characters? Thomas, born Florida filled with water lilies and the room was in Presque Isle in 1826, was a churchman decorated with begonias and orchids shipped in generally referred to as Deacon, as can be from Washington. "This is a prohibition state, but seen on his tombstone in the Otter Creek champagne flowed like water," the Times drily noted. Cemetery. Savage was probably Thomas R. Two weeks earlier, a story in the Bar of Eden, born in 1852 and identified in the Harbor Record told of another outdoor affair 1880 Census as a common laborer. Aulick that, despite the absence of champagne, seems Palmer was a well-to-do, well-connected to have been at least as effervescent. Episcopalian from Washington, D.C. who served as president of the American Society PLANTATION No. 7. — Although this is of Civil Engineers and U.S. consul general but a small place we have plenty of company in Dresden, Germany. In 1886, he began and very good times. The drive up here from building a summer cottage in Otter Creek, Sullivan is very pleasant and attractive. A a few houses away from Deacon Thomas. party from West Sullivan was here last week. It is tempting to speculate that Savage, In the party were Mr. and Mrs. Oakman perhaps employed at Palmer's construction Bunker and son Fred, Mrs. Nathan Bunker, site, had borrowed the horse for some kind Mrs. Helen Ramsdell and her daughter Ada, of religious errand involving Thomas and and Mrs. Hattie Gordon. They brought Foy. But Foy needn't have had any personal with them a beautiful large awning, which involvement. The buggy/carriage/wagon they raised in front of Mr. Wm Johnson's was likely one of the many conveyances home and one day invited friends and had kept on lots in Bar Harbor for rental to a picnic beneath it. Among the guests were those who needed to move goods or people Mr. and Mrs. Simon Havey, aged respectively around the island. The clergyman in East eighty and eight-five years. Oakman Bunker, Sullivan would then have depended on the the jolly cook, well-known to sportsmen lot owner, presumably someone he knew, and rusticators, officiated and everything to assure him a small but regular income. was prepared in fine style. Spring chicken, The lives of rusticators and locals in raspberries and cream, ice cream and lemonade Gilded Age Hancock County were at and all the delicacies of the season were

71 served. Mrs. Gordon favored us with music Americans living in Hancock County, from the organ and Elder Foye gave a short and Foy in his swallowtail coat and tall and appropriate address. It was a day that silk hat cannot but have cut a memorable will long be remembered by young and old. figure. Under the circumstances, then, it is odd indeed that her physical These visiting Bunkers (including Mrs. Ramsdell description of him should be at such and daughter) were relatives of residents of Plantation odds with the others we have. Was he 7, and clearly Foy had become one of the local short and very dark complexioned, as fixtures. she says, or tall and light complexioned, In her genealogical history of Sullivan and as he was portrayed in the Portland Sorrento, published in 1953, Lelia A. Clark Johnson Tribune and recalled by Ellen White? goes out of her way to pay tribute to him as a pillar Could there actually have been of local religion. In a section titled "The Church," two William Foys — the first a native Johnson reprints a sketch of local church history Mainer who achieved celebrity during written by O.G. Barnard, the Methodist pastor in the Millerite enthusiasm and, as Sullivan, as an appendix to a pamphlet marking Loughborough believed, died shortly the 1904 rededication of Sullivan's first meeting thereafter; the second an escaped slave house.11 Barnard discussed Baptists, Methodists, who assumed Foy's identity, living the and "liberal Christians," but made no mention of life of a freelance preacher from the Foy. Johnson remedies this with "East Sullivan late 1840s until his death in 1892? Church," a short subsection of her own that begins: New Bedford was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, an asylum for Not to be forgotten among the preachers was escaped slaves where Frederick Douglas Elder William E. Foye, who was esteemed arrived under an assumed name in 1838. and beloved. No one seems to remember just The Freewill Baptist clergyman named when he came, but neighbors have a very William E. Foy who lived there in 1850 is clear memory of a very dark complexioned, listed on the Census form as "black" (not colored man, small in statue (sic) with "mulatto" like his neighbors) and born in white curly hair, wearing a tall silk hat and Massachusetts. It is not impossible that swallowtail coat, and holding meetings in an African-American preacher escaping the hall, and also different school houses. slavery was made pastor of a local mixed- race Freewill Baptist congregation Elsewhere in the volume Johnson writes, under Foy's name, perhaps thanks "Tradition has it that he was an escaped slave from to Silas Curtis, who in 1849 became New Jersey. He probably came here in the 1860s or president of the recently established 70s."12 Freewill Baptist Anti-Slavery Society.14 Johnson was doubtless drawing on personal Not impossible, but nevertheless memories of Foy. She was born 1862 and grew up improbable. Foy the visionary would in the area, and her husband was a native of East have been a well-known figure in Sullivan.13 Then (as now) there were very few African southern Maine in the 1850s, when

72 View of vestibule window, ca. 1904, artist unknown. Otter Creek Hall

73 someone with his name was pastoring there, and Census records show a Betsy Foy (presumably Foy's mother) living with him in 1850 and 1860, and an Amelia (presumably his daughter) living with him in 1860. That these women would have associated themselves with an impostor is hard to believe.15 There is no photograph of Foy to shed light on this question, only one of a young, apparently light-skinned young black man believed to be Orrin Foy — who would have been the son of the second Foy. While DNA testing of known descendants might be able to provide an answer, for now it seems safest to conclude that all the evidence relating to William Ellis Foy has to do with one and the same person, and that the confusion derives from the vagaries of memory, racial prejudice, and/or a high degree of variability in white peoples' descriptions of African Americans. Whatever the case, it's clear that the settled clergy in Sullivan wanted nothing to do with the Foy who lived among them, and perhaps vice versa. The hall where Johnson says he held his meetings was Temperance Hall, a gathering place in East Sullivan that was built in the 1870s by the local chapter of the Independent Order of Good Templars. Founded in upstate New York in the early 1850s, this progressive fraternal organization admitted men and The gravestone of William Foy at Birch Hill Cemetery in women on an equal basis and made no distinction East Sullivan. Photo by the author by race. Sullivan's Good Templars were just the people to welcome an African-American preacher. As for Johnson's recollection of his also a year and a half later and his wife went holding meetings "in different school buildings," to live with a family in the area, at the a notice that "Reverend Mr. Foye of Sullivan" expense of the Town of Sullivan.16 He is would be holding a "series of meetings at the buried in Birch Tree Cemetery, down the Magadore school building" in Steuben appears in road from his home, among the neighbors the Bar Harbor Record of November 19, 1891. who loved him, next to Parcentia and together with Laura, whose remains he Foy died on November 9 of the following year, evidently brought from Burnham. half a century after receiving his visions and inspiring His modest tombstone is there Ellen White. His house was sold to a lumber dealer today, inscribed with the lines,

74 I have fought a good fight, 2. The fullest account of Foy's life, together with a collection of the relevant documents, is Delbert W. Baker, The Unknown Prophet; I have finished my course, Revised and Updated (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald I have kept the faith; Publishing Association, 2013). Henceforth there is laid up 3. Quoted in Benjamin J. Baker, "'I Have Fought a Good Fight,': For me a crown of righteousness. William Ellis Foy as a Millerite," Dialogue 25–3 (June 22, 2015): 18. The words come from 2 Timothy, 4. Ibid. the last of the so-called pastoral letters 5. Delbert Baker, The Unknown Prophet, 185–86. attributed to St. Paul. No doubt, 6. The pamphlet is reprinted in Delbert Baker, The Unknown Prophet: the quotation can be found on page 182. Foy himself picked them out. They 7. For a close study of the parallels between Roy's and White's suggest a proud man, an accomplished visions, see Tim Poirier, "Black Forerunner to Ellen White: evangelist prepared to risk comparison William E. Foy," Spectrum 17, no. 54 (1987): 23–28. with the Apostle, a Freewill Baptist 8. Delbert Baker, The Unknown Prophet, 147. confident he had done what was 9. Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. necessary to grasp the grace he believed White, 3rd ed., (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI: 2008), 70, 289. his Lord had proffered to him. 10. Delbert Baker, The Unknown Prophet, 190. 11. O.G. Barnard, "Local Church History," in A Sermon (West — Sullivan, ME: Gerrish, 1905). Mark Silk is director of the Leonard E. Greenberg 12. Lelia A. Clark Johnson, Sullivan and Sorrento Since 1760 Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life (Ellsworth, ME: Hancock County Publishing Company, 1953), 65, and Professor of Religion in Public life at Trinity 37. College in Hartford. He is the author of Spiritual 13. Ibid., 273. Politics: Religion and America Since World War II, Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in 14. We know of at least one black minister who escaped slavery America, and (with Andrew Walsh) One Nation, and became pastor of a Freewill Baptist congregation. Shortly after Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the denomination considered how to respond to the law at its triennial General Shape American Politics. He owns a summer home Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. As described by the in Hull's Cove, where he has vacationed since 1977. Society's corresponding secretary, "The subject was introduced by one of our brethren, a minister of Him who was sent 'to preach Acknowledgments: deliverance to the captives.' [Luke 4:18] He asked advice, for he I would like to thank Willie Granston for putting was himself a fugitive, liable every hour to be torn from his home, his encyclopedic knowledge of Mount Desert at my his family, and the flock of his charge. Sympathy for this distressed service; Andrew Walsh for his inestimable help with fugitive swelled every bosom." I.D. Stewart, Fifth Annual Report nineteenth-century American religious history, Gary of the Free-Will Baptist Anti-Slavery Society (Dover: William Burr, and Jeanne Edwards for their beyond-the-call-of-duty 1851), 25. hospitality in East Sullivan; Allen Kimball for his 15. But again, not impossible. In the famous Martin Guerre case careful scrutiny of the Ellsworth American; and Tema from the 16th century, an honorable peasant woman named Silk for being there, always. Bertrande de Rols accepted another man as her husband for years until the actual husband returned to claim his rights. — 16. A notice in the September 5, 1894 issue of the Bar Harbor 1. George Edward Street, Mount Desert; a History, ed., Record reads, "To whom it may concern, this is to notify and warn Samuel A. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), all persons from boarding or trusting Mrs. Preciuta (sic) W. Foy, 246. of Plantation No 7, as we provide a boarding [place], and shall pay no bills of her contracting." It is signed "E.F. Chapham, A.T. Hill, Overseers of Poor, Town of Sullivan."

75 Detail of "Christ the Fisher of Mankind," 1966, Susan Dunlap, USA. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor

76 Elegy at Baker Island: Charles W. Eliot's Maritime Pastoral

By David A. Hollinger

Eliot hoped that Gilley might be "a true American type." How promising the nation's destiny would be, Eliot reflected, if this remnant of coastal Maine's robust past could be a model for the future.1 The specific circumstances of Gilley's origin, and of his death, perfectly caught Eliot's symbolic imagination. Gilley was born in 1822 in the home of a midwife on Great Cranberry Island. His mother had travelled there from Baker Island, where she lived with her husband and nine older children. William and Hannah Gilley had this remote island as their own through what amounts to a purified re-enactment of the European occupation of that Atlantic side of North America. The small, round island four miles from the shore of Mount Desert was not inhabited, even by indigenous Americans who complicated the feeling of Europeans that This daguerreotype pictures John Gilley as American soil was theirs for the taking. The Gilley a young man. Courtesy of the Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Archive, image 11756 couple's act of occupation also partook of the classical American myth of "virgin land" as developed in relation to the westward movement.2 "There it lay Charles W. Eliot declared that in the sea," wrote Eliot of the island, "unoccupied a farmer-fisherman he befriended in and unclaimed; and they simply took possession Northeast Harbor was the complete of it." Thus John Gilley's conception was almost embodiment of what human beings were immaculate, historically speaking: it happened supposed to be. "We cannot but believe," beyond and prior to the physical and legal complexity the Harvard president concluded his of property rights and native populations. And memoir of 1899, John Gilley of Baker's when death came seventy-four years later, it struck Island, "that it is just for countless quiet, the innocent child of nature in the mythically simple lives like this that God made pure waters of the surrounding sea. Rowing from and upholds this earth." John Gilley Northeast Harbor to Sutton's Island, assisted was one of the local residents who sold only by an untrained youth, Gilley was drowned produce, fish, and poultry to the wealthy when an October gale blew his boat westward to Bostonians and New Yorkers who spent the mouth of Somes Sound, and capsized it. their summers on Mount Desert Island.

77 John Gilley had passed from a hearty and successful old age in this world, full of its legitimate interests and satisfactions, into the voiceless mystery of death. No trace of his body was ever found. It disappeared into the waters on which he played and worked as a boy and man all his long and fortunate life.3

Pastoral in death no less than in birth, and for decades in between, Eliot's hero was an artifact of a life that had been lost to the urban elite that came to Maine each summer. Those Bostonians and New Yorkers were surrounded by a sprawling modernity that was anything but pastoral. The rapidly industrializing, urbanizing, ethnically diversifying events of the late-nineteenth century made men and women of Eliot's milieu all the more responsive to reminders of a world of self-sufficient families living in small, face-to-face communities. Life in the 1890s had come to be lived on a larger scale, with governments

and corporations exercising more and more control Charles W. Eliot. Courtesy of Benjamin Pierce over the lives of individuals. Eliot himself was one of his generation's greatest institution-builders, transforming a provincial Unitarian college of 1869 into one of the world's most cosmopolitan universities by the time he retired in 1909. In an apt turn of emergencies, and courageous steadiness phrase, a discerning historian — himself a summer in difficulties and dangers." By learning resident of Mount Desert! — has described the "to wring safety and success out of such older social and economic order of the entire United adverse conditions," Eliot explained, a States as an expanse of "island communities."4 youth was "taught by these struggles Those communities were all the more precious in with nature to be vigilant, patient, self- memory, and all the more easily idealized.5 At least reliant, and brave." Eliot implied that Eliot was able to develop his romantic vision of the the conditions of modern, urban life past by meditating on a real island. Confronting were less conducive to the development nature head-on, "successive generations" developed of these habits and capabilities. In a "some of the best human qualities." Alone in a rare, explicit reference to the urban small boat out on the treacherous waters of the world, Eliot contrasted coastal Maine's surrounding sea, a young lad received "admirable panorama of unspoiled nature to "the 6 training in alertness, prompt-decision, resource in straightened, squalid, ugly sights of a city."

78 "West Window: Bear Island Light," 1940, designed by Agnes F. Northrop of New York, executed by Westminster Memorial Studios of New York. St. Jude's Episcopal Church, Seal Harbor

79 Nothing in Gilley's upbringing captivated Eliot describes his work as the captain of more than the Gilley family's self-sufficiency. "They a schooner transporting goods from got their fuel, food, and clothing as products of their Boston to the summer residents of own skill and labor, their supplies and resources Northeast Harbor. On a small scale, being almost all derived from the sea and from Gilley was a model entrepreneur. their own fields and woods." They made their own clothing from wool sheared from their own sheep. He was noted among his neighbors They crafted their own shoes from leather grown for the care and good judgment on the backs of their own livestock. William and with which he executed their various Hannah Gilley and their twelve children lived a commissions, and he knew himself life "much more self-contained and independent to be trusted by them. This business than any ordinary family is today."7 Eliot was he followed for several years, paid off moved by the strength, energy, and resourcefulness his debt to the seller of the schooner, of Hannah Gilley and women like her. Living in and began to lay up money. It was an complete isolation for much of every year, John immense satisfaction to him to feel Gilley's mother took "her share in the severe labors himself thus established in an honest of a pioneering family." She taught all twelve of business which he understood, and her children to read and raised all to maturity.8 in which he was making his way. The personal quality Eliot was the most There are few solider satisfactions to determined to ascribe to Gilley was "patient be won in this world by anybody, industry." 9 The noble yeoman applied himself in any condition of life. The diligently to every task, staying with it until scale of the business — large or completed. It had to be this way, because each small — makes little difference family faced the elements almost alone. Even a in the measure of content.11 family with "a good deal of property" was always close to the margin, and almost never had any The honest laborer was an ancient hero in kind of insurance. Occasionally, neighbors could English literature, and never more so than be called upon for help, but the lack of socially in nineteenth century America. Eliot wrote interdependent institutions distinguished "island in the tradition of Maine's own Henry communities" like Gilley's from the solidarities of Wadsworth Longfellow, whose "Village larger scale and scope being created by national Blacksmith" always had a brow "wet with leaders like Eliot. When disaster struck, one managed honest sweat," and through arduous labor through "unremitting industry and frugality and an and honest dealings stayed out of debt: intelligent use of every resource the place afforded."10 Eliot's emphasis on "industry and frugality" He earns whate'er he can, is central to the rudimentary political economy And looks the whole that runs throughout John Gilley of Baker's Island. world in the face, Eliot's account of Gilley's business enterprise For he owes not any man.12

80 This detail from an 1887 map shows Sutton's Island and the location of John Gilley's house. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Eliot discerned intellectual as well as liberalism: she "became a Universalist, to which economic independence in Baker Island's more cheerful faith she adhered till her death."13 cultural milieu. Gilley's mother took her Such honest, independent inquiry appealed children to the Congregational Church to Eliot in his role as an earnest advocate of the in Southwest Harbor — a journey of advancement of modern science. Mount Desert seven miles each way in an open boat — had no laboratories of the sort Eliot was building but she soured on the preacher's strict in Cambridge, but there are unmistakable parallels Calvinism, consigning many apparently between Eliot's ethical image of science and his good souls to eternal fire. "She bought sense of the culture of the Gilley family. The ideal books and read them for herself," and scientist was a humble and honest man of steady after years of reflection "could no longer habits, laboring patiently, diligently, modestly, and accept the old beliefs." Hannah Lurvey without prejudice. When speaking at the opening Gilley became not only a Unitarian, of the American Museum of Natural History in like Eliot, but went all the way to the 1878, the Harvard president extolled "the peculiar farthest shore of New England's religious kind of human mind" produced by the practice

