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Yarns Spun to Order: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island and the Advent of Maine Summer Tourism
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ARRIET BEECHER STOWE’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island, H a pioneering novel in the “local color” genre, was a sturdy bestseller in its time, going through forty editions between and . The height of its popularity coincided directly with the coming of summer tourism to the islands of Maine’s Casco Bay. Especially during a period from the Harpswell Steamboat Company’s founding in to America’s entry into World War I in , thousands of tourists poured onto tiny Orr’s Island each summer hoping to meet favorite characters from Pearl and visit their homes as well as the novel’s outdoor locations. Islanders responded by creating a literal cottage industry, turn ing their houses into the homes of the Pearl, Captain Kittridge, or Aunt Roxy, charging admission to caves and coves, and even doing some role playing. Feuds broke out among islanders over the authenticity of these lucrative competing concessions, and the Pearl phenomenon was so pronounced that it even created a rush for summer real estate. In , Minneapolis journalist Frank R. Stockton wrote: “After Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe published her ‘The Pearl of Orr’s Island,’ that neglected piece of insular realty came into the market and for some time the rush to get eligible tracts and lots bore some resemblance to
Editions and formats, “Pearl of Orr’s Island,” OCLC WorldCat, https://www .worldcat.org (accessed November , ).
The New England Quarterly, vol. XCIII, no. (March ). C by The New England Quar terly. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/ . /tneq_a_ .
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the tumultuary passage of ‘sooners’ to a newly opened Indian reservation.” (see Fig. ) For several decades, Pearl based tourism turned the island into something very like a theme park. In the novel, Stowe would write of Captain Kittridge, “it was said . . . that the Captain’s yarns were spun to order; and as, when pressed . . .
he always responded with, ‘What would you like to hear?’ Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 it was thought that he fabricated his article to suit his mar ket.” The Captain can turn fact into ction—he may have seen polar bears on a voyage to Baf n Bay; little children can ride them with golden bridles and pearl saddles. And he can turn ction into fact—sea nymphs toll bells for the drowned in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”; the Captain has seen them him self, holding undersea funerals for drowned sailors. Because Stowe’s own time spent on Orr’s Island was brief and poorly documented, and because her convincing descriptions of char acters and places were nonetheless ctional, islanders often responded to “visitors and sojourners . . . hunting for the peo ple and things immortalized by Mrs. Stowe” with marketable fabrications of their own. Historian Dona Brown reminds us that tourist industries are “built by people” and are “the product of human choices, made not only by visitors, but by natives as well.” What hap pened on Orr’s Island was part of a larger cultural context— a vogue for “local color history” and literary tourism that gripped New England as the nineteenth century went trend ing into the twentieth—yet was also unique to the island and its people. This now forgotten chapter in Orr’s Island history is nevertheless well documented by the era’s travel writers and
Frank R. Stockton, “One Use of Genius,” The Minneapolis Journal, August , , , http://www.newsbank.com (accessed November , ). Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine (Boston: Houghton Mif in, ), . Hereafter cited in text as POI. Stockton, “One Use of Genius,” . Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Cen tury (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), . Joseph Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), , . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER island guides. Their collective observations offer us an oppor tunity not only to experience Pearl of Orr’s Island tourism rst hand, but to witness a small Maine shing village reinventing itself for a new summer economy, spinning popular interest in an historical novel into a new identity. First, some background. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in