81 of scientific inquiry. It was a "searching, open, Let not Ambition mock humble mind… patiently and enthusiastically their useful toil, devoted to the pursuit of such little new truth Their homely joys, as is within its grasp."14 No self-aggrandizing and destiny obscure; bravado here, no Byronic ego, no Young-Werther- Nor Grandeur hear with like indulgences of melancholy self-pity; rather, a disdainful smile the scientist was the ultimate embodiment of The short and simple deeply Protestant petit-bourgeois virtue. And annals of the poor. thus, not so very different from John Gilley. Eliot was also moved by Gilley's relative Do not suppose is it a result of any anonymity. "History and biography alike neglect fault of their own, Gray warns "ye proud," these humble, speechless multitudes," Eliot wrote in that "o'r their tomb no trophies raise." an idiom similar to the "history from the bottom up" Who knows what talent and virtue the slogans of the late twentieth century. Eliot opened neglected multitudes may have possessed? John Gilley of Baker's Island in just this voice. "This little book describes with accuracy the actual life of Some mute inglorious one of the to-be-forgotten millions." So important Milton here may rest, was this framing that Eliot returned to it at the end: Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. This is the life of one of the forgotten millions. It contains no material for distinction, Gray imagined these souls living fame, or long remembrance; but it does their lives "Far from the madding contain the material and present the scene crowd's ignoble strife," where "Their for a normal human development through sober wishes never learned to stray." mingled joy and sorrow, labor and rest, Simple and quiet, like John Gilley, adversity and success, and through the tender loves of childhood, maturity, and age.15 Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless This sentence of Eliot's, like many others, tenor of their way. follows conventions put firmly in place by Thomas Gray's poem of a century and a half before, "Elegy The point is not that Eliot should Written in a Country Churchyard."16 Eliot does not have acknowledged Gray, but rather that cite Gray, but he need not have. Most of his readers Eliot lived in a moral universe suffused would have known many of its verses by heart. It with sentiments like Gray's. Gilley was was the most widely quoted poem during Eliot's not a Milton or a Cromwell, but Eliot lifetime. Gazing at the tombstones surrounding wanted to make sure someone recognized a rural church, the poet ponders the lives of the his value. "Full many a flow'r is born to dead who were unknown beyond the village. blush unseen," wrote Gray. "Full many

82 a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear." Not the gem of John Gilley. Eliot would rescue his memory from those ocean caves. Eliot wrote at the same historical moment that Frederick Jackson Turner voiced the worry that American democracy might suffer because the frontier was disappearing. Only six years before Eliot wrote his memoir of Gilley, the young Wisconsin historian published "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."17 There is no reason to suppose that Eliot was thinking about Turner, John Gilley is pictured here with his second wife, Mary Jane or about the end of the era of "free (Wilkinson) Gilley, at home on Sutton Island. Courtesy of Southwest land" in the American West. But Eliot's Harbor Public Library Digital Archive, image 9564 uncertainty that modern, urban life could mold the personal character he thought Americans needed was evident throughout his lament for a way of life found in the Eastern Seaboard's closest equivalent to a frontier. No land was more virgin than Baker Island, and no American pioneer who often regarded the Civil War sentimentally, more easily admired than John Gilley. as a conflict between moral equals. Eliot was Yet Eliot's vision was broader than certainly sentimental about John Gilley and his Turner's, and his engagements more kind, but among wealthy Anglo-Protestants of his enduring. Turner offered a narrow generation, Eliot was a vigorous egalitarian.18 understanding of American history that Charles W. Eliot fought against many of the altogether ignored slavery and the Civil prejudices of his own class and culture. After War on the one hand, and the power retiring, he opposed the anti-Jewish quotas brought of English-derived institutions on the to Harvard by his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell. other. Turner's ideas were ascendant John Gilley of Baker's Island shows Eliot to have been during the era of Jim Crow, from the a man of his time and place, but in his actions as a 1890s through the 1940s, after which university president and public figure, like Hannah they were resoundingly discredited. Lurvey Gilley in her religious journey, he critically The "Frontier Thesis" appealed to assessed inherited belief.19 Eliot tried to bridge the generations of white Americans who gap between the future of Boston and the past of did not want to think about race and Baker Island. It was a stretch, but not a bridge too far.

83 Window above altar, ca. 1967, Susan Dunlap. St. John the Divine Episcopal Church, Southwest Harbor

84 — Island," in the Public Library of Southwest Harbor, Maine: https:// David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of swhplibrary.net/digitalarchive/items/show/6673. Many of these History Emeritus at the University of California, photographs are displayed in a new, impressive effort to describe Berkeley. He is a former President of the the life on Baker Island and the surrounding islands: Cornelia J. Organization of American Historians, and has Cesari, Baker Island (Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2018). been elected to the American Philosophical Society 6. Eliot, Gilley, 23, 26–27. and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 7. Eliot, Gilley, 24–25. His most recent book is Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but 8. Eliot, Gilley, 10–11. Eliot's frontispiece included an inscription from the Water Gate at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893: "To the Changed America (2017). His previous works brave women who in solitude amid strange dangers and heavy toil include After Cloven Tongues of Fire (2013), and reared families and made homes." Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (1996). He has served as a Trustee of the Institute for Advanced 9. Eliot, Gilley, e.g., 39, 48, 57, 61. Study and of the National Humanities Center. 10. Eliot, Gilley, 24–25, 36, 46, 57–58. 11. Eliot, Gilley, 34–35. Acknowledgments: I thank the editors of Chebacco for the opportunity to 12. Longfellow's heavily didactic ("Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou has taught," etc.) "The Village write this, and I also thank Marie Griffith and Leigh Blacksmith" is conveniently prominent on the website of the Maine Schmidt for putting me in touch with Chebacco and Historical Society: http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem. for their comments on a draft of this essay. I also want php?pid=38. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine and was an to thank my friends John Gillis and Christine Gillis 1825 graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. for their many conversations about Mount Desert 13. Eliot, Gilley, 24. Island and the surrounding islands. I also want to thank the boat captains — whose names I do not 14. Charles W. Eliot, "Address," Popular Science Monthly 7 know — who have conveyed me several times to Baker (1878), 473. See also, for the proximity of clergy to scientists in Island. Eliot's mind, Charles W. Eliot, "On the Education of Ministers," Princeton Review 59 (1883): 345–346. — 15. Eliot, Gilley, 4, 71–72. 1. Charles W. Eliot, John Gilley of Baker's Island 16. Gray's Elegy, written in 1750, was included in Eliot's famous (Eastern National Park and Monument Association, Harvard Classics, vol. 40, 414. It is most easily accessible at https:// 1967), 4, 72. I cite this edition of piece, first published www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a- in book form in 1904 by the American Unitarian country-churchyard. Association but originally published as an article in 17. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier The Century Magazine, 1899. Modern usage is Baker, in American History," first published in 1893, has often been not Baker's, and I will follow the modern practice reprinted. It is easily available from the American Historical except when quoting Eliot. Association in a slightly abbreviated text at https://www.historians. 2. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/ West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american- University Press, 1950), remains after nearly seven history. decades one of the most influential scholarly works 18. For Eliot's career, see Hugh Hawkins, Between Harvard and ever written about the culture of the United States. America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot(New York: 3. Eliot, Gilley, 5, 8, 71. Oxford University Press, 1972). 4. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 19. In a rarely noticed aside, Eliot reported that the Lurvey family (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), esp. 44. Prior of John Gilley's mother descended from a Jewish immigrant from to his death in 2000, Wiebe owned property near Russia. Eliot, Gilley, 9. Bernard and spent many summers there. 5. For evocative hints of what life was really like on Baker Island about the time Eliot wrote and shortly thereafter, see the remarkable collection of photographs, "The Gilley-Stanley Family on Baker

85 Detail of "Angel of Praise," 1893, Louis Comfort Tiffany, USA. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor

86 George Hefflon's Silent Mission

By Tim Garrity

By the causeway at the northern end of the Seawall area of Acadia National Park, a natural pier of granite extends a quarter-mile into the Western Way, the channel that separates Mount Desert Island from Great Cranberry Island. When the water is calm, high tide laps at the base of the ledge. During storms, curling waves overwhelm it, their foamy brims flying in the wind all the way to the causeway. When big waves recede, sea-borne stones rattle back towards the ocean. On a vertical face of this outcrop, someone has carved an inscription: The rock at Seawall is inscribed, "1895–1900 GHH." Photograph by Jennifer Steen Booher 1895–1900 GHH

The meaning of the inscription has Gardiner, then a student at the Harrow School long been a mystery. The most common in London, UK, tried to find the inscription's explanation is that it marks the spot meaning. After a thorough but fruitless search of where a child was swept out to sea and local newspapers, Gardiner went to the Maine State drowned. Annabel Robbins, who owned Archives in Augusta and examined all the birth the nearby Seawall Dining Room, told the records from 1895 and all the death records from Bar Harbor Times in 2007 that a "child 1900 but found no one with corresponding initials was washed out to sea from that spot and lifespan. Gardiner searched news accounts but she couldn't recall the name." Don and obituaries from Mount Desert Island, Boston, Lenahan, in his 2010 book, The Memorials New York, and Philadelphia, but to no avail. He of Acadia National Park, noted that the appealed to the public for answers in a press release inscription might be either "CHH" or published in the Mount Desert Islander in July 2015.2 "GHH" but that "No individual has yet Gardiner's article caught the attention of George been identified to these letters." Lenahan Gilpin, a church historian for the Southwest Harbor concluded, "The mystery remains."1 Congregational Church. Gilpin walked into the In the summers of 2015 and 2016, Theo offices of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society

87 writing a page or so almost every night for twenty-five years, recording his daily experiences and intimate thoughts. He left his entire diary collection to Yale University, his alma mater. We know from his private diaries that he was unsettled in his vocation, was celibate but wished to be married, was poor with few prospects of earning a living wage, and experienced deafness that eventually became total. These personal challenges barred him from some of the things he wanted — a loving marriage, comfortable income, and peace of mind. His impediments also guided him toward the only avenue that seemed open to him — a life of self-sacrifice and service among the poor and the Deaf, a ministry that was appreciated by a wide-spread community of people who needed him.3 Hefflon was born July 10, 1865 in Deep River, Connecticut. The son of a carriage maker and blacksmith, he graduated from Yale in 1891, studied at Drew Theological Seminary, and proceeded to pastoral assignments, George H. Hefflon, undated.Courtesy of Gallaudet University Archives first in Massachusetts, then as a Congregational Minister in Tremont in 1895. When he arrived on Mount Desert Island, he was thirty years old, in the spring of 2018 and said, "I think I know who tall and slim, with thinning hair. He this is." Working in the church archives, Gilpin had a marked hearing impairment that 4 remembered the inscription when he came across the grew more pronounced in time. name of Rev. George H. Hefflon — GHH — who The young pastor immersed himself in served the church as minister from 1895 to 1900. work for the Mount Desert Congregational Gilpin had unlocked the mystery. The life of Church of Tremont, which then had two George Henry Hefflon is quite transparent. Public branches, in Southwest Harbor and Bass records of his life are plentiful but it is his journals Harbor. He preached, visited congregants, that are most revealing. He was a faithful diarist, read, and prepared sermons. Though public reports describe him as well-

88 liked, his diaries reveal the thoughts of a discontented and restless young man. Uncertain about his career, unhappy in his present circumstances, and worried about his future, Hefflon was easily wounded by social slights and irked by difficult people. He felt the sting of little humiliations, as when another minister was asked to officiate at the funeral of one of his congregants, or more painfully, when a member of his church, "said some hateful things. That she thought we ought to have a new minister."5 All around him he saw impoverished and Rev. Hefflon frequently visited the Carroll family and he was unattractive neighborhoods that raised in love with young Nellie Carroll (second from left). Nellie up young people bound for unruly turned down his proposal of marriage. She became Mrs. Seth lives. He wrote of one young man, "I Thornton, the author of a local history, Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor and Somesville. Photograph ca. 1888. never liked the fellow especially since I Courtesy of Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Archive, image 5906 knew of his seducing two Bass H. girls having children by both, and his stealing $25.00 from the debating society."6 He recognized that some people seemed to appreciate him, though they were not always members of his own to go courting some lovely girl." He feared his church. When he filled in for other pastors own desires. "I dread the winter," he wrote, "its and preached at Manset and Seal Cove, temptations to me may be many. I fear myself."8 he reported that "Several spoke kindly His diaries record his attraction to several of my work. In evening had the largest young women of his congregation, among them crowd I have faced in a long time." In the beautiful young Nellie Carroll. Miss Carroll, 1897, he founded the Southwest Harbor alas, did not reciprocate. She tried to let him down Literary Club that was popular among men easy by blaming his profession. She told him that and women in the community. Though she could never be a minister's wife, whose job he would never get rich as a small-town description appealed to her not at all. "She never pastor, he occasionally saw that he could could like church work," he wrote, "never could improve the lives of people around him.7 do it." Hefflon did not handle the rejection well. One problem concerned him When he replied in a letter to Nellie, he wrote, "I most. Hefflon longed for female suspect that she will not like some parts of it."9 companionship. "When work is all over Soon, another young woman caught his eye, I feel thankful," he wrote, "yet empty but left him flummoxed. One evening he, "Saw hearted, starved of sentiment. I'd like Julia K. [Kittridge] and talked awhile with her. I

89 wish that girl would take me for a husband or else Hampshire. While ministering in New leave me alone. I am utterly taken by her." At one Hampshire, he attended Andover Divinity social gathering, he "Had a miserable exhibition School, receiving a degree in 1906. As of my weakness for that girl. I don't know what a student, he found it difficult to hear I shall do." One foggy evening, he came home to lectures. He wrote, "Exams bring to mind find that Julia had slipped a letter under the door my painful limitation." He had difficulty of his room. She said that she could not marry seeing how he would make a living. "Can't him because she was in love with someone else. make out what my future is going to be," He wrote woefully, "I am not fit to live alone. Not he wrote, "church work if I can find it, to get married either. Have little or no confidence or create it. Tough time probably."14 in my ability to take care of myself." His wounds In the early twentieth century, accumulated to the point that he "wished that religious institutions were beginning to there was a new opening in life for me somewhere recognize the needs and potential of Deaf — a new church or better still a new work."10 people and to advocate on their behalf. The Hefflon's hearing loss increased his isolation. Episcopal Church had long been in the His hearing steadily deteriorated in these years forefront of ministry to the Deaf. In 1851, and he would sometimes give up on conversations Rev. Thomas Gallaudet founded St. Ann's that he could not hear. The fact that he had Church for the Deaf in New York City and to lean in close to hear people made him was the first to incorporate sign language familiar with many forms of bad breath.11 into worship services. In November, He found escape from his cares in the outdoors, 1906, Hefflon went to New York with especially in bike riding, even when rough roads and his sister, Jessie, and, "attended St. Ann's dark nights made his exercise dangerous. He would church for deaf mutes — a very interesting often ride his bike from his lodgings in Southwest experience. This is my future work."15 Harbor to Seawall's windswept ledge where, "it Hefflon began to see a path forward. was good to feel the storm buffeting you."12 He started to learn sign language and By 1900, he was ready for a change. Though discovered the presence of a community the church voted in April to retain his services for of Deaf people who seemed to appreciate another year, six months later, the board of deacons his ministry. In 1907, he was ordained reduced his salary from $75 to $50 per month. He a Deacon in the Episcopal Church and applied for an opening at a church in Ellsworth Falls committed himself to serving the Deaf. As and took the job when it was offered to him. Despite he crossed from the hearing to the silent the personal turmoil of the previous five years, he world, Hefflon increasingly accepted his received a nice send off from his congregation. An solitude. "I live by myself," he wrote, "My admiring notice appeared in the newspaper that deafness cuts me off from others. Yet I spoke in glowing terms of his service and regret at am not unhappy in it." In his forties, the his departure. It was, he said, "Hard to leave."13 internal and interpersonal conflicts that Hefflon stayed in Ellsworth Falls less than two troubled his early ministry lessened. As years, then took a church assignment in Dublin, New his own deafness increased, he found his

90 place among the Deaf, and he determined that their physical and spiritual well-being would be his life's work. From 1907 to 1909, Hefflon served as Assistant Minister in Philadelphia's All Souls' Church, learning lip reading and sign language and serving the Deaf of the community.16 He remained a very human saint, however, who continued to fight his discontentment. Once on a crowded train car, he shared a bench with a "frowsy wretch" who fell asleep on his shoulder. The man overwhelmed the preacher with his smell of stale gin, tobacco, and body odor. Hefflon asked himself what Christ would have done and so he tolerated his burden, though inside he recoiled with disgust, imagining a violent cleansing for the fellow, and lamenting his own poverty that forced him to keep such company.17 In his two years in Philadelphia, Hefflon continued to struggle with a sense of weariness and futility. He wrestled against his weakness and temptation.

I know I would steal if I was strongly tempted. It is not easy for me to walk right with God or man. I want Hefflon served as pastor of the Congregational Church on High Road to go into a saloon and drink beer in Southwest Harbor from 1895 to 1900. Mount Desert Island Historical Society and ale when I feel thirsty, I have at times a sort of sensual desire for woman. I can lie, and do sometimes. I distrust myself — am afraid of myself. The possibilities in me for He lamented the misfortunes of his deafness, evil, for easy surrender to the Devil celibacy, and poverty. He wrote, "In work, are horrible. Yet I never will give up in love, in friendship, in aspirations I seem 19 struggling to do the right thing. It to have been balked continually." is a long fight. When people slight Living among the poor, Hefflon began to me I feel it for days without end.18 sympathize with their political causes, including

91 In 1909, Hefflon moved from Philadelphia to Hartford, Connecticut, to take a position with The Episcopal Mission for the Deaf. It was a risky step. Small numbers of Deaf people were scattered about cities in the region, a handful in Springfield, about thirty in Hartford, ten or twenty in Bridgeport, and a dozen or so in New Haven. He wondered how such tiny and wide-spread gatherings could produce the minimal income he would need. He asked, "And how shall I live? God knows."22 Hefflon began his work with "The Silent Mission" in May 1909. Tremont Congregational Church, ca. 1900. Rev. Hefflon A newspaper reporter who visited a often rode his bicycle from Southwest Harbor to the Tremont worship service wrote, "One of the most Congregational Church in Bass Harbor, passing the ledge at peculiar public services ever held in Seawall on his journey. Mount Desert Island Historical Society Hartford was that in the chapel of the Church of the Good Shepherd yesterday afternoon, a service for deaf mutes, those of anarchists and socialists. The Yale peculiar, impressive, and pathetic. It was alumnus, familiar with the privileges of his conducted in silence, the sign and manual wealthy classmates, wrote, "All my sympathies language being used and the audience, are with the poor. I have a sort of hatred in my while small, was most attentive."23 heart of the rich. So selfish — so ostentatious, For Silent Mission services, Hefflon their automobiles, that beautiful luxurious home translated the elegant text of the Book — their every indulgences in fine things — travel, of Common Prayer into sign language. art, fine living, friends, etc. — while 1000s suffer Where the equipment was available, 20 for common comforts all around them." he accompanied his sermons with One cold day in February, 1907, Hefflon saw illustrations from lantern slides and two boys stealing coal from a freight car. A boy motion pictures. At larger mission climbed onto the car and threw down chunks of sites, robed choirs would sign hymns coal to his accomplice, enough to fill two heavy like "Nearer, My God, to Thee," "Lead bags. As one of the boys struggled to drag his load Kindly Light," and "Just as I Am."24 up a bank, Hefflon climbed down to help him. A woman who knew him provides a He saw that the child's stockings showed through sketch of his appearance and personality. holes in his shoes. In his diary that night, Hefflon Margaret Gillen, a granddaughter of Rev. acknowledged that his small act of abetting a theft Thomas Gallaudet, wrote, "His earnest 21 left him feeling that he had really helped someone. speech, gauntness and deep eyes had

92 stirred us deeply — like a voice crying in the wilderness." She also described a lighter side. She wrote, "One day in July, 1917, he met us on a busy Hartford street and made a deep bow, and we promptly dropped him a curtsey, which delighted him."25 Hefflon's immersion into church work mostly eclipsed the discontent of his youth. In 1912, he wrote, "busy till late in evening not a moment to spare. Not time for a bath even. I am a busy man. May God direct me daily amen." But the demands of his work eventually exhausted and overwhelmed him. In 1923, a newsletter for the deaf community reported he would take a respite from his pastoral duties due to ill health. The report said, "The great exertion he put forth to carry forward the Christmas festivities in various cities in New England was too much for him to shoulder and the result was he simply broke down." Hefflon undertook a long convalescence, taking time for rest and recreation. He even learned to play golf.26 Rev. Hefflon kept diaries recording his most intimate thoughts In September, 1924, Hefflon returned nearly every night for twenty-five years. In this entry, he inserts a to Mount Desert Island. Now he was photograph of himself standing with an unknown companion by the fifty-nine years old and feeling the effects entrance to a church in Harford, Connecticut. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare of age. He saw that much had changed Book and Manuscript Library for the better since he left Maine eighteen years before. The quality of steamer transport had improved. Towns and villages were cleaner and more prosperous. eyed 'flapper' who smokes too many cigarettes." He He stayed at the upscale Claremont visited with Grace Carroll, the younger sister of his Hotel, played eighteen holes of golf at former love interest, Nellie Carroll Thornton.27 the course by Norwood Cove, and toured On an afternoon as blue, clear, and mild as a the island from Bar Harbor to Sargeant Maine September can conjure, Hefflon went Drive by auto. With friends, he cruised down to the rocks at Seawall with a party of old by motorboat to Baker Island, Northeast friends. They made a fire and roasted clams and Harbor, and Somes Sound. Among the lobsters, ate crackers, rolls, and olives, and washed party aboard the boat was, "a dear blue- it all down with coffee boiled on the spot. Then,

93 he wrote, "We had fun with the waves. Tide was celibacy, and poverty — guided his path rising and one could stand on a rock and watch towards a life of service to the Deaf. for a wave to catch him, as it invariably did."28 — Returning to Southwest Harbor from Seawall Tim Garrity has served as Executive Director in late afternoon, Hefflon visited a cemetery and of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society the graves of several of his former friends. On since 2010. He has contributed to nine issues Sunday he attended three services, the Episcopal of Chebacco as an author and/or editor. He at St. John's Chapel and Congregational in and his wife, Lynn, reside in Somesville. Southwest Harbor and Bass Harbor. He thought, Acknowledgments: "of those I prayed with, and long walks or bicycle For unlocking the mystery, thanks to Theo Gardiner, rides I took watching the sea, or the sunsets." He George Gilpin, and the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. remembered his old congregants who once filled For editing this issue of Chebacco and recruiting the pews and now were gone. "Happy Memories!" their friends and colleagues to write articles, thanks he once wrote, "Yes, we all have them — glints to Marie Griffith and Leigh Schmidt. Thanks also to of mellow and golden light falling lovingly across Charlotte Morrill and Lynne Birlem, who helped to find images and archival sources at Southwest Harbor the path of the bygone years, mingling with the Public Library. This is for the people in my family shadows of our failures and sorrows and sins — but who have been affected by deafness, including my tender glints of heavenly light just the same."29 father, Thomas Garrity, my daughters, Laura Garrity Hefflon's life came to an end in April 1925. In Peterson and Megan Garrity, and my grandson, Oscar Peterson. Providence, Rhode Island, he stepped out of an automobile and into the path of a street car. He was — struck down and severely injured. The news of his 1. Bar Harbor Times, 2007, (Clipping in the files of death three days later brought shock and sorrow to Mount Desert Island Historical Society. The precise date is unknown); Don Lenahan, The Memorials of Mount Desert Island and to the Deaf community Acadia National Park (Bar Harbor: Printed by author, throughout New England. Said one eulogist, "No 2010), 69. more self-sacrificing and self-immolating man 2. Mount Desert Islander, July 23, 2015. ever lived. How he subsisted on his infinitesimally 3. I follow the custom of using the upper-case "D," small stipend is incomprehensible. He served the "Deaf" to designate the culture of Deaf people who primarily use sign language to communicate and cause of the deaf, and carried to them the office lower-case "d" to indicate the medical condition of and comforts of the Church, with zeal and love, deafness. 30 and they should ever revere his memory." 4. At the time, the town of Tremont included the In my search of diary entries in the Hefflon villages of Southwest Harbor and Bass Harbor. Southwest Harbor separated from Tremont in 1905, collection at Yale, I did not find an acknowledgment becoming its own town; Obituary Record of Yale that he inscribed the rock at Seawall. But it seems Graduates, 1924–25, Bulletin of Yale University, New certain that Hefflon is the subject and probable Haven, Twenty First Series, August 25, 1925, No. 22. that he is the author of the carving. The rock at 5. George H. Hefflon Diary, manuscript, June 1, 1900, box 1, MSS-51, Beinecke Rare Book and Seawall, with its inscription, "1895–1900 GHH" Manuscript Library, Yale University. Hereafter diary marks the sojourn of a man who struggled as a references are given as "Hefflon Diaries, (date), (box young pastor here for five years and then moved on, number). until the misfortunes that vexed him — deafness,

94 6. Hefflon Diaries, April 14, 1900, box 1; Hefflon Diaries, September 2, 1899, box 1. 7. Hefflon Diaries, June 3, 1900, box 1; Mrs. Seth Thornton, Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor and Somesville (Auburn, ME: Merrill & Webber, 1938), 123; Hefflon Diaries, December 12, 1900, box 1. 8. Hefflon Diaries, April 8, 1900 and September 2, 1889. 9. Hefflon Diaries, September 25 and October 2, 1889, box 1. Nellie later became Mrs. Seth Thornton and published a popular local history. 10. Hefflon Diaries, April 10, 18, and 19, 1900, box 1. 11. Hefflon Diaries, April 12, 1900 and May 24, 1900, box 1. 12. Hefflon Diaries, April 10, 1900 and October 14, 1900, box 1. 13. Hefflon Diaries, May 17, 1900, box 1; Hefflon Diaries, October 15, 1900, box 1; Hefflon Diaries, October 14, 1900, box 1; Bar Harbor Record, November 7, 1900; Bar Harbor Record, November 7, 1900; Hefflon Diaries, November 14, 1900, box 1. 14. Hefflon Diaries, November 1, 1906, box 2. 15. Hefflon Diaries, November 11, 1906, box 2. 16. Hefflon Diaries, November 11, 1906, box 1; Ibid, March 24, 1909 and April 16, 1909, box 2. Detail of "The Flight into Egypt," 1891, Louis Comfort Tiffany, 17. Hefflon Diaries, March 28, 1909, box 2. USA. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor 18. Hefflon Diaries, April 9, 1909, box 2. 19. Ibid. 20. Hefflon Diaries, December 7, 1908, box 2. 25. Otto Benjamin Berg, A Missionary Chronicle: Being a History 21. Hefflon Diaries, February 7, 1908, box 2. of the Ministry to the Deaf in the Episcopal Church (1850–1980) 22. Jack R. Gannon, Deaf Heritage: A Narrative (Hollywood, MD: St. Mary's Press, 1984), 105. History of Deaf America (Washington, DC: Gallaudet 26. Hefflon Diaries, December 5, 1912, box 2; "The Deaf World," University Press, 2012), 185; Hefflon Diaries, April 9, The Silent Worker35, no. 7 (April, 1923): 304. accessed 5 January, 1909, box 2. 2019. https://archive.org/details/silentworkerv35n7 23. "The Silent Mission," Hartford Courant, May 3, 27. Hefflon Diaries, September 6 and 7, 1924, box 4. 1909, clipping in Hefflon Diaries, May 17, 1909, box 2. 28. Hefflon Diaries, September 6, 1924, box 4. 29. Hefflon Diaries, September 7, 1924, box 4; George H. Hefflon 24. Preston Barr Jr., "The Silent Mission in New England," The Spirit of Missions 86, no. 7 (July, 1921): to Friends of the Christian Endeavor Society, Southwest Harbor, 468. accessed September 15, 2018. https://tinyurl. ME, June 4, 1912, Southwest Harbor Congregational Church. com/ybastpbp 30. Berg, A Missionary Chronicle, 105.

95 Detail of "Chanukah," 1986, Nancy O'Neal. Beth Abraham Orthodox Synagogue, Bangor

96 From Harvard's Semitic Museum to Mount Desert Island and Back

By Mikeal C. Parsons

"Kind Lord, we thank his family, one of its few practicing Jews.2 Schiff's thee for the Grace presence there was encouraged by Harvard President Which brought us to Charles W. Eliot. The friendship between these this pleasant place. two is well-documented. As Judith Goldstein has And now, O Lord, we humbly pray pointed out: "Theirs was a unique friendship — one Thou'lt keep all other folk away." that flourished on Mount Desert — between the Nancy Saunders Toy to liberal educator and the philanthropist, the Brahmin Woodrow Wilson and the German immigrant, the Unitarian and the Jew. It was one of the very few of its kind in In a letter to her longtime friend, the social history of Mount Desert."3 But what was President Woodrow Wilson, Nancy Toy the origin of this friendship? This essay traces the attributed this "ditty" about Mount development of that friendship and then focuses Desert Island, and more specifically Seal on the lives on Mount Desert Island of those two Harbor, to a "Miss Wooten."1 In the late Harvard professors, Crawford Howell Toy and nineteenth century, Nancy Saunders Toy David Lyon, who facilitated that relationship. had become a regular summer resident The story begins in May 1879, when the Board of Seal Harbor along with her husband, of Trustees of the Southern Baptist Theological Crawford Howell Toy, Hancock Professor Seminary voted to accept the letter of resignation of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at of C. H. Toy, then professor of Old Testament Harvard University. The Toys were part of and Hebrew. Toy's embrace of historical criticism a steady stream of Harvard dons and their and Darwinism caused friction with some of the families who populated Mount Desert Southern Baptist constituency of the Seminary. Island during the late nineteenth and Toy left Louisville and was doing menial editorial early twentieth centuries. The Toys' story work in New York City (despite having been elected is intertwined with the stories of Jacob President of the American Philological Society) Schiff, Charles Eliot, and David Lyon, when he came to the attention of President Eliot.4 each of whom also played a central role Eliot learned about Toy's situation at Southern and in the founding and establishment of the went to New York to interview Toy.5 Apparently, Semitic Museum at Harvard University. Eliot was determined to hire a non-Unitarian In the late nineteenth and early in the Hancock Chair of Hebrew and Oriental twentieth centuries, financier and Languages in his effort to expand the Divinity School philanthropist Jacob Schiff was one of beyond its current vision as a training ground for the most prominent summer residents of regional Unitarian ministers. Toy was hired and Mount Desert Island, and, along with began teaching at Harvard in October 1880.

97 Crawford Howell Toy (left) and David Gordon Lyon (right). Along with Jacob Schiff and Charles W. Eliot, they played a central role in the founding and establishment of the Semitic Museum at Harvard University. Photographs courtesy of Harvard Divinity School

Two years later, Harvard hired Toy's former the Hollis Chair, the oldest Chair at the student at Southern Seminary, David Lyon, who university, by noting that the benefactor upon Toy's advice had pursued graduate studies at of the chair, Thomas Hollis, had been the University of Leipzig. Eliot, presumably acting on a Baptist: "One hundred and sixty- Toy's recommendation, offered Lyon the prestigious one years after the establishment of the Hollis Chair. Whether because he was an untested professorship, a member of the Baptist thirty year-old or because he was another Baptist communion is at last elected to it."7 (or perhaps both), the appointment was approved After a couple of years on the by the Corporation, but not unanimously (as was faculty, Toy and Lyon made known their usually the case with Eliot recommendations).6 In interest in "the exploration of the ancient part, Eliot justified the appointment of Lyon to Semites in Western Asia."8 To that end,

98 The Semitic Museum housed thousands of artifacts collected from Near Eastern countries, including these Palestinian costumes (left) and Palmyrene busts and musical instruments (right). These were photographed in 1903. Courtesy Harvard Semitic Museum

99 Quatrefoil window above St. Francis and St. Christopher windows, 1968, Willet Windows. Church of Our Father, Hulls Cove

100 the university purchased a few Assyrian inscriptions and bas-reliefs. In 1887–88, three small collections of Babylonian tablets were purchased. Toy and Lyon hoped these purchases might lead to the establishment of a Semitic Museum on the Harvard campus. Lyon shared this hope in 1888 with recent Harvard graduate James Loeb, who told Lyon that his brother-in- law, Jacob H. Schiff, might be interested in such an endeavor. Loeb arranged a meeting between Lyon and Schiff in January 1889 in the home of Loeb's parents in New York.9 Lyon also met with President Eliot about the possibility of raising funds for a Semitic Museum.10 Both meetings proved momentous. Jacob Schiff suggested the possibility The Semitic Museum at Harvard University was founded in of establishing a "great Semitic Museum 1889. A permanent building, illustrated here, was dedicated in in 1892 in connection with the observance 1903 and today holds more than 40,000 Near Eastern artifacts. Courtesy Harvard Semitic Museum of the four hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain."11 Though the museum would take a much different shape, its idea was born.12 Following the first meeting of a newly homes. "Whatever other reasons may have led Mr. formed Semitic Museum Committee Schiff to select Bar Harbor as one of his summer (which Schiff chaired for twenty-five houses, the nearness of President Eliot, only a few years), Lyon reported that "Mr. Schiff was miles away, must have been a strong additional President Eliot's guest at luncheon and attraction."15 From at least 1903 until his death in there began a beautiful friendship which 1920, Schiff and his family lodged each August gave great pleasure to each of these strong at Bar Harbor. In recognition of his donations to and far-sighted [men]." This "interest in the the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association, affairs of the Semitic Department" forged a mountain trail was named for Schiff.16 "a special bond" between the two men.13 Schiff and Eliot were not the only two persons All told, Schiff contributed more than associated with the Semitic Museum who spent $300,000 to the building of the Harvard parts of their summers on Mount Desert Island. Semitic Museum and its related activities.14 Both Toy and Lyon vacationed there at the end The professional alliance soon of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth blossomed into a personal friendship centuries, though neither was wealthy enough to that included proximity in their summer own or rent a summer home. In 1888, Crawford

101 Toy married Nancy Saunders, of Norfolk, Virginia, The Lyons returned to Seal Harbor and they soon began spending summer weeks at July 21–August 24, 1891, and took a Glencove Hotel in Seal Harbor. In one of their room at the Glencove, where the Toys earliest visits to Glencove, Toy reports to Lyon that typically resided (July 21).20 That year the "the weather is delightful, fair, and the company Toys did not arrive until August 12, and at the hotel good."17 Toy also related a story at a Lyon and Toy attended a baseball game dinner party about Harvard Law Professor James at Northeast Harbor the next day. On Thayer that (unconsciously) reveals a bit of the class August 16, Lyon preached a sermon on tension between year-round residents and summer Jeremiah in the chapel, presumably at the occupants: "the man who takes care of his house invitation of President Eliot. Apparently, at Bar Harbor; being askt of what Mr. Thayer was preaching on Mount Desert Island was professor, he replied, 'oh, he's professor of the whole "high stakes"; Lyon spent the better part damn thing'."18 We know little about Toy's daily of a month working on this sermon.21 life on Mount Desert Island beyond his presence He and Toy again rowed to Northeast there, but we know of his great affection for the Harbor to watch another baseball game place. Mrs. Toy had his cremated ashes spread (August 20). They played a card game, over the shoreline of his beloved summer home, popular at the time, known as Casino. another sign of his (and their) love of the place. He and Tosca also participated in a From his diary, we know a good deal more about Soap Bubble Party. He spent a good deal David Lyon's time on Mount Desert Island. For of this vacation reading Walter Scott's example, just months after the fateful meeting with recently published journal (Aug 20). Jacob Schiff in New York in May, David Lyon and After a summer on Martha's Vineyard his wife, Tosca, spent August 24–September 9, 1889, in 1892, the Lyons returned to Bar on the island.19 The Lyons' activities were varied and Harbor in 1893, even though they were many. They took a buckboard ride on August 24 and in the midst of building a new home that evening attended a singing service (a regular in Cambridge.22 He gave a lecture on event on Sunday nights). On August 26, he had a some of the Assyrian finds housed in "most lovely walk with Tosca and Mrs. Toy," and the Semitic Museum, sponsored by the later in the week took a row with Toy (Aug 30). But Jesup Memorial Library (Aug 1).23 Once it was not all play; Lyon read part of a manuscript by again, Lyon records his impressions of Toy, which would later be published as Quotations Eliot: "C.W. Eliot the man in his summer in the New Testament (Aug 28). The Lyons were home is very different from C.W.E. invited to spend a few days at President and Mrs. the official in Cambridge" (July 19). Eliot's summer home, where they played games in In 1909, we have the first report of the the evening (Sept 5). Lyon observed that President Lyons visiting with the Schiffs on Mount Eliot showed much interest in "the natives," inquiring Desert Island (Aug 16), but it was by no about their activities and evincing a familiarity with means the last. Whether at Seabright, several individuals (Sept 5). After their four days NJ, or Bar Harbor, Lyon reports, "it with the Eliots, Lyon remarks that he had learned was always a joy to be a guest in the of the "gentler side" of "Eliot's character" (Sept 9). refined and hospitable home of Mr. and