Maine for just two short years, residing in Brunswick from Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 to , when her husband Calvin brie y taught reli gion at Bowdoin College. During this period, she cared for her six children (ranging from an infant born in Maine to twin teenaged girls), presided over a nineteenth century household, ran a small school with her sister Catherine, and, famously, wrote her rst novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, driving it through forty one weekly installments in the National Era from June , to April , . Stowe did not have time for frequent or extended visits to Orr’s Island and has left behind just one letter clearly identifying an undated trip there when she met “a sturdy, independent sherman farmer”—a man she does not name—who would become the model for Zephaniah Pennel in Pearl. Not yet the celebrated author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe attracted little notice, and there is no rsthand evidence telling us whom she met or where she stayed. Stowe’s acquaintance with Orr’s Island may have been slight, but her general familiarity with the “belt of coast between f teen and twenty miles wide” encompassing Harpswell and its “complicated network of islands” was not. Stowe often took her children to enjoy beachcombing, shing, bathing, and boat ing at Brunswick’s Mere Point, and there were opportunities as well to picnic at Harpswell, see a ship being launched at a local yard, collect seagull eggs at Birch Island, or go sailing on Casco
Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Annie Fields, ed. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton Mif in, ), . Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Letter from Maine—No. ,” The National Era, August , , newspaper clipping, Special Collections, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, ME. THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Bay. Stowe’s novel uses a wide swath of coast, from Maquoit Bay to the Kennebec, and her explorations sometimes found her visiting cottages and taking tea with local shing families. When she came to write The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Stowe was well prepared to sketch a Maine community centered on sh ing, seafaring, and family shipbuilding, and to render its cus
toms, dialect, and traditions. (see Fig. ) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 When Stowe arrived in , Maine was the country’s lead ing builder of wooden ships. Its sailing vessels plied transat lantic and Caribbean trade routes while its agricultural and shing economies were among the strongest in New England. “Most people in Maine,” writes Stephen Hornsby, “lived in a world of wood, wind, and water.” Stowe would discover char acters for The Pearl of Orr’s Island among them—prosperous sherman farmers, shipbuilders, and sea captains. Yet from the moment she disembarked from the brand new steamer Ocean and boarded the just completed Kennebec & Portland Railroad to be whirled off to Brunswick and its river anked by clatter ing cotton mills, Stowe understood that she was observing a threatened way of life. In an “Letter from Maine” for the National Era, she expresses her dread that steam will end the “poetic” age of sail, just as hydraulic power had ended the splendor of wild rivers: We pray the day may never come when any busy Yankee shall nd a substitute for ship sails, and take from these spirits of the wave their glorious white wings and silent, cloud like movement, for any fuss and
See Charles Edward Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton Mif in, ), – ; Eliza Tyler Stowe to Ellen [no surname, cousin of Anna Smith], August , , and Harriet Beecher Stowe II (Hattie) to Ellen, July , , Beecher Stowe Family Papers, – , Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and George Hinman, “The Pearl of Orr’s Island: How Mrs. Stowe Came to Write the Story,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), August , , , www.newspapers.com (accessed November , ). H. B. Stowe, “Letter from Maine—No. .” Stephen J. Hornsby, “Maine in ,” in Historical Atlas of Maine, ed. Stephen J. Hornsby and Richard W. Judd (Orono: University of Maine Press, ), Part , Plate . William Avery Baker, A Maritime History of Bath, Maine and the Kennebec River Region (Bath, ME: Marine Research Society of Bath, ), : – . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER sputter of steam and machinery. It will be just like some Yankee to do it. That race will never rest until everything antique and poetic is drilled out of the world. The same spirit that yearns to make Niagara a mill seat, and use all its pomp and power of cloud and spray and rainbow, and its voices of many waters for an accessory to a cotton factory, would, we suppose, be right glad to transform the winged ship into some greasy disagreeable combination of machinery, if only it would come cheaper. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021