102 Mrs. Schiff. There was daily something of interest going on, a drive, a stroll, a short walk, a call, or receiving visitors. In the guest book one read the names of generals, statesmen, ambassadors, scholars, financiers, philanthropists, editors, men eminent in the business world. … In the country Mr. Schiff was a great walker. He patronized the bicycle also, and though fond of the wheel myself, I can never forget my rashness in venturing to go out with him on one of his rides."24 Lyon provides a rare and intimate glimpse in the private practice of Jewish faith on Mount Desert Island: "The prayer at table before eating, spoken by the father or one of the children or grand-children, was a beautiful feature at mealtime, always ending: 'Continue to bless us with thy favor, that we may share our plenty with others less fortunate than ourselves. Blessed be thy name forever.'"25 Lyon's experience with Schiff's family, along with his commitment to championing David Gordon and Tosca Lyon traveled to the Near East in the rights of religious minorities — a 1902. Here they are shown in Luxor, Egypt in January 1902. conviction rooted in his Baptist faith — Courtesy Harvard Semitic Museum served him well. In 1922, near the end of Lyon's career at Harvard, President Lawrence Lowell (who succeeded Eliot in 1909) tried to place a limit on the Princeton University, met at a summer institute in number of Jews admitted to Harvard 1894 on the Massachusetts coast, where both Toy College.26 Lyon led the faculty opposition and Wilson were lecturing on ethics. All native and, after several rancorous encounters, Virginians, they were drawn to each other, especially successfully forced Lowell and his Nancy and Woodrow. Wilson described Nancy to his supporters to withdraw the proposal.27 wife as an "altogether delightful" young woman.29 Nancy Toy, whose "ditty" is cited Wilson and Mrs. Toy exchanged correspondence over at the beginning of this essay, provides the ensuing years, discoursing on matters that ranged another dimension of insight into life from personal to professional. Wilson even invited on Mount Desert Island.28 The Toys and Mrs. Toy to visit the White House in January 1915, Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at during which time she kept a diary of her visit.30 In

103 Detail of Whiting memorial window, ca. 1967, artist unknown. Church of Our Father, Hull's Cove

104 her correspondence with Woodrow Wilson, and the fragrance of fir trees accompanying Nancy Toy made frequent reference to her the rocks to the water's edge. Inside central summer routine, often in terms of what the heating, open wood fires, bathrooms galore residents were saying about the President. furnish the physical comfort, and Mr. Rhodes' One particularly revealing episode comes bed-room is the most beautiful I have ever seen. from a letter from Toy to Wilson, in which I walked over the rocks yesterday, amazed and she shares what she had heard on her stroll sorrowful that anybody with such a house at around the island regarding whether or such a place could leave it for Switzerland. Two not the United States should enter the of my best-summer friends have died during conflict beginning to emerge in Europe the winter and the very best is too ill to come (WWI). Wilson, of course, had adopted — "For when we're there, although 'tis fair, a position of neutrality at the beginning 'Twill be another Yarrow!"33 of the war, a policy he would eventually abandon. In a revealing throwaway line, Much of the planning and implementation for she refers to the various walking paths the Semitic Museum by Lyon, Schiff, Eliot, and Toy as the "real Seal Harbor salon."31 occurred during the summers, when several and Some years later in 1922, after Wilson sometimes all of them were conducting working had left office and her husband had vacations on Mount Desert Island.34 Harvard's died, Nancy Toy returned to Seal Semitic Museum was both a cause and a result of Harbor and wrote Wilson from the those relationships. Professional alliances developed Seaside Inn, providing a glimpse of and personal friendships deepened, and an accidental the living quarters of one occasional kind of symbiosis emerged between Mount Desert and wealthy summer resident: Island and the Semitic Museum. The diaries and correspondences between these four individuals, I have had a bit of Paradise here for a along with Nancy Toy, provide, for those with eyes week — sea, woods, mountains and open and ears attuned, an intimate, if inadvertent, trails, huge log hotel fires all my own glimpse into life on Mount Desert Island among with a few old acquaintances. With four liberal Protestants and a Jewish benefactor who one difference, however, from the were, or became, summer residents of "Paradise" in dwellers in the real Paradise. I fancy: the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. my heart is aching to have somebody — I love to enjoy it with me — notably, Mikeal Parsons is the Kidd L. and Buna Hitchcock Macon you and Mrs. Wilson. I wish you Chair in Religion at Baylor University, where he has taught would come and take possession of since 1986. He is the author or editor of some two dozen Mr. Rhodes'32 jewel of a house; it is books. Along with art historian Heidi J. Hornik, Parsons co- authored The Acts of the Apostles Through the Centuries renting for a song, I hear — can't (2008) and the trilogy, Illuminating Luke (2003). His you sing it? Such a wonderful "flying current project, A "Frank and Somewhat Full" Account verandah," glassed in on three of Crawford Howell Toy: The Man, the Scholar, and the sides and nothing between you and Teacher looks at the career of C.H. Toy, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Harvard University. the south of France but the ocean

105 Acknowledgments: 12. The museum opened in 1891 as a new section Appreciation is expressed to the Harvard University Archives of the Peabody Museum. The building itself on for permission to publish from their rich collections of historical Divinity Avenue was open to the public in 1903. materials. In addition, Dr. Joseph Greene, Deputy Director and "Semitic" may have meant different things to Schiff Curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum, provided images of the and Lyon. For Schiff, it may have been a code word for "Jewish"; for Lyon the term functioned as a Semitic Museum and its holdings and David and Tosca Lyon. socio-linguistic descriptor. See Joseph A. Green, "A Maureen Jennings, Head of the Special Collections, Andover- Complicated Legacy: The Original Collections of the Harvard Theological Library, supplied pictures of Toy and Lyon. Semitic Museum," Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Finally, I am grateful to Leigh Schmidt and Marie Griffith for the Archaeology and Heritage Studies 5 (2017): 60. At invitation to contribute to this special issue and to Tim Garrity for the museum's opening, Crawford Toy explained the his guidance in preparing the essay for publication. expansive mission of the enterprise, which included but went beyond Schiff's vision of combating rampant — antisemitism in America and especially Europe. Toy 1. Nancy Toy to Woodrow Wilson, February 6, 1915, Papers of said: Woodrow Wilson, microfilm reel 535, series 2. The title "Semitic Museum" is justified by the unity of the material. The Semitic 2. Judith S. Goldstein, "Making America Work: A Look at languages, though distinct dialects, are very Christians and Jews on Mount Desert Island," The History Journal closely related to one another, the various of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society 3 (2000): 37. Semitic civilizations are in important respects 3. Ibid. identical. The field, however, is large in space and time. It embraces eight nations; it 4. See Mikeal C. Parsons, A "Frank and Somewhat Full" Account includes almost all of Western Asia and a part of Crawford Howell Toy: The Man, the Scholar, and the Teacher of Africa and the Mediterranean Islands and (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, forthcoming). coasts; it goes back four millenniums before 5. Charles W. Eliot to Mr. Hulburt, November 23, 1920, Papers the beginning of our era. ("Opening of the of Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, box 231, Harvard University Harvard Semitic Museum: Addresses by Pres. Archives. Eliot, Prof Toy, Curator Lyon and Mr. Jacob H. Schiff," The American Hebrew [May 1892]: 6. Minutes for September 13, 1882," Overseer's Records, 1871–1882, 67–70; here 67 in UAI 5.150, box 217, folder vol. XI, Harvard University Archives; David G. Lyon to Charles W. 47.2, Records of the President of Harvard Eliot, September 2, 1901, Papers of Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, University Charles William Eliot.) box 52. 7. Harvard University, President's Report for 1881–82, Annual Harvard's Semitic Museum provided a stimulus for Harvard reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 1881– to join Johns Hopkins University in pioneering the study of 1882, 27–28. Elsewhere, Eliot explained that the responsibilities Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Culture in North of the Hollis Chair had been distributed among five different America. professorships. 13. Lyon, "Relations of Jacob H. Schiff to Harvard 8. David G. Lyon, "Relations of Jacob H. Schiff to Harvard University," 3. University," 1, Lyon Papers, box 16, Harvard University Archives. 14. Naomi Wiener Cohen, Jacob A. Schiff: A Study in 9. Ibid. American Jewish Leadership (Hanover, NH: University 10. Lyon Papers, Diary, January 10, 1889, box 6. Press of New England, 1999), 76–78; Lyon, "Relations of Jacob H. Schiff to Harvard University," 11. Lyon, "Relations of Jacob H. Schiff to Harvard University," 2. 65–66.

106 15. Lyon, "Relations of Jacob H. Schiff to Harvard 30. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 32: 7–10, 21–22. University," 3. 31. Nancy Toy to Woodrow Wilson. Seal Harbor, ME. July 16. "Mount Desert Island," Crossing Lines (Sept/Oct 17, 1915. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 33: 517–18. The writer of 1992): 33. "international law" was most likely E.H. Strobel, Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard. 17. Toy to Lyon, 28 July 1890, David Lyon Papers, Semitic Museum Archives, Harvard University, 32. James Ford Rhodes was a successful American industrialist who Cambridge, MA. retired before the age of forty, moved from Cleveland, OH, to Cambridge, MA, and became a devoted historian, publishing 18. Toy, March 8, 1900, 900.11, box 4, Harvard University Archives. multiple volumes on U.S. history. 33. Nancy Toy to Woodrow Wilson, July 2, 1922, Papers of 19. Lyon Papers, Diary 1889, 1872–1935, HUG 1541, box 6, vol. 6. Woodrow Wilson, Microfilm Series 535. Toy's quote is from William Wordsworth's poem, "Yarrow Unvisited." 20. Lyon Papers, Diary 1891, 1872–1935, HUG 1541, box 6, vol. 7. 34. For example, President Eliot wrote Lyon from Northeast Harbor on numerous occasions about various details regarding the Semitic 21. Elsewhere in the diary, Lyon reports on preaching Museum. See e.g., Charles W. Eliot to David G. Lyon, August 5, at his home church, The Old Cambridge Baptist 1898; September 11, 1900; August 17, 1902. Eliot's interest in the Church, but does not indicate he spent nearly the time Museum continued even after his retirement; see Charles W. Eliot to on that sermon preparation as he did on this sermon. Julius Rosenwald, September 15, 1913. The preceding 22. Lyon does make a quick trip to Northeast Harbor correspondence is located in the Lyon Papers, HUG 1541, box 12. (Aug 25–27) to report to Eliot on his excavation After a period of neglect, especially during and following WWII, findings. Harvard's Semitic Museum today is a flourishing university museum that, under the directorship of Dr. Peter Der Manuelian, has 23. Lyon Papers, Diary, 1893, HUG 154, box 6, vol. 9. continued to fulfill and expand the original vision proposed by Lyon 24. Lyon, "Relations of Jacob H. Schiff to Harvard and Toy. See https://semiticmuseum.fas.harvard. edu/. University," 11, 12. 25. Lyon, "Relations of Jacob H. Schiff to Harvard University," 12. 26. Lyon Papers, Diary, May 9, 1922, box 9. 27. Lyon Papers, box 16, folder [Admission of Jews to Harvard, 1922–1923], 1. 28. Although I have yet to find any supporting evidence, it is tempting, given their long-standing relationship, to think that Nancy Saunders Toy may have had some role to play in Woodrow Wilson's approval of Eliot's proposal to create Acadia National Park. 29. Woodrow Wilson to Ellen Axson Wilson, July 16, 1894, Arthur Link, ed., Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 8:610.

107 Detail of "Shabbat," 1986, Nancy O'Neal. Beth Abraham Orthodox Synagogue, Bangor

108 The Jewish Presence, or Absence Thereof…

By Judith S. Goldstein

American history is an essential part new bounty of democratic practices. As a testing of our national enterprise, embracing a ground for both conservative and progressive ideas, unique identity, mission and culture of Mount Desert Island fostered one of America's unlimited opportunities. Within that great conservation efforts that ultimately benefited history, land was the prize. It was the basic an inclusive national and international public. source of wealth, prosperity and mythology In Landscape and Memory, the historian Simon on a continent inhabited by Native Schama linked "continental expansiveness" with "the Americans before the insatiable incursions heroic destiny of the New World." This was a macro from European countries. This magisterial American perspective of national pride and identity. national vision purports to benefit all He also invoked the micro: "the landscapes can be as pioneers, settlers, frontiersmen and self-consciously designed to express the virtues of a women, and preservationists wrested particular political or social community." The history America's democracy and power from the of Mount Desert Island partakes of both perspectives. land. In practice, the land has been used Rusticators — the summer residents — populated to benefit some at the often-dire expense an exquisite island to reinvigorate America's "heroic of others. Violence and unequal access to destiny" as well as built a community based on resources resulted in compromises and Anglo-Saxon culture and Protestant faith.1 contradictions in the national ethos. According to the seminal American social and Mount Desert Island, starting in political historian John Higham, summer colonies the late 1800s, has a special place in reflected a loss of faith, particularly among a cadre of the American narrative of land-based Boston's Brahmin intelligentsia, in the late nineteenth exclusion and inclusion, particularly in and early twentieth centuries.2 Urbanization, regard to a Jewish presence — or absence industrialization, advances in transportation, and the thereof. The summer social colonies that unwanted presence of millions of new immigrants flourished from the 1880s into the mid- from eastern and southern Europe, especially Jews, twentieth century provided the island with drove the desire to escape from fetid summer cities. its first taste of national prominence. Its At the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, Mount Desert reputation, and eventually its idealized Island attracted patricians, the new rich, academics history, was founded on a blend of old and professionals, mainly from eastern cities. and new wealth and society. Despite its By the turn of the century, the presence of glitter, the summer colony drew much millions of poor Jews threatened the confidence of of its force from a pessimistic view of upper class Protestant society. Escaping restrictive, America's future. Paradoxically, the dual impoverished and often violent societies, Jews seeds of wealth and despair contained a sought refuge in America. By 1914, in New York

109 alone about 1.3 million Jews lived in tenements dominance and authority for long. The and slums with a distinct religion, language and local economy, along with much of New culture, meager economic assets, and strikingly England's rural population, stagnated different physical appearances.3 Included among in the post-Civil War period. Then, in the "new immigrants" of Slavs and Italians, Jews another reversal of fortune, the island were deemed of lesser value than America's "old residents found new sources of income immigrants" and as un-American and destructive and work as the rusticators constructed of the founders' work and mission. Among the new their communities of exclusion and immigrants, Jews were the most visible, upwardly Anglo-Saxon renewal. Much of the local mobile and aspiring as they sought to tap into the population converted itself, absent the country's resources and established societies. labor strife present in cities, into a service Within the inter-city aristocracy, fear and economy to erect and maintain the competitive tensions led to xenophobia, nativism, lavish physical and social infrastructure and new forms of racism. "For the New Englander," required for summer colonies. the historian Barbara Miller Solomon wrote, "the The perfect combination of a stunning, immigrant, like the Southern Negro and the rude cool natural landscape and Anglo-Saxon Westerner, was a semi-barbarian, outside 'the foundations produced new value and social pale of civilization.'"4 She further observed that investments on the island. The acclaimed "Four generations removed from New England's summer colonies of the late nineteenth prime, these Brahmins entered adulthood in century pioneered in land-based prejudice. the 1890s with the conviction that neither the "It was after all at the beaches and economic nor the social promises of democracy watering-places," wrote Harvard historians seemed to work in the divided society of rich and Oscar and Mary Handlin, "that the poor, native and foreigner, educated and illiterate, putative aristocracy was most anxious Anglo-Saxon and the scum of Europe."5 to withdraw to itself so that appropriate Designed to reinforce Anglo-Saxon wealth, groups' feelings would be cultivated and prestige and dominance, the Mount Desert Island so that the proper friendships among the model of escape spread throughout the country. At young people would grow into proper a propitious time, Bar Harbor, Northeast Harbor, marriages. … As the century drew to and Seal Harbor entered the national narrative a close, the pattern of exclusion spread as three jewels in the competitive and socially back from the resorts to the cities, stratified constellations of the Gilded Age. The penetrated the clubs and societies, and wealthy invaders — the rusticators — fit their even the philanthropic associations."6 new communities into the Protestant foundations Louis Marshall, a brilliant legal of hardworking, resourceful, white "colonial mind and leader of the newly established settlers." They built modest villages after having American Jewish Committee, testified to eliminated the claims to the island's land from the efficacy of the exclusionary strategy in Native Americans, French and British explorers, summer resorts. Referring to an incident and land-hungry entrepreneurs. The settlers and of discrimination, Marshall wrote: their descendants, however, did not maintain their

110 been carried to such an extent that printed advertisements and announcements appear in the newspapers, circulars, letters, cards, railroad literature etc., announcing that the owners of various hotels and places of amusement do not solicit or cater to Hebrew patronage, or have exclusively Christian patronage, or in other offensive ways discriminate against Jews.7

As the forces of discrimination against Jews intensified in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, patrician snobbery and prejudice started to morph into pseudo-scientific beliefs based on racial categories. Eugenics sought to preserve northern European, Anglo-Saxon white society. The new theories, constituting an ideology, not only reinforced perennial anti-black and anti-Native American racial attitudes but also expanded these attitudes to include Jews in America. Through sterilization, miscegenation laws, and restrictions on immigration, eugenicists sought to stem social contagion and the deterioration of the American democracy. In 1881, the humor magazine Puck illustrated The American eugenics movement, in concert the segregation of Jews in resort communities. with European scientists and ideologues, developed Courtesy of the Library of Congress roots in New York, Boston and soon, nationwide. Eugenicists touched down on Mount Desert Island through three leading figures of the American Eugenics Society: Dr. Clarence Cook Little, founder This is but one of hundreds of of the Jackson Laboratory, Madison Grant, author incidents of like nature which have of the The Passing of the Great Race, and David Starr occurred not only in New Jersey Jordan, the first President of Stanford University. but in New York and New England The three could be sure that on Mount Desert Island during the past ten years, and they would not mix with Jews, whom they considered conditions are now such that there is undesirable and inferior. In fact, there was hardly scarcely a hotel in Atlantic City, in a Jewish presence. Over several decades, only a few the Adirondacks, Catskills or on the Jews had come to the island: peddlers who traveled New England coast which does not from Bangor to the island; a small number of store make it most uncomfortable for any owners in Bar Harbor; and a few distinguished Jew who desires accommodations. men such as Jacob Schiff and Henry Morgenthau, Of recent years this abuse has who reached heights of financial power and sought

111 entry into the summer colony on Mount Desert Island. But the island's reputation held firm as a refuge from diversity. Of the three, Little left the strongest impression on the island. George B. Dorr, a Boston Brahmin who dedicated his life to protecting the island's landscape and promoting it as a site of scientific and cultural distinction, invited Little to establish the Jackson Laboratory in 1929. Although the Lab, under Little's strong leadership, apparently never focused on eugenics research, he consistently maintained his strong credentials in the eugenics movement. He was a founding member of the Eugenics Committee of the United States of America, and served as President of the American Eugenics Society from 1928–1929. He remained on its board as an active advocate from 1923 to 1935.8 David Starr Jordan, president of Cornell and then Stanford, was an established educator and scientist who enjoyed a prominent public role and distinction as an island visitor. While Starr Clarence Cook Little sat for this portrait in 1951, when he was President of the University of Michigan. Courtesy of the did not endorse the extreme measures of University of Michigan sterilization or immigration restriction as did Little, Jordan thought the new immigrants incapable of meeting American standards. In 1924 he wrote: "It is easy to recognize that the Irish, the Greeks, the South Italians and the Polish Jews contain largely elements permanently deficient in the best traits we hope for in America. … They are controlled by emotions, animal instincts, subliminal tendencies and the like, instead of by brains and will. A republic can be successful only to the degree in which men of self-control, governed by their minds, are in the lead."9

112 The third prominent eugenicist summer visitor was Madison Grant. A rich member of New York society, he emerged as the impassioned leader of the American and international eugenics movement supported by scientists, politicians, educators and journalists. Grant's major work, The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916 and again in 1923, was the handbook of the anti-immigrant movement that Hitler referred to as "my Bible."10 Mount Desert was the perfect place for Grant to nurture two of his passionate causes: promoting the Anglo-Saxon heritage through eugenics and protecting America's landscape. He was a prominent figure in the Save the Redwoods League, several national parks, the American Museum of Natural History, and the New York Zoological Society. In Grant's mind, eugenics and conservation stemmed from the same source. The dual goals were, in Grant's words, "attempts to save David Starr Jordan, island visitor and President of Stanford University, as much as possible of the old America." wrote: "It is easy to recognize that the Irish, the Greeks, the South According to his biographer, Jonathan Italians and the Polish Jews contain largely elements permanently Peter Spiro, the two objectives meshed deficient in the best traits we hope for in America."Courtesy of Bancroft perfectly — a superior white race was the Library, University of California protector of blessed American landscape.11 While most conservationists were wealthy and patrician — and many were deeply disturbed by the "new immigrants" — not all conservationists shared Grant's racist exclusionary views as a justification for protecting America's landscape. In fact, guardians of land, as David Brooks referred to them, discovered new frontiers of the spirit.12 On Mount Desert Island, the spirit emerged through the perseverance of Charles W. Eliot, one

113 Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race described "Nordic" people as the "blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe" and "Alpine" people as the "dark-haired, dark-eyed" of southern Europe. His book was known as the Bible of the anti-immigrant movement.

114 of New England's greatest progressive in the country intensified in employment, thinkers. His inspiration came in part residential housing, educational institutions, from his son, also Charles Eliot, an medical practices, and cultural associations. imaginative and strategic-thinking By the 1920s and into the 1930s, Mount Desert Boston landscape architect who worked Island was no longer the thriving summer center of to preserve the city's landscape to meet an intercity Christian aristocracy or the front line the needs of a growing public. Starting in of prejudice. The Depression cut through the old the early years of the twentieth century, wealth, although many families remained committed Charles W. Eliot, George B. Dorr, and to the island. The aura of exclusion and prejudice John D. Rockefeller Jr. contrived to keep prevailed as the summer colonies supported clubs major parts of the island's landscape and hotels that held tightly to the keys of exclusion. free from balkanized private ownership The local population of the island proved to be and commercial development. In fertile ground for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. 1916, thousands of acres of the island's Two of the largest popular demonstrations in the mountains and forests were donated to island's history took place in Bar Harbor and the federal government to establish the Northeast Harbor in 1924.14 Although drawn from first national park east of the Mississippi different classes, the Klan, with 30,000 members River. In exchange for protection of the in Maine, and the eugenics movement were agents landscape, the national public gained of white supremacy intersecting on the island. ownership and access irrespective of It was only after the Second World War that race, religion, or national ancestry. the powerful grip of patrician anti-Semitism and Such were the cross-currents eugenic beliefs began to break down throughout of American democracy. While the country. The war transformed America: it conservationists opened the land to the became the leader of the democratic world, an public on Mount Desert Island and economic behemoth, a country able to absorb and elsewhere in the country, the nation closed reward the hard work of its diverse populations itself off to immigrants from eastern — except for blacks and Native Americans. The and southern Europe. Grant, Little, and racist ideology, taken to its genocidal extreme in others in the American Eugenics Society Germany, was no longer acceptable in Europe had triumphed. In 1924, Congress finally or applicable to Jews in America. Grant and his passed the long-sought objectives of the eugenicist friends were discredited for having given Boston-based Immigration Restriction outspoken support for the racial policies of the League and national supporters of Nazis and the crafting of the Nuremberg Laws.15 eugenics. A quota system, based on the The war was transformative for Jews in eugenic ideology of racial distinctions, America. The devastation in Europe and the defeat severely restricted immigration from places of the Fascists deepened the attachment of Jews other than northern Europe.13 In a decade to the country. No one has described that Jewish of suspicions and fears, discriminatory adoption of American identity better than the practices against Jews already settled writer Philip Roth — the prejudice so prevalent

115 before the war; the sense of belonging after it; and have from the beginning, as a free the transition from exclusion to inclusion in the American and — though I am hardly American imagination, culture, and language. unaware of the general prejudice that persisted against my kind till not that long One's American connection overrode ago — as irrefutably American, fastened everything, one's American claim was beyond throughout my life to the American question… . There had been a great disturbance moment, under the spell of the country's to the old rules. One was ready now as past, partaking of its drama and destiny, never before to stand up to intimidation and and writing in the rich native tongue by intolerance, and, instead of just bearing what which I am possessed."17 Mount Desert one formerly put up with, one was equipped Island's history belongs to that "drama to set foot wherever one chose. The American and destiny" with its particular history of adventure was one's engulfing fate.16 land, community, and American dreams.

It was a sense of participating in the American In 2017 and 2018, President Donald adventure that brought a small number of Jewish Trump and many in the Republican Party refugees from Europe to Acadia National Park in and their supporters referred longingly the late 1940s and '50s. They built modest camps to the late nineteenth and early to mid- for summer use on the western side of the island twentieth centuries, when white America miles away from Bar Harbor, Northeast, and Seal suppressed Black and Native Americans, Harbor. They were hardly noticed except by those and immigration from Asia, eastern who sold them land and houses. While the refugees Europe, and southern Europe was radically established the first communal Jewish presence, they restricted. Incendiary language — raw built no synagogue to claim a place among Christian and coded — in the 2016 election and churches. The refugees sought no recognition — just afterwards sought to pit white America the pleasure of the landscape as a summer haven. against immigrants and racial and In the 1950s and 1960s, hotels in Maine gradually ethnic minorities. Verbal violence and gave up their discriminatory practices against actual acts of violence were powered Jews. The hold of the Christian patrician class on up in the ongoing contest for political corporations, medicine, professional practices, and power. In the summer of 2017, events in legal and financial institutions gradually abated. Charlottesville, Virginia, evoked tensions Colleges and universities slowly abandoned their seemingly left behind after World War quota systems. Research centers such as the Jackson II and the civil rights movement. The Laboratory and the Mount Desert Biological shootings in Pittsburgh in November Laboratory attracted the attention of Jewish scientists 2018 made many American Jews and students and threw off the aura of exclusionary conscious of both the preciousness and practices. Other Jews found their way to the island. precariousness of their lives in America's The Jewish refugees, scientists, and others liberal democratic and pluralistic society. shared Roth's claim to belong to America and its The President and his party cast land. "As a novelist," he wrote, "I think of myself, America's pluralistic society as a danger

116 This Mizrach hangs in the home of Helene and Murray Tuchman in Bernard. According to Helene Tuchman, "'Mizrach,' meaning 'east' in Hebrew, is a piece of ritual art which is placed on the east wall or window of a home to indicate in which direction to pray. Jews try to face east towards Jerusalem when praying."

117 Detail of "Rosh Hashanah," 1986, Nancy O'Neal. Beth Abraham Orthodox Synagogue, Bangor

118 to the country's mission and greatness. In 4. Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, a Changing New England Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, despair, David Brooks asked: "So what are 1956), 47. the resources we can use to pull ourselves 5. Ibid., 56. together?" For solace he turned to the land 6. Oscar and Mary Handlin, "The Acquisition of Political and as an idealized foundation. "Throughout Social Rights by the Jews in the United States," The American our history, the American identity has Jewish Year Book 56 (1955): 73, 74. been shaped by nature, by how our 7. Louis Marshall, "Letter to State Senator Martin Saxe, May 22, 1907" in Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty: Selected Papers wilderness molds, inspires and binds us. and Addresses, vol. 1, ed., Charles Reznikoff (Philadelphia: Jewish … From the nation's founding, Americans Publication Society of America, 1957), 249. had a sense that their continent's vast 8. "Members, Officers, and Directors Activities Database," The and beautiful abundance gave their American Eugenics Society, 461, accessed November 17, 2018, nation a unifying destiny and mission."18 https://archive.org/details/americaneugenicssocietymembers. 9. Edward McNall Burns, David Starr Jordan: Prophet of Freedom In these troubled times, the American (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 74. narrative of this beautiful island — from 10. Stefan Kühl, Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and exclusivity to inclusivity — is part of our German National Socialism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, country's liberal democratic promise. 2002), 85. 11. Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, — Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University Judith S. Goldstein is the founder and Executive of Vermont Press, 2009), 58, 59, xiii. Director of Humanity in Action, which since 1997 12. David Brooks, "This American Land," New York Times, August has organized international educational programs 25, 2017. in seven countries focused on liberal democracies, pluralism, and human rights. She received her 13. "The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act)," Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, accessed November 17, Masters and PhD in history from Columbia 2018, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration- University. She has published several books and act. articles about European and American history, art and landscape architecture. She is a member of the 14. Raney Bench, "Maine's Gone Mad: The Rising of the Klan," Chebacco 15 (2014): 12. Council on Foreign Relations, the Frances Perkins Center, and the Somes Pond Center Boards. 15. James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Acknowledgement: With thanks to Betsy Hewlett who University Press, 2017), 73–131. read closely and advised well. 16. Philip Roth, "I Have Fallen in Love with American Names, Shaping a Writer," The New Yorker, June 2017, 47. — 17. Ibid. 1. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: 18. Brooks, "This American Land." A.A. Knopf, 1994), 15. 2. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism; 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955). 3. Henry Chalmers, "The Number of Jews in New York City," Publications of the American Statistical Association 14, no. 105 (1914): 68–75, accessed February 28, 2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/ i348991.

119 Detail of "Archangel Michael," 1932, Reynolds, Francis & Rohnstock, Boston. Church of Our Father, Hull's Cove

120 The Episcopal Church Comes to Gott's Island

By Craig D. Townsend

Gott's Island — formally, Great Gott get around, and cell phones work to some degree. Island, semi-attached to Little Gott Island Strauss is shouting over his throbbing outboard by a tidal bar — lies just a mile south of motor tales that he heard from Russell Gott Mount Desert Island. It remains reachable (descendant of the Daniel Gott who first settled only by boat, and there is no longer any the island in the 1780s), previous deliverer of regular or even irregular service to it. people and mail and groceries, who died in 1991.2 My family and friends and I had to ask We tie up and Strauss insists we take a look in around Bass Harbor until the affable Eli the ramshackle house right there by the dock: the Strauss of Island Cruises allowed that his former home of the last year-round resident of the family summers over there and that his island, Montell "Mont" Gott, another descendant. uncle used to serve as a boat taxi until he The small red building is unlocked, and when we quit, just this summer, because he was enter, it becomes apparent that nothing in it has sick of it. But, Eli thought, maybe I could been touched since Gott left nearly sixty years ago. talk him into it with my story of writing The dishes are still in the cupboards, the spice jars about the history of the Episcopal chapel are still on their shelf by the stove. It's rather eerie. on the island and not wanting to write The island had a permanent year-round fishing about someplace I'd never been. Eric community from the first Gotts until the 1920s. Strauss did agree to take us over, and a few The population was never much above one hundred days later we were off for a quick visit. persons, usually hovering in the 50–60 range. It had to be quick, because the tidal The last of them left following the closing of the bar blocks the only harbor on the island, post office in 1927. The advent of the gas engine so the window for landing and leaving that removed the advantage of living closer to is two hours either side of high tide. The fishing grounds, the lack of a high school that island is a mile and a quarter across, forced all teenagers to live off-island most of the shaped like a beaver in profile with its year, and the pressure of summer tourists wanting tail at the eastern end, and has a quiet to buy property combined to make maintaining beauty on a soft summer day. There are a permanent community impossible. Mont Gott a small number of long-time summer came back to the island in 1929 or 1930 and vacationers. About a quarter of the island lived there, alone in the winters and alongside the was donated to the Maine Coast Heritage vacationers in the summer, until he moved into a Trust as a preserve in 1992.1 There are nursing home in 1960. He died in 1963.3 Now his no hotels, inns, restaurants, or stores, no empty place lends the feeling of a ghost town to the electricity and no cars, though most of the island, despite those devoted summer residents. summer folk use ATVs and golf carts to

121 The islanders built a church, Gott's Island Bar Harbor clergy were being called ever Methodist, in 1893. As the only church, it served farther west: Episcopalians in Eden, Indian as a social center as well as a religious one.4 The Point, and Pretty Marsh were being served island's most famous resident was Ruth Moore, by them, such that by 1910 "the work on the best-selling novelist and poet who chronicled the west side of the island had so increased, with affection the social dynamics of the isolated that it was hardly possible for the two populations of Gott's and other nearby islands, Priests to take care of it." This western fictionalizing them to greater or lesser degrees. movement was solidified with a week- In Speak to the Winds (1956), she tells the story long preaching mission in August 1911 of "Chin Island" and "Roxinda Greenwood," in Seal Cove, resulting in anywhere from a summer visitor in the 1910s who becomes a 100 to 175 year-round residents attending permanent resident and then decides to build an weekly Thursday evening services and Episcopal chapel, dividing the community. The making plans to build a church.7 At this novel is a barely-disguised version of what actually point, the Bishop of Maine stepped in. happened on Gott's, as the Greenwood character is The Right Reverend Robert Codman said by Moore's sister to be an accurate portrait of launched what came to be called the the eccentric Elizabeth Peterson and as the plot's "Southern Mount Desert Mission." The depiction of the dynamics of the community has goal was to settle on a central location for been corroborated by island historian Rita Johnson the west side, and he mused about Bass Kenway's more factual account. An earlier short story Harbor, Somesville, and Seal Cove equally version, probably written by Moore in the 1940s, as having both summer supporters and uses Peterson's name and reads more like anecdotal year-round possibilities. Then, in 1913, history.5 It is plausible that the community's he instead bought a house in Southwest religious division, and resulting social division, Harbor for a missionary to live in, touting was another factor in the island's abandonment. advantages in access to other locales and The Episcopal Church as a denomination arrived in education for a priest's children. Finally, on Mount Desert Island when the earliest wave the bishop appointed the Rev. William T. of postbellum tourists requested services in that Forsythe, an Englishman who had served tradition. These services began in the first destination churches in Quebec and Vermont, to begin towns, Bar Harbor and Northeast Harbor, in hotels, serving as the missionary in May of 1914. rented halls, and private homes, offered by Episcopal Forsythe understood his charge to be the clergy who were themselves vacationers. Soon year- entire western side of Mount Desert, and round residents joined the summer people, and he therefore continued holding services churches were eventually built: St. Saviour's in 1878 by request in Pretty Marsh, Somesville, in Bar Harbor and St. Mary's by-the-Sea in Northeast and Bass Harbor. But while keeping up Harbor in 1882. The clergy of these parishes this outreach to the scattered summer continued the practice of holding services elsewhere Episcopalians, his focus was really on by request, which soon led to the erecting of St. Jude's Seal Cove and Southwest Harbor. The in Seal Harbor (1889) and the Church of Our Father congregation in the former village was in Hull's Cove (1890).6 By the 1900s, though, the building a church that summer, yet

122 Forsythe was already suggesting to the bishop that the latter town was destined to be the real center of the mission. Codman was pleased with the progress and urged the diocesan missionary board to provide funding for a horse and buggy (the plea fell on deaf ears and Forsythe became renowned for the miles he covered on foot).8 The Southern Mount Desert Mission was now firmly institutionalized. That same summer, Forsythe gathered area Episcopalians, mostly vacationers with some year-round residents, in Southwest Harbor and secured twenty-seven pledges toward supporting the Mission, totaling $569 a year for eight years. They included "Miss Peterson of Philadelphia," the first mention of her in this regard.9 She had started summering in the Bass Harbor vicinity with her mother around the turn of the century, renting rooms from another Gott family branch. At that same time, some of the residents of Gott's Island had started letting out rooms in their houses for summer vacationers, and by 1901 the Peterson women were summering there and had purchased land to build on. And while she had agreed to support the Mission with a $25 per year pledge, Elizabeth Peterson had more specific plans in mind. She was apparently The arrival of the Episcopal mission at Gott's Island in 1916 proved beginning to make it known that she divisive to the community, where the Gott's Island Methodist Courtesy of the Southwest Harbor Public 10 Church had stood since 1893. wanted an Episcopal chapel on Gott's. Library Digital Archive, item 7275 Peterson's father, Lawrence, managed the financial department for a Philadelphia silk-trading firm in which his father- in-law was a partner. According to his biographer, he was a committed Presbyterian. He died of tuberculosis at 46 in 1862, leaving his wife and daughter,

123 St. Columba's Episcopal Chapel, Gott's Island. Undated photograph courtesy of Sven and Muriel Davisson

both named Elizabeth, financially well-off.11 Having Peterson had some sort of severe facial purchased land on the far eastern point of Gott's, disfigurement of unknown cause, such on the opposite side of the island from all the other that another island contemporary said residents, by 1905 mother and daughter had built her appearance was a "skull with the skin a grand house, filled with furniture, silver, and fine stretched across the bones." She was seen linens from their Philadelphia home. They named it therefore always as a bit apart, an odd "Petite Plaisance," after the first name given to the duck but accepted and looked out for. island by seventeenth-century French sailors. The And she became renowned for her annual two women summered there until 1909, when they Christmas parties for the islanders, one spent their first winter and announced they were for the children and one for the adults, for permanent residents. Sadly, the elder Elizabeth was which she did all the cooking and hosting. essentially housebound, and died the following year, It is unclear when Peterson began to but the younger Elizabeth stayed in the house alone desire an Episcopal church for her island for the rest of her life. She was a peculiar presence, home. She quickly recruited Forsythe to apparently determinedly self-sufficient through this cause, convincing him that first July the harshest parts of the winter, enigmatic about of his ministry to hold a service in the herself in conversation, and described by Moore in island schoolhouse, and to see Gott's as her more anecdotal piece as "calamitously homely." fertile mission ground. He began returning

124 Detail of "A Guiding Angel," 1888, Louis Comfort Tiffany, USA. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor

125 twice a month for services, and included the progress the situation: "Gott's Island … has a on the project in his regular reports. Peterson herself community of about thirteen families, was indefatigable, raising funds from family, friends, making in all about sixty souls. Here the and institutional supports. Episcopal prayer books Methodists have monthly services."15 But and hymnals came that fall as donations from the "the Methodists" were quite simply those Bishop White Prayer Book Society of Philadelphia. island residents, who had one church to A $200 grant was given by the American Church attend and so had all always done so. Building Fund Commission. A small plot of land There were some summer vacationers was purchased. By the next spring, the bishop renting rooms, but only a few, as there himself had visited for a service and confirmed two never were any hotels or other amenities persons.12 Gott's Island was now clearly the third beyond a general store — and those Bass wing of the Southern Mount Desert Mission. Harbor families were not going to keep Peterson remained the prime mover, however. going to church on Gott's beyond special In 1916 Forsythe wrote, "Through the efforts of occasions — so this group of Methodists this earnest church woman, we hope to have a was the only source for members of small chapel erected on the island this summer." this new chapel. For it to grow and The "earnest church woman" had also been survive, some of those thirteen families gathering "most of the children on the island … would need to become Episcopalians. for religious instruction." And so the chapel was The idea of a "mission" on Mount built that summer, with the first service held on Desert, of denominational leaders September 6. It was a small building, holding planting churches where none of that sixty persons, with windows of amber glass and a denomination had yet been, does not short cupola with a bell. Peterson herself hooked seem odd in a setting of multiple towns, an aisle runner and made a stiff altar frontal.13 It growing populations, and a burgeoning was the second church built under the Southern tourist presence. But such a mission on Mount Desert Mission: Seal Cove's St. Andrew's- Gott's was problematic. While Moore's by-the-Lake was finished in November 1914; the versions of this dynamic may be fiction, third, St. John the Divine in Southwest Harbor, they are supported by Kenway's report: would be erected in 1918. The Gott's Island church was named St. Columba's Mission, and was It becomes very apparent that the dedicated to the memory of Peterson's mother.14 introduction of this chapel took By this time, one would have to ask, where did members from the established Peterson and Forsythe think the parishioners for this Methodist Church, setting neighbor church were going to come from? The first baptisms against neighbor in their loyalties, in the schoolhouse, in August 1914, were of three one religion vying with the other. Gott girls, Alma, Fannie, and Hilda, but they were Some proud islanders were insulted not islanders — they were the Bass Harbor family by the idea of being served by a with whom Peterson had first stayed, come over to missionary. ... I understand that the island. In his initial report about the mission Miss Peterson came to recognize in the diocesan magazine, Forsythe described that it had been an unwise decision

126 to bring another religion to the island. She could see how it had divided this small community.16

The contrast between the establishment of this church and the rest of the Mission is here apparent: while the other churches were raised by communities developed by clergy over time, St. Columba's was always seen by the people of Gott's Island as Elizabeth Peterson's church. The families that joined her in it were part of a social fabric being torn in two. The end of the story is fairly quick By the 1960s, St. Columba's Chapel was in ruins. Courtesy of the and tragic. Forsythe attended the first Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Archive, item 7336 service in the Southwest Harbor church on June 2, 1918, but as a member of the congregation in a brief respite from a long illness; he died at the end of that month and a new missionary, Arthur Freese, was appointed.17 Services at St. Columba's continued twice monthly, but the congregation was usually quite small. Then on January 29, 1925, Petite Plaisance burned to the ground, killing Elizabeth Peterson at age 69. Islanders still argue over whether it was an accident of curtains catching fire or, in the wilder rumors, a robbery and murder. None of the silver table settings or tea service everyone remembered from the Christmas parties was ever found in the ashes, not even melted down, but there were also no suspicious tracks in the surrounding snow when people got there the next day.18 Within two years, the permanent community had left the island for good. Did the bell on the shore of Gott's Island come from St. Columba's or There were occasional services held in St. the Methodist Church? Its origins are disputed. Photograph by the author Columba's for the summer people over the years, but by the 1950s it was crumbling

127 insurance, to cover the treatment costs, is "very plausible." Unfortunately the house was next door to the Methodist church, so when the wind blew the flames over, the church was destroyed as well.20 Kenway also tells the story of arriving on Gott's in the fifties to find that Mont had mounted a church bell on a frame by the harbor landing, "to be rung in emergencies." He claimed it had fallen from St. Columba's belfry, a story she found unlikely, thinking he simply took it from the tumbledown building. Some islanders claimed that the bell was from the Methodist church's steeple instead.21 The rivalry, apparently, lived on. We remarked on the bell as we were leaving. Eric Strauss told us more stories of the island's eccentrics as we went back to Mount Desert, a harbor Detail of "Christ, Priest and King" window, 1907, by porpoise surfacing along the way. Clement Heaton, UK. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor — Craig D. Townsend is a retired Episcopal priest currently serving as Associate for Faith Formation at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church and Visiting from neglect. It was deconsecrated in 1959 and Scholar at Saint Ann's School, both in Brooklyn, 19 NY. He earned his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion demolished in 1966. The rest of the Southern Mount (American Religious History) under David Hall Desert Mission, however, continues to this day in at Harvard University. Craig and his family have the merged Parish of St. Andrew and St. John, still been summer visitors to Mt. Desert for many years. in the same building in Southwest Harbor, and in its Acknowledgments: cooperative relationship with the rest of the island's My thanks to Eli Strauss for his introductions, to surviving Episcopal churches — St. Saviour's in Bar Eric Strauss for his transportation and humor, and to Harbor, Our Father in Hulls Cove, and the Parish Christina and John Gillis for their hospitality on the of St. Mary and St. Jude in Northeast Harbor. island and their insights into its history and culture. Thanks also to Gabe and Marty, Cathy and Asher, for Ironically, St. Columba's had outlived the accompanying me on the journey. Methodist church. In 1930, while Mont Gott was the only person living on the island, his relative — William Gott developed cancer that needed 1. "Great Gott," Maine Coast Heritage Trust, treatment. Kenway thinks the rumor that William's accessed December 21, 2018, https://mcht.org/ preserves/great-gott abandoned house was set on fire by Mont for the

128 2. Rita Johnson Kenway, Gotts Island Maine: Its People 9. Summary of report [to unknown party], 1914, "Copy of 1880–1992 (Bass Harbor, ME: Penobscot Press, Documents"; Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 111. 1993). 10. All biographical details here and in what follows are from 3. Charles B. McLane, Islands of the Mid-Maine Kenway, 99–113; McLane, Islands of the Mid-Maine Coast, 430; Coast: Penobscot and Blue Hill Bays (Woolwich, ME: and Spiker, Gotts Island, August 30, 1962, unless otherwise noted. Kennebec River Press, 1982), 422–431; Kenway, 11. Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 99, and Moore, "The Lonely of passim; LaRue Spiker, "Gotts Island, Now Serene and Heart," 33, both assert that Peterson's father was the publisher of Quiet, Was Once Heavily Populated," Bar Harbor Peterson's Magazine, a well-known women's journal; according to Times, August 2, 1962; "History of Gotts Island: A Steven N. Winslow, Biographies of Successful Philadelphia Merchants Chain of Memories Linking Centuries," Bar Harbor (Philadelphia: James K. Simon, 1864), 206–8, that would be Times, August 30, 1962. her uncle instead. See "Peterson — Elizabeth Safford Peterson 4. Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 55–66. (1855–1925)," Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Archive, accessed December 21, 2018, https://swhplibrary.net/digitalarchive/ 5. Ruth Moore, Speak to the Winds (New York: William Morrow, 1956, reprinted Blackberry Press, items/show/9066.item 13082 1988); "The Lonely of Heart," in Sven Davisson, 12. Forsythe, The North East, July 1914, 13; August 1914, ed., When Foley Craddock Tore Off My Grandfather's 18; December 1914, 85; "American Church Building Fund Thumb: The Collected Stories of Ruth Moore and Commission," The Living Church 62 (April 10, 1920): 787; Bishop's Eleanor Mayo (Nobleboro, ME: Blackberry Press, Report, Journal, 1915, 44. 2004), viii, 31–55; Kenway, 101. 13. Forsythe, The North East, January 1916, 93; May 1916, 156; 6. Edwin Atlee Garrett, "The Episcopal Church October 1916, 44. Comes to Mount Desert Island," The History Journal 14. Carson, The History of the Southern Mount Desert Mission, of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society 3 (2000): 72–73; Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 100. 20–31. 15. Forsythe, The North East,October 1914, 61; Register of services, 7. Journal of the Ninety-First Annual Convention, The Southern Mount Desert Mission, Archives, Parish of St. Diocese of Maine (Brunswick, ME: Press of the Andrew and St. John, Southwest Harbor, 31; Forsythe, The North Brunswick Record, 1910), 9 [henceforth "Journal" East, August 1914, 18. with the year attached]; Journal 1911, 127; Annual Parish Meeting (December 5, 1911), Vestry 16. Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 114; McLane, Islands of the Mid- minutes, Archives, St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Maine Coast, 430, agrees. 138; "Mount Desert Island," The North East: The 17. The North East, September 1918, 22–25; Carson, 74. Missionary Magazine of the Diocese of Maine 38, no. 10 (April 1911): 18 [henceforth "The North East," with 18. Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 103–105; private email from Kim month and year attached]. Strauss regarding a story told him by Russell Gott, July 24, 2018. 8. Summary of letters of Robert Codman, December 19. Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 103–105; letter from the Rev. 28, 1912, October 20, 1913, and March 20, 1914, Ralph Hayden to the Rt. Rev. Oliver Loring, July 23, 1959, in "Copy of Documents Regarding Western [sic] Archives of the Diocese of Maine, Parish Files: St. Columba's, Mt. Desert Mission," Archives of the Diocese of Gott's Island. Maine, Parish Files: St. Andrew's Church, Seal Cove, 20. Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 66 – 67. anonymous notation: "(sent me by Miss Fanning, July, 1918)" [henceforth "Copy of Documents"]; Roy 21. Kenway, Gotts Island Maine, 119–120. Livingston Carson, "The History of the Southern Mount Desert Mission — Protestant Episcopal Church," in Nellie C. Thornton, Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor and Somesville, Mount Desert Island (Auburn, ME: Merrell and Weber, 1938), 71–74 (typescripts in the archives of both St. Saviour's Church, Bar Harbor, and the Parish of St. Andrew and St. John, Southwest Harbor, are dated 1937 by Carson); Journal, 1914, Bishop's Record, 37; "William Thomas Forsythe, Priest," obituary, The North East, September 1918, 22–25.

129 Detail of Perkins memorial window, ca. 1882, designed by F. Crowninshield of Boston, executed by Donald MacDonald of Boston. Saint Mary's by-the-Sea, Northeast Harbor

130 Acadia National Park: A Soul and Spirit Stretching Place

By Thomas S. Bremer

The history of national parks in America, with their often hallowed associations, places these treasured reserves squarely in the American religious landscape. Acadia National Park typifies the role of parks as destinations of often sacred significance. Its founding came at a key moment in the long religious history of American conservationism, and its attractions serve the spiritual desires and needs of millions of people each year. The national park came to dominate the island's landscape in geographic terms and has played a similarly prominent role in Mount Desert's religious history. Volunteers from A Christian Ministry in the National Parks lead a sunset worship service on Cadillac Mountain at the Blue Worshipping in Acadia National Park Hill Overlook. Courtesy of A Christian Ministry in the National Parks At least some of the more than 3.5 million annual visitors to Acadia National Park find a spiritual element in their practices in the park. These include actual worship experience of the park, according to services aimed especially at Christian visitors. one observer, Scott Planting, President During peak tourist season, visitors can find of the Maine Seacoast Mission in Bar regular Protestant religious services inside the park 1 Harbor. In his optimistic estimation, offered by A Christian Ministry in the National "90% of the people who visit Acadia Parks (ACMNP). Volunteers for this national National Park have a spiritual experience, interdenominational Protestant parachurch a feeling of mystery with the sea, the organization conduct Sunday morning worship 2 woods, the mountains." Though most services throughout the peak tourist season at of these experiences may be little more the two national park campgrounds on Mount than fleeting aesthetic encounters with Desert Island, and they also have a sunset service the park's spectacular scenery and on Sunday evenings atop Cadillac Mountain, the other attractions, at least a few people park's highest point.3 For the young volunteers engage in formal religious devotional of ACMNP, Acadia National Park is an ideal

131 setting to offer "a Christian interpretation to and marine — that have car[v]ed out the awe and grandeur of God's creation."4 innumerable ecological niches. Life Although ACMNP conducts the only regular thrives with heartening diversity. And worship inside Acadia National Park, local religious the larger look of the landscape — the communities on Mount Desert Island recognize the rugged, inviting sweep of it — has a importance of the park in the spiritual history of the profound impact upon us that never wears island. In celebration of the park's centennial in 2016, out. Mount Desert is a soul and spirit the Mount Desert Island Clergy Association staged stretching place, and that is what we a public arts and worship program at the Fabbri celebrate today."9 The celebration included Memorial on the Park Loop Road in Otter Cove on song, poetry, dance, silent reflection, July 27, 2016.5 "The Spirit of Acadia: Celebrating our and stirring words about nature's Spiritual Connection with Place and Park" included beauty and specifically the inspirational "readings, music and dance from diverse spiritual qualities of Acadia National Park. perspectives and traditions," according to the press "The Spirit of Acadia" centennial release announcing the program, which emphasized celebration highlighted the aesthetic that "All are welcome to participate and share in attractions that move many visitors toward the service."6 The public announcement included a profound, sometimes transcendent, an acknowledgment from Superintendent of Acadia experience of the natural world. Although National Park Kevin Schneider: "The inspirational missing the specific confessional language quality of Acadia makes it a deeply spiritual place and conventional liturgical order of the for many." Jack Russell, the co-chair of the Acadia interdenominational worship services Centennial Task Force, added, "Acadia was conserved that ACMNP offers regularly in the by people from many faith communities whose park, the purpose of the Mount Desert common cause was to protect these extraordinary Island Clergy Association's program land-and-seascapes as a source of spiritual renewal. aligned closely with that of A Christian As we celebrate the centennial of Acadia, it is good Ministry in the National Parks: to that people gather in faith that stewardship of this acknowledge and honor a spiritual remarkable place can help us find our better selves presence in the stunning landscapes and best community."7 In seeking their "better selves of Acadia. The park for many visitors and best community," the organizers based the remains a place of spiritual encounter, program on the Canticle of St. Francis, a medieval whether one understands spiritual Christian song celebrating the natural world as encounter in the particular Christian God's creation. They conceived it as an interactive imagery of evangelical interpretations commemoration of the national park's spiritual or in less distinct aesthetic terms. heritage, with the intention "to reflect in word and song, in silence and movement, about the spiritual Worshipping Nature in Acadia National Park 8 impact [of] this park and this place upon our lives." The distance between an evangelical Rev. Scott Planting began the program by Protestant view of nature as God's observing that "Everywhere on Mount Desert, life creation and the more generalized spiritual is compressed between great forces — terrestrial

132 Detail of "Resurrection," 1930, Tiffany Studios. Church of Our Father, Hulls Cove

133 aesthetic that was apparent in the Mount Desert of the Bible for Christians to know God. Island Clergy Association's centennial celebration is He went so far as to declare in his Institutes much less than some may think, at least historically. of the Christian Religion "that it can be The history of environmentalism in the United said reverently, provided it proceeds from States, and the aesthetic interpretation of nature a reverent mind, that nature is God."13 that has lent great popular support to environmental Protestants in the Calvinist Reformed concerns, originates in the same Calvinist traditions tradition would pursue this view of that produced much of evangelical Christianity in nature with scientific inquiries aimed at America. To a large extent, Acadia National Park revealing the moral lessons of nature. comes from the same historical strains that bring Among the most influential figures for the evangelizing volunteers of ACMNP to worship American Reformed Protestant naturalists in its campgrounds and on its mountaintops. was Alexander von Humboldt, whose Mount Desert Island entered the American explorations in South America at the popular imagination when painter Thomas turn of the nineteenth century enthralled Cole and others in the Hudson River School American readers with adventurous of landscape painting, especially Cole's protégé tales laced with "noticeable Calvinistic Frederic E. Church, painted the island's moralism and hints of spiritual wonder at spectacular scenery in the 1840s and 1850s.10 the unity in diversity of the cosmos."14 These painters are best remembered for their Thomas Cole's art was, in the words impressive renderings of pastoral New England, of historian Mark R. Stoll, "Humboldtian but they produced art saturated with religious art" that incorporated a scientific associations.11 Consequently, their paintings, view of nature with moral overtones. including the seascapes and landscapes of Maine's Cole and other Hudson River School largest island, contributed to an enduring spiritual artists translated the Calvinism of the aesthetic that would give rise to national parks. Reformed tradition that dominated The American landscape painting tradition the Connecticut Valley in the early initiated by Thomas Cole derived from the pervasive nineteenth century into a moral aesthetic Calvinist ideals that in the 1830s, according to of nature that would plant the seeds of historian Mark R. Stoll, "were fostering an art American conservation movements. Stoll aesthetic, a landscape ideal, a scientific worldview, concludes, "The Congregationalists of and moral and practical notions about land the Connecticut Valley and the New and landscape that would inspire and galvanize England diaspora would give the nation the American conservation and environmental conservation in all its aspects," including movements."12 Cole's art epitomized American "parks, which preserved God's natural Protestant ideals derived from Calvinist views of world for the benefit of the people."15 nature that would eventuate in nineteenth- and Calvinist Puritan ideals that linked twentieth-century movements to preserve and art, science, and morality in attitudes protect natural environments. The sixteenth-century toward the land and the natural world Protestant reformer John Calvin had regarded the germinating in the New England soil natural world as the most important source outside of Congregationalism would culminate

134 Frederic E. Church, "Eagle Lake Viewed from Cadillac Mountain, Mount Desert Island, Maine," (1850–1860). The dominant position of the radiant sun and the rustic figure of a cross in the lower left corner of this painting by Thomas Cole's most famous protégé typifies the religious symbolism that often appeared in the art of the Hudson River School painters.Original painting in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York City; image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

in Acadia's founding as the region's first creation. Charles W. Eliot, longtime president of and most prominent national park. Harvard University, convened a meeting in 1901 The land preservation movement on at Seal Harbor to consider a proposal "to hold Mount Desert Island that made Acadia reservations at points of interest on this Island, for National Park possible was heir to the the perpetual use of the public." Those who attended religious ideals of New England Reformed this initial meeting of the Hancock County Trustees Protestant traditions bestowing a religio- of Public Reservations (HCTPR) came as "persons aesthetic appreciation of nature as God's interested in the preservation of this island as a place

135 for healthful enjoyment."16 Specifically, President Charles Eliot's death in 1897 at age 37 Eliot sought to perpetuate the legacy of his son, the devastated his father.21 As a tribute to his prominent landscape architect Charles Eliot whose son's legacy, Charles W. Eliot resolved to early death brought profound grief to the elder Eliot fulfill his son's vision of preserving Mount and left him determined to fulfill his son's vision of Desert scenery. He convened twelve of preserving the landscapes of Mount Desert Island.17 his summer neighbors who shared his The younger Charles Eliot had been one of concern about Mount Desert's future, the most promising of Frederick Law Olmsted's and they formed the HCTPR based on a students, working in the wake of his mentor's success land trust model that the younger Charles as the founding figure of American landscape Eliot had devised.22 This model, based on architecture. Olmsted had established a distinctive values derived from a Congregationalist landscape design approach with such iconic places religio-aesthetic vision of nature that he as New York's Central Park, the US Capitol grounds gained in working with Olmsted, became in Washington DC, and Stanford University in the foundation of Acadia National Park. California. From the beginning of his career, A key personality in the success of Olmsted's work reflected the Puritan values that the land trust model on Mount Desert he had gained in his early Connecticut education, Island was George B. Dorr, a founding what religious historian Evan Berry describes as member of the HCTPR. From their Olmsted's "soteriological view of recreation."18 initial meeting in 1901 to Woodrow These values became foundational for subsequent Wilson's 1916 establishment of the Sieur generations of landscape architects.19 Accordingly, de Monts National Monument and American landscape architecture, beginning with its elevation by Congress to Lafayette its most influential progenitor, relied significantly National Park in 1919, Acadia National on park design principles derived in part from Park owes its existence to Dorr's diligent a Reformed Protestant religio-aesthetic vision and persistent efforts.23 As his biographer of nature cultivated in the nineteenth-century notes, Dorr has wide recognition as Congregationalist milieu of the Connecticut Valley. the "Father of Acadia National Park," Even before Charles Eliot fell under Olmsted's having served as "the founder and first spell as one of his most promising apprentices, superintendent of New England's only he was among the first to recognize the need to national park and the central figure protect Mount Desert scenery. The twenty-three in Maine's land trust movement."24 year-old Eliot wrote in his personal diary in 1883, Dorr demonstrated considerable "The scenery of Mount Desert is so beautiful and political skill throughout his many years remarkable that no pains should be spared to save of dedication to creating and managing it from injury — to the end that many generations the national park, but his success also may receive all possible benefit and enjoyment revealed a distinct religious element as from the sight of it." The young Eliot became well. Though a lifelong Episcopalian, Dorr a strong advocate for landscape preservation, was more interested in an Emersonian but he did not live to see his preservationist spirituality of immersion in nature vision fulfilled on Mount Desert Island.20 than he was in week-to-week church

136 This 2016 publicity poster announces "The Spirit of Acadia: Celebrating Our Spiritual Connection with Place and Park," a program of "word, song, and movement" from the Mount Desert Island Clergy Association commemorating Acadia National Park's centennial. Courtesy of Scott Planting

life. His work to preserve the wildness a new federal agency to manage the national parks.26 of Mount Desert Island typifies the This new attention to parks and the added resources importance of a Transcendentalist to develop and protect these revered places coincided religious sensibility in supporting the with an enthusiasm for Ralph Waldo Emerson, massive expansion of national parks the revered sage of Concord, as "the guiding spirit in the early twentieth century.25 for the first generation of American Modernist Woodrow Wilson established both artists, craftsmen, and architects." Out of these Sieur de Monts National Monument and artistic circles, enamored with Emerson and also Grand Canyon National Monument just Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, came a month before he signed the National many of the designers and builders of national park Park Service Act in August 1916, creating infrastructure.27 Landscape art of the early twentieth

137 Detail of "Without Fault before the Throne of God," 1926, Clement Heaton, UK. St. Saviour's Episcopal Church, Bar Harbor

138 century, as environmental historian Mark Center, audiences learn from host and narrator Jack R. Stoll documents, had evolved from Perkins that the park offers "solitude, recreation, the Calvinist-inflected paintings of Cole, and inspiration."29 These experiences make Acadia Church, and the other Hudson River National Park a sacred place for many visitors, not School artists to the Transcendentalist because of any sort of sectarian confessional tradition, influence of the Modernists' reverence for but through embodied engagements with nature nature "as the highest source of all things facilitated by rituals of visitation. Attention to visitors' spiritual, moral, and creative." They had a ritualized behaviors offers another way of thinking very direct impact on American national about how religion has been part of the park's history. parks precisely at the moment that the Much of conventional tourist practice fits what new park in Maine joined the ranks of ritual studies scholars regard as "ritualization," America's most treasured sites. Stoll notes ways of acting and behaviors that "distinguish that "the establishment of the Park Service and privilege what is being done in comparison to during the apogee of the Emersonian era other, usually more quotidian activities."30 Many ensured that to a large degree park officials, of Acadia's visitors typically engage in ritualized architects, artists, and visitors viewed them activities seeking the "solitude, recreation, and as places of Transcendentalistic worship." inspiration" promised in the park's orientation Stoll concludes, "From the vision of an film. Perhaps the most widely publicized tourist unpeopled landscape of the spirit evolved ritual in the park is the pre-dawn trek to view the the ideals and goals of the new National sunrise from the summit of Cadillac Mountain, Park Service. The Park Service's managers, where most expect to witness the first light of day to developers, and designers strove to create reach the US.31 During the peak tourist seasons in and preserve the illusion of an uninhabited the summer and fall, dozens, sometimes hundreds world of otherworldly beauty."28 The of park visitors can be found on the mountain's landscape of Mount Desert Island certainly summit as the sun lifts over the eastern horizon. In fit this generation's Emersonian vision of the 1960s those who made the effort to witness this national parks. Indeed, a good deal of the spectacle could become certified members in the conservation work of George B. Dorr and "Sunrise-From-Mount-Cadillac Club." A 1961 tourist the other members of the HCTPR was brochure includes an application for membership aimed at preserving the wild beauty of in this elite if somewhat dubious organization. To the island, in effect creating a destination gain membership, applicants had to certify their valued largely for its natural features, much experiences of the Cadillac Mountain sunrise with like other national parks that had become signatures from the proprietor of their place of shrines of American nature religion. lodging and from the Harbor Master at Bar Harbor.32 The more common ritual that far more visitors Ritualized Experiences of Acadia undertake involves the core practice of tourists in National Park many destinations throughout the world: sightseeing. In the orientation film Acadia Acadia's scenery is superlative and constitutes the Always shown at the Hulls Cove Visitor park's main attraction. Most visitors tour these magnificent sights by following a conventionally

139 ritualized route through the park. It begins at the Acknowledgements: Hulls Cove Visitor Center and follows the 27- I am grateful to the editors of this issue, R. Marie Griffith and Leigh Eric Schmidt, for the invitation mile Park Loop Road, with numerous attractions to contribute this essay, which gave me good reason and observation points along the way, including for my first visit to Acadia National Park. I also a spur road to the top of Cadillac Mountain. appreciate their editorial skills in suggesting useful Many end their ritual tours of the park with an improvements to this essay. During my visit to Mount Desert Island, I had the privilege of conversations obligatory stop at the Jordan Pond House for and archival help that greatly benefited this essay, their famous popovers and afternoon tea. from Marie C. Yarborough, Curator, Cultural For the more adventurous, the park offers Resources and Interpretation Liaison at the William endless opportunities for ritualized experiences Otis Sawtelle Collections and Research Center, Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, Maine; from of nature up close. Acadia boasts over 120 miles Scott Planting, President of the Maine Seacoast of hiking trails in addition to the 45 miles of Mission, Bar Harbor, Maine; and from Tim Garrity, carriage roads built by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Executive Director of the Mount Desert Island excursions to more remote off-island locations on Historical Society, Mount Desert, Maine. Schoodic Peninsula and the smaller outer islands — promise additional recreational experiences. 1. Acadia National Park hosted more than 3.5 million The variety of ritualized tourist activities available recreational visits in 2017: National Park Service, in Acadia National Park may seem far from the "Annual Visitation Highlights," accessed July 24, 2018, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/ devotional practices found in more traditional annual-visitation-highlights.htm. communities of faith. Outdoor recreation, though, 2. Scott Planting, interview with author, May 17, has a long and well-documented historical foundation 2018. in Christian theology and devotional culture, 3. "Acadia National Park, ME: A Christian Ministry especially in the Reformed Protestant traditions of in the National Parks Involvement," accessed July 33 24, 2018, http://www.acmnp.com/employment/ New England. Visitors discover in the park more acadia-national-park-jobs. A Christian Ministry in than pretty places and fun ways to occupy their the National Parks began in the early 1950s as an interdenominational ministry affiliated with the leisure time. Many of them, perhaps most, participate National Council of Churches aimed at serving in the sacred history of American nature religions national park visitors. They started with just two as they experience "a feeling of mystery with the summer interns at Yellowstone National Park and quickly spread to other parks, including Acadia. sea, the woods, the mountains" in the "soul and See G. Holger Hansen, As It Was in the Beginning: spirit stretching place" of Acadia National Park. A History of a Christian Ministry in the National Parks (Freeport, Maine: A Christian Ministry in the — National Parks, 2001), 5–9. Thomas S. Bremer is an Associate Professor of Religious 4. "About A Christian Ministry in the National Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he Parks," A Christian Ministry in the National Parks, teaches classes on religion in the Americas. He is author of accessed July 24, 2018, http://www.acmnp.com/ Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and about. Tourism in San Antonio (2004) and Formed from This Soil: An Introduction to the Diverse History of Religion in America (2014), a textbook on American religious history.

140 5. President Woodrow Wilson created Sieur de Monts 19. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 97. National Monument by proclamation on July 8, 1916. 20. Catherine Schmitt and Maureen Fournier, "Acadia's Ronald H. Epp, Creating Acadia National Park: The Nineteenth-Century Origins," Friends of Acadia Journal 23 no. 1. Biography of George Bucknam Dorr (Bar Harbor, ME: accessed July 24, 2018. https://friendsofacadia.org/the-champlain- Friends of Acadia, 2016), 172.; George Bucknam society-transcriptions/. Dorr, The Story of Acadia National Park,3rd ed., (Bar Harbor, ME: Acadia Pub Co, 1997), 50. 21. Epp, Creating Acadia National Park, 93. 6. Details about the celebration come from Scott 22. Ibid. Planting, interview with author, May 17, 2018; he 23. Congress converted the national monument to Lafayette also provided me with the official program of the National Park in 1919, and then renamed it Acadia National Park event that includes a press release announcing the in 1929. See ibid., 172, 87, and 239; and Dorr, Story of Acadia celebration. National Park, 50, 74, and 109. 7. These quotations are in the press release included 24. Epp, Creating Acadia National Park, 2–3. with the official program. 25. Dorr's family worshipped at the Summer Street Trinity Church 8. Scott Planting's opening remarks as printed in the in Boston, which was destroyed in 1872 by the Great Boston Fire. program. His funeral service was at St. Saviour's Episcopal Church in Bar 9. Ibid., with reference to Time and Tide in Acadia by Harbor. Ibid., 43 and 301. Christopher Camuto for this section. 26. Ibid., 172–73. 10. David Little and Carl Little, Art of Acadia: The 27. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 115. Islands, the Mountains, the Main (Camden, ME: Down East Books, 2016), 33–36. Also see Pamela 28. Ibid., 135–36. Evan Berry also documents the religious J. Belanger and J. Gray Sweeney, Inventing Acadia: foundations of American attitudes to nature and wilderness. See Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert (Rockland, ME: Berry, Devoted to Nature, 128. Farnsworth Art Museum, 1999), 19. 29. Acadia Always: The Story of Acadia National Park, DVD (Bar 11. Mark Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion Harbor, ME: Jeff Dobbs Productions, 2010). and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New 30. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 58. Oxford University Press, 1992), 74. I utilize Bell's understanding 12. Ibid., 12. of ritualization to highlight how tourists distinguish and privilege their activities in the places they visit much the same way that 13. Ibid., 50. religious pilgrims ritualize pilgrimage shrines. 14. Ibid., 52. 31. Although the claim of America's "first light" has been a 15. Ibid. standard promotional trope for Mount Desert Island for decades, this is true only in fall and winter. See Michael J. Vieira and J. 16. These words from President Eliot's invitation of North Conway, New England Rocks: Historic Geological Wonders August 12, 1901, to George B. Dorr to attend the (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2017), 122. organizing meeting of the HCTPR are quoted in Dorr, The Story of Acadia National Park, 13–14. 32. "Sunrise-From-Mount-Cadillac Club," Your Mount Desert Island Passbook for 1961, Bar Harbor Times Publishing Company, 17. Epp, Creating Acadia National Park, 93. Mount Desert Island Historical Society, box 9, folder 34. 18. Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious 33. Evan Berry explains the relationship between religious elements Roots of American Environmentalism (Oakland: and American outdoor recreation in the early twentieth century. University of California Press, 2015), 66. As a child, See Berry, Devoted to Nature, 128. Olmsted was sent to live with Zolva Whitmore, a Congregational minister, where his early education concentrated on religious instruction. See Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Scribner, 1999), 25.

141 Detail of Melcher memorial window, ca. 1956, designed by Betsy F. Melcher, executed by Napoleon Setti of Boston. Saint Mary's by-the-Sea, Northeast Harbor

142 "Moment After Moment After Moment": Cultivating a Zen Presence on Mount Desert Island

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

"I have practiced Zen Buddhism for Much more common, however, are small, almost fifty years, since I was a teenager," private groups who meet regularly, often for said Paul Weiss, "but I don't usually decades, in living rooms and community centers call myself a Buddhist."1 This apparent to meditate, practice Reiki, or study the writings paradox is familiar to practitioners of of particular teachers. For them, the island itself non-Western religious traditions on may not be the object of spiritual veneration, but Mount Desert Island, of which there simply, as one practitioner told me, "the place are many. Their knowledge is deep, and where I lived when I found the dharma."4 their history long. But they may be wary For this history, I will confine myself to three of labels, which unnecessarily constrain groups that are neither headline-grabbing nor truths that they believe to be universal. completely private. They share a lineage, of sorts, For the historian, then, the island's in Buddhist practice. This selection is already spiritual seekers can be difficult to trace. an exception to the rule, a small window onto Spirituality has its occasional moments practices that have shaped the island's spiritual of visibility. In August 1987, several landscape for decades, and continue to do so. hundred people gathered on Cadillac Mountain, one of the world's "power The Whole Health Center centers," to celebrate a planetary alignment One of the reasons Paul Weiss doesn't call himself known as the Harmonic Convergence a Buddhist is that he does so many different things. with chanting and meditation. Park Weiss is founder of the Whole Health Center, a Town rangers deemed the event "orderly," Hill-based nonprofit organization with a simple goal: although Bar Harbor police later reported to help people work through the spiritual problems a loincloth-wearing man wandering that keep them alienated from their true nature of Cottage Street claiming he was celebrating 5 2 "consciousness and love." Trained as a therapist, "the dawning of the age of the flowers." Weiss believes that "there is no rigid line between Many islanders will remember Chris the psychological and the spiritual." By "spiritual," Kaiser, who took days-long shamanic he means a "state of presence," of being aware of the "vision quests" in wild areas of the Park, present moment in one's relationships, work, and life. where the earth "symbolically expressed" That state of presence, Weiss is convinced, "can be itself to those who vibrated on the learned, practiced, and taught." And that is exactly same wavelength. He invited readers what Weiss has been doing for thirty-seven years. to join him in his 1998 guidebook The Chakra System of Mount Desert Island.3

143 The exterior of 33 Ledgelawn Avenue when it housed the Whole Health Center, from 1981 to 1989. Courtesy of Paul Weiss

144 The Town Hill home of the Whole Health Center, from 1989 to the present. Courtesy of Paul Weiss

145 A group of students receive ordination as monks in the Kanzeon Zen Center at 33 Ledgelawn Avenue, formerly St. Edward's Convent, in a ceremony known as Shukke Tokudo, circa 1990. Dennis Merzel is in the third row, center, directly beneath the calligraphy on the wall. Courtesy of Big Mind Zen Center

Since 1981, Weiss has taught hundreds of people, awareness to that underlying mystery." using many tools. He focuses on communication It was, however, Zen Buddhism via individual, couple, and group counseling, and that first brought Weiss to Maine. After emotional recovery work. He helps people work studying with Japanese Zen teachers in toward body-mind integration using tai chi, qi New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s, gong, nutrition, and body work. He teaches deep he heard about Walter Nowick.6 Wanting awareness through meditation training. All this to study with an American Zen teacher, might not look like what we think of when we he moved to Blue Hill and lived with think of religion. "I don't have to rush to new or old Nowick for several years.7 He first came conclusions about what 'God' is," Weiss explains, to Bar Harbor for Alexandra Lounsbery, "but I may learn to open spacious availability in my also a spiritual seeker, whom he married

146 in 1974. Alexandra and Paul spent several spring of 1987 alone, Weiss led four of them. What years traveling, learning new spiritual the Weisses didn't teach themselves, they would techniques, and expanding their family. invite others to teach. Soon, however, a routine In 1981, they returned to Bar Harbor and invitation turned into something else altogether.9 opened the Whole Health Center, in a The Weisses asked Dennis Genpo Merzel, a large brick building downtown. This was Zen monk with whom they had both practiced in before "integrative medicine" was common Los Angeles, to lead a meditation retreat at their in healthcare settings, and before yoga and center. Merzel, who was leading such retreats all meditation had become ubiquitous. Weiss over the U.S. and in Europe at the time, agreed. remembers, "I was the only name under Once Merzel arrived in Bar Harbor, says Weiss, "he 'massage' in the Bar Harbor yellow pages expressed a desire to move his family here," and set — and now you see it on every door!" himself up to teach. The Weisses offered to share New as the Weisses' work was to many, their building, 33 Ledgelawn Avenue, with him. Bar Harbor was supportive. The Whole But, "after a few months," says Weiss, "he told us Health Center's family-friendly downtown that he had too many people who wanted to practice location teemed with enthusiastic students. with him, and that there was no room for us." "In those days," says Weiss, "I had no Merzel seemed to want to be the town's trouble getting fifteen people to commit to only representative of Buddhism. Paul stopped a [series of] tai chi classes," referring to the leading his True Mind, True Heart retreats, exercise series that forms part of ancient and the Center's support groups went on hiatus. Chinese Daoist energy practices known Although Alexandra Weiss remained a student as qi gong. Weiss is convinced that people of Merzel, the Weisses wanted to maintain the "of all ages, abilities, and stages of health" bustling variety of spiritual practice they had can learn from these exercises to relax, fostered for seven years. By 1989, they had made "open the heart, allow energy to flow." the painful decision to leave downtown, and The Weisses also tried to respond to settled into the space the Whole Health Center the community's needs. Indeed, perhaps still occupies in Town Hill, a wood-shingled home the signature service of the Whole Health tucked back from the road and surrounded by Center has been their ongoing weekly trees, perhaps trading centrality for coziness. support groups. A Septemer 1987 issue of the Bar Harbor Times announced the Kanzeon Zen Center formation of the Center's group based Meanwhile, the 1917 Jacobethan Revival on M. Scott Peck's bestselling self-help 8 building at 33 Ledgelawn Avenue that had been book, The Road Less Traveled. The other the Whole Health Center, and was originally cornerstone of Weiss's practice is the built as Saint Edward's Convent, underwent yet four-day "True Mind, True Heart" retreat another transformation. Merzel renamed the he has been leading since 1982, which building Kanzeon Zen Center and eventually are equal parts silent contemplation and attracted a couple dozen young men and women communication. This unlikely-sounding to join this sangha, or community.10 Sometimes combination proved popular. In the

147 they called it "Hosshinji," after a Japanese Zen monastery that was among the first to welcome Western students, in the 1920s. They lived together and studied the dharma in a "formal and intensive" way.11 In 2010, Tamara Myoho Gabrysch remembered her Bar Harbor practice as "very traditional-style sesshins [silent meditation] with all the trimmings." Those "trimmings" included the familiar zazen (sitting) in oryoki (silence), and also kyosaku (service) and daisan (one-on-one instruction). Gabrysch remembered that initiates would sometimes go through a three-month ango, or monastic practice period, with a "free day" every nine.12 The curved wood lines and stained-glass windows of the former convent gave this new Zen community a traditional backdrop, albeit one borrowed from Laura Neal's reminder of the meaning of Zen. Courtesy of Laura Neal another tradition. The sangha set up an altar of the Buddha, and placed black meditation cushions in rows in the empty, red-carpeted rooms. Merzel took the idea of lineage and hierarchy seriously. The second American 'dharma successor,' or trainee, of Taizan Maezumi, Merzel proudly hosted Maezumi Roshi at Kanzeon. They posed, grinning, in their formal robes in the backyard of 33 Ledgelawn. Merzel passed on this same sense of hierarchy he had learned to his students. After taking initial vows, they were encouraged to shave their heads, symbolizing the letting-go of worldly attachments. Some were eventually ordained as monks. Members of a Japanese Soto Zen mission to America visited in 1991, and reportedly declared of Kanzeon that, "This is true Zen here, just like Dogen Zenji's first monastery."13 In point of fact, however, any outpost of Buddhism in America is already an adaptation on tradition.14 For one thing, traditional Zen Buddhist sanghas in Japan did not ordain women. Within its traditional parameters, Merzel's practice varied widely. Sometimes everyone would get to study one-on-one with Merzel every day.15 Other times, they would do group meditation for weeks with

148 no individual instruction at all. When easier for beginners to find an entry point, and students joined Merzel on trips to Europe, doesn't require week-to-week commitment. In "One could never tell what the next this new era, however, one of Paul Weiss's many sesshin would be like!"16 For three years, students has carved out her own way to practice the Kanzeon Zen Center sangha persisted Zen Buddhism on Mount Desert Island. as an ascetic practice in the middle of downtown Bar Harbor. In the early 1990s True Nature Zen Sangha Merzel, who was married, was discovered If you had told Laura Neal when she first moved to have had inappropriate sexual to Mount Desert Island in 1990 that she would relationships with some of his women 17 become a Zen monk, she might have laughed. "Never students. After many uncomfortable in a million years," she told me, "but no one can conversations, the community grew predict the future." Neal worked for decades as a increasingly divided. By February 1991, personal fitness trainer and exercise teacher before Merzel had permanently left town, along opening her Bar Harbor yoga studio, Cattitude. with many of the sangha members he had Raised Catholic, she knew that theism of any kind, brought to the Island. They took a cheerful mono- or poly-, was "not my path." But "I am photo on the steps of 33 Ledgelawn, their 18 the kind of person who when I am interested in shaved heads wrapped in hats and scarves. something, I grab on and find out everything I can."20 For 33 Ledgelawn, the rest was literally Which is what happened when a Whole Health history: the building was purchased by the Center meditation retreat sparked her interest. She Bar Harbor Historical Society in 1997, and 19 didn't have the means or desire to move or away currently serves as their museum space. from the island to pursue dharma training, so she Meanwhile, the Whole Health Center explored on her own. In 2007, she encountered continued to flourish. The nonprofit Center the book Mindfulness Yoga, which described an operated with a small board of directors; integration of "asana," or yoga poses, and "dharma," the only full-time employees were Paul or Buddhist wisdom.21 This struck an immediate Weiss and Bettina Dudley, a biologist chord with Neal. Practicing yoga, she started to and poet who moved to the Island in be more aware of her mind, "the way we gravitate 1994. That year, they offered their True toward poses that are pleasurable, and avoid ones Mind, True Heart retreats again. In 1996, that are difficult." Neal realized she had been keeping they re-started their support groups, and mind and body separate, and that she didn't need to: continued to invite outside Buddhist "It changed my teaching dramatically." She began teachers to lead meditation retreats. studying dharma with the author, Frank Jude Boccio In recent years, Paul Weiss has seen — mostly by phone, since Boccio lived in Arizona. a surging demand for "spiritual but not Looking for more, she found an online Buddhist religious" groups on the island. The pace seminary, then called the Five Mountain Zen has changed, and distraction increased. Order, where she earned her master's degree in Over the years, he explains, by way of Buddhist doctrine and was certified to teach Zen example, he has shifted from teaching in the Korean lineage of Zen master Sung Sahn.22 tai chi classes to qi gong because it is

149 In August 2011, one of Neal's teachers traveled meeting platform. "I know, it's wild, these to Bar Harbor to ordain her and give her the twenty-six-hundred-year-old traditions dharma name "Bonyon," which means "original being accessible this way. But it is 2018. nature." Now, she leads a small group of Zen We no longer have to climb up the sides practitioners called the True Nature Zen Sangha. of mountains to access this dharma." Although it is traditional for sanghas to echo Most of Neal's students are year-round their leader's dharma name, Neal is adamant that island residents. Because she knows that True Nature is an open, accessible "community of everyone is "just trying to keep it going" in practitioners … that could go on without me." The the busy tourist summers, the sangha used sangha met at Neal's yoga studio until it closed in to meet less often then. In 2018, though, 2015, then on the College of the Atlantic campus Neal took the summer as a challenge, for about a year, followed by two years at the Bar digging into the writings of "ancient Harbor Congregational Church. Every year, Neal Chinese masters" in weekly meetings at offers sangha members the opportunity to take vows Town Hill's ArtWaves community center. in a public ceremony; they state their intention, Summer is the perfect time for learning among other promises, to live truthfully. "They get to "keep the mind," as Neal puts it, a cool Buddhist name and a thing to wear around "moment after moment after moment." their neck," Neal says. "But you can of course The summer meetings made for some live by those principles without those things." awkward moments. One Wednesday, Every Wednesday, the True Nature Zen Center two out-of-town women showed up, gathers, for sixty minutes in the summer, ninety in enthusiastic but inexperienced. Some time the winter. They do sitting and walking meditation, into the sesshin, the doors opened and and Neal concludes with a teaching. She wears her there were two men with cameras — the robe, but "not the big long one." Formal practice is women's husbands, eager to document important. "I take ritual seriously, I take my vows their wives meditating on vacation. Neal seriously," but simplicity is the goal. And to keep asked them to stop: "I told them, 'This is coming back to awareness of the present moment. kind of like church, right?' And they said, Neal finds that people often misunderstand Zen as 'Well, we won't use a flash!'" Neal laughs. "tuning out." "People talk about their 'moment of She realizes that Zen meditation may not Zen' or how they 'get their Zen on.'" But Zen as Neal look "like church" to some. After all, at practices it is hard work. Students learn to "study ArtWaves, "they also offer Zumba classes." the self to forget the self," exactly in order to tune It is important, however, that people in to the world around them. "My students tease me realize residents "do all sorts of things that that I answer every question with 'Just this.' What are unrelated to other people's vacations!" is Zen? 'Just this.'" She says it so often that she got Buddhist practice always has and a vanity license plate, "JST THS," as a reminder. always will adapt itself to the culture at Like Weiss, Neal "rarely uses the term Buddhist," hand. "And in America our culture is preferring to describe herself as a dharma student. capitalism, so things get commodified." She still has weekly koan sessions with her teacher. However, when dharma becomes an He lives in Ames, Iowa, so they use Zoom, the online "industry" selling people the perfect body

150 Detail of "The Visitation," ca. 1908, Mayer & Company, Germany. Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Bar Harbor

151 and mind, there is a "real danger" of meditation Acknowledgements: Grateful acknowledgement is practices being misused. Neal runs her sangha on made to Paul Weiss and Laura Neal, and to the 23 following individuals for their generous support voluntary donations, per Buddhist tradition. And researching this history: Henry Lanford, Ann Davis, she still operates her own business, as a personal Rollin Stearns, Bob Pyle, Richard Sassaman, Kristen fitness instructor, specializing in "corrective exercise" Moulton, Peggy Fletcher Stack, Sheila Wilensky, M. for older people and those with health conditions. J. McIsaac, Judith Cox, Rebecca Brugman, Sarah Vekasi, Timothy Smith, Tim Garrity, the Jesup She brings her Zen training with her to work. Memorial Library, and the Friends of Island History "It's not about: 'I used to run marathons.' It's newspaper archive. about: 'you're eighty years old, how is your body now.'" Moment after moment after moment. — 1. This and all quotes from Paul Weiss are from personal communication, August 4, 2018, unless In 2016, after twenty years of continuous otherwise noted. meetings, Paul Weiss's Monday night support group 2. The summit of Cadillac Mountain was one of disbanded. Several long-time members withdrew. several "power centers" worldwide that drew believers Weiss's longtime colleague Bettina Dudley died to celebrate the beginning of a new age of peace and harmony on August 16 and 17, 1987. Five to seven suddenly. It seemed to be the end of an era for the hundred people held hands in large, concentric Whole Health Center.24 Weiss does not want to retire, circles and "sang, talked, and meditated." See: "New Age celebrated on Cadillac," Bar Harbor Times, because he loves what he does. But, as he puts it, "I Thursday, August 13, 1987; "500 Celebrate Harmonic feel my inner life shifting toward doing nothing!" Convergence," [Police Beat], Bar Harbor Times, For now, he is not succeeding. As Laura Neal puts Thursday, August 20, 1987; "Harmonic Convergence" photo by Tom Hindman; Bar Harbor Times, it: "Paul works harder than I do." He is reaching Thursday, August 20, 1987. into new areas, including environmental awareness, 3. P. Chris Kaiser, The Chakra System of Mount Desert neuroscience, and the "radical and challenging" Island: A Guidebook (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic teachings of Jesus. 25 He has started a new support Books, 1998). Many were devastated when Kaiser was found dead in Hamilton Pond, Salsbury Cove, at group. It may not last twenty years, but that is okay. age 57, on June 27, 2004, which can be read in Becky No one can predict the future. "It has always been Buyers-Basso, "Missing Man Found Dead," Mount important to my own spiritual practice," Weiss Desert Islander, July 1, 2004. 4. Eschewing their own real estate is by no means explains, "not to be to ego-ically attached to what I restricted to Buddhists on the island. Jewish groups do." The Center will evolve to meet the needs of the meet weekly in people's homes; the closest synagogues moment, as it always has. What is Zen? Just this. are in Bangor. A Quaker meeting has met regularly since at least 1973 in spaces including Northeast — Harbor's Neighborhood House and the Bar Harbor Congregational Church. Brook Wilensky-Lanford moved to Bass Harbor with her parents, Sheila and Henry, at age two, and graduated from 5. "Holistic Health Center is 30," Ellsworth American, Mount Desert Island High School in 1995. The author of June 24, 2011; Paul Weiss, "Compassion, Integration, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (2011), and Healing: The Psychological and Spiritual Work of she received a B.A. in Religious Studies from Wesleyan the Whole Health Center," The Whole Health Center, accessed January 3, 2019, http://thewholehealthcenter. University, an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia org/compassion-integration-and-healing/. University, and is currently pursuing her PhD in American Religious History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was not at the Harmonic Convergence, but does remember seeing Halley's Comet at Back Beach.

152 6. Surry-based Walter Nowick (1926–2013) was 16. Merzel repeated this pattern in Los Angeles and Salt Lake well-known both for his Zen practice and his support City, where he resigned from his Center at the urging of Zen of young musicians. He founded Moon Spring leaders in 2011. For details, see: Peggy Fletcher Stack, "Utah Zen Hermitage in 1971, where he taught until 1985. The master admits affair, leaves center," Salt Lake Tribune, Feb. 25, center still exists as the Morgan Bay Zendo. 2011; Kristen Moulton, "Zen teachers are livid Utah colleague in sex scandal still teaching," Salt Lake Tribune, May 10, 2011. In 7. Alexandra and Paul Weiss divorced in the mid- 1990s; she returned to her maiden name of Lounsbery his 2016 autobiography Spitting Out the Bones: A Zen Master's 45 and died in 2012. "Alexandra Lounsbery," Obituary, Year Journey (Big Mind Publishing), Merzel does not mention Bar Ellsworth American, August 2, 2012. https:// Harbor, but does admit he misused his power as a teacher: "I slept www.ellsworthamerican.com/obituary/alexandra- with women students to whom I was sexually attracted and they to lounsbery/ me and then lied" (41). And he acknowledges that "It is not as if I wasn't warned or given good advice and even brought to account 8. "Scott Peck Study Group Offered," Bar Harbor on this very issue back in the early '90s" (48–49). Times, Thursday, September 24, 1987. 17. Document 1991015627, Registry of Deeds, Hancock Country, 9. "Zen Workshop, Retreat Offered," Bar Harbor book 1894, 068–069. Times, Thursday, September 10, 1987. 18. Document 19086, Registry of Deeds, Hancock County, book 10. Document 1987017021, Registry of Deeds, 2694, 503. Hancock Country, book 1673, 661. Physical descriptions of Kanzeon are based on photographs 19. This and all Laura Neal quotations come from personal like those posted by Big Mind Zen Center in the communication, August 15, 2018, unless otherwise noted. public Flickr album "Kanzeon Memories," Bar 20. Frank Jude Boccio, Mindfulness Yoga: The Awakened Union of Harbor Jukai, Flickr.com, https://www.flickr. Breath, Body, and Mind. (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, com/photos/kanzeon_zen_center/247435609/in/ 2004). album-72157594234144669/ Added September 19, 21. Now part of Buddha Dharma University, http://www. 2006. buddhadharmauniversity.org/ 11. "Tamara Myoho Gabrysch Interview," Sweeping 22. "Zen Meditation," ArtWaves, accessed January 3, 2019, https:// Zen, September 18, 2010. http://sweepingzen.com/ www.artwavesmdi.org/product-page/zen-meditation tamara-myoho-gabrysch-interview/ 23. "Obituary: Bettina Dudley," Ellsworth American, October 12. Several Kanzeon members went on to higher 5, 2016. https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/obituary/bettina- ranks in Zen. Tenkei Coppens now leads the Zen dudley/ River Center in Uithuizen, The Netherlands. 24. Flyer for "Conscious Loving Presence: A Radical Look At the 13. For a broader account of these adaptations, see Teachings of Jesus," a workshop conducted on December 10, 2018 David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism at the Whole Health Center. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14. "Koan" is a form of dharma study that involves contemplating apparent puzzles, the stereotypical example of which would be "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" 15. "Tamara Myoho Gabrysch Interview," Sweeping Zen, September 18, 2010. http://sweepingzen.com/ tamara-myoho-gabrysch-interview/

153 Corrigenda and Errata

In Volume XIX (2018)

On pages 17 and 18, Charles W. Eliot is said to be the great- grandfather of Richard Paine. Actually, Charles W. Eliot was the grandfather of Richard Paine's wife, Ellen Eliot Paine.

The photo on page 64 was misattributed to Nikolai Fox. The photograph should have been attributed to Lois Stack.

Richard Estes' portrait of Madame Yourcenar on page 135 is reversed.

The caption for the photograph on page 138 by Grace Frick titled Marguerite Yourcenar with Three Portuguese Sailors should read:

The figures in the photograph are (left to right): John Reynolds (2), John Reynolds (1), Madame Yourcenar, and John Ward. They are standing in front of the Manset fishing house on the Stanley Fish Wharf, which was used to keep accounts for buying lobsters and for selling gasoline to the boats.

In Volume XII (2011)

On page 22, the assassination of Henry IV of France is said to have occurred in 1604. Actually, Henry was killed on May 14, 1610.

154 Charles-Gustave Housez (1822–1894), "Assassinat d'Henri IV et arrestation de Ravaillac le 14 mai 1610." Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Following page: Otter Creek Hall

155 156 The mission of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society is to foster meaningful engagement with the histories of Mount Desert Island.

Visit www.mdihistory.org to: ·· Become a member ·· Check our calendar of events ·· Find resources and links on the histories of Mount Desert Island

For more information, please contact: Tim Garrity Executive Director PO Box 653 Mount Desert, Maine 04660 [email protected] (207) 276-9323

The Mount Desert Island Historical Society is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. All donations are tax-deductible to the amount allowed by law.

Cover design by Rebecca Hope Woods based on Jennifer Steen Booher’s photograph of a stained glass window in Saint Saviour’s Church, Bar Harbor.

Chebacco silhouette adapted from a photograph by Len Burgess for the Essex Shipbuilding Museum. Our magazine, Chebacco, is named for a type of boat built in the eighteenth century in Gloucester, Massachusetts and nearby towns. In 1762, Abraham Somes, his wife, and four young daughters sailed in a Chebacco boat to make their home in Somesville and become Mount Desert Island’s first permanent Euro-American settlers.

We invite you to voyage through the histories of Mount Desert Island in this contemporary Chebacco.

Published annually by the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, Mount Desert, Maine