By the time Stowe came to write The Pearl of Orr’s Island ten years later, her early nostalgia for a pre industrial era had only grown more acute, and her need to record its folkways more urgent. There was no tourism to speak of in mid coast Maine dur ing the years of Stowe’s brief stay. Orr’s Island, she writes, was visited only occasionally by “a stray party from . . . Brunswick c[o]me down to explore the romantic scenery of the solitary island” (POI, ). But Stowe saw the potential for tourism. In , she marveled that “in all the ecstasies that have been lav ished on American scenery, this beautiful state of Maine should have been so much neglected.” “The islands of the coast of Maine are a study for the tourist,” she wrote, “The whole sail along the shore is through a never ending labyrinth of these— some high and rocky, with castellated sides, bannered with pines—some richly wooded with forest trees.” Stowe’s emphasis on “romantic scenery” and “study” are char acteristic of the early s, when the limited number of tourists who visited New England before the Civil War, in uenced by European Romanticism, sought encounters with the sublime—with God’s design—in wild scenery, and expected to re ect on their experiences in discussion with fellow trav elers, in journals, in sketchbooks, and on canvas. Even as Stowe wrote about the neglect of Maine’s scenery, farther up
H. B. Stowe, “Letter from Maine—No. .” H. B. Stowe, “Letter from Maine—No. .” Stephen J. Hornsby, “Mountain Views, Coastal Scenes,” in Historical Atlas of Maine, Part , plate . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the coast, at Mount Desert Island, Romantic artists Frederic Church and Fitz Henry Lane were endeavoring to correct the problem. Stowe herself picked up a paintbrush to produce a scene of sailboats on Casco Bay, but it would be her pen that nally brought tourists to Orr’s Island—“No language,” she wrote, “can be too enthusiastic to paint the beauty.” (see
Fig. ) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 This introduction of a Romantic sensibility to Maine in the s, according to Hornsby, “laid the foundations for Maine’s tourist industry . . . in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” The Pearl of Orr’s Island was conceived at this piv otal moment. A minister’s wife who wrote to help support her family, Stowe—like her creation Captain Kittridge—looked at stories as “marketable reside commodities,” and at Maine as full of untapped potential (POI, ). In the summer of , af ter Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been published in book form, Stowe began thinking about her next novel. Calvin Stowe had recently accepted a position at Andover Theological Seminary in Mas sachusetts, and as Harriet reluctantly began preparations for leaving Maine, she wrote to her husband: Well, the inspiration has come at last. I have had a vision, and the next thing I do will be to embody my deep love to the beautiful state of Maine in a story. It is to be called “The Pearl of the Islands”.... How I have loved these beautiful shores, these glittering seas, these rocks yellow with seaweed, and the brave old sailors, and the bright eyed, beautiful children, and the crystal hearted, true, good people that live along its shores, and before I go from it I must sail once through the islands. I must go to Orr’s Island. . . . This story will be the pearl of my stories, a purely creative thing of which the material shall be American. I will invest with poetry and romance this dreamy old sea.
See, for example, Church’s “Fog off Mount Desert” ( ) or Lane’s “Somes Sound, Mount Desert Island” (ca. ). H. B. Stowe, “Letter from Maine—No. .” Hornsby, “Mountain Views, Coastal Scenes,” in Historical Atlas of Maine, Part , plate . H. B. Stowe to Calvin Stowe, before July , , in George Hinman, “The Pearl of Orr’s Island: How Mrs. Stowe Came to Write the Story,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), August , , , www.newspapers.com (accessed November , ). YARNS SPUN TO ORDER For a brief time, Stowe worked on her “Maine story. . . . composing it every day.” She did not anticipate that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was about to become a bestseller then unprece dented in history, sweeping her up in a whirlwind of celebrity and controversy. Stowe was forced to set Pearl aside in to defend Uncle Tom from critics who claimed the picture of
slavery it presented was exaggerated and false. Within the year, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 she produced A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a compendium of “Facts for the People” about slavery, and as soon as it was done, departed for the rst of three triumphal tours of Europe. For several years, The Pearl of Orr’s Island was forgotten in a rush of other writing projects. Then, in , tragedy struck. Stowe’s eldest son, Henry, a freshman at Dartmouth College, drowned while swimming in the Connecticut River. Seeking consolation, Stowe returned to Brunswick with Calvin and their seven year old, Charlie, for a short visit with close friends. As Stowe revisited old haunts on Brunswick and Harpswell shores, bittersweet memories of her family’s years in Maine came ooding back, along with her am bition to write The Pearl of Orr’s Island. But it was not until December that Stowe was nally able to begin writing the novel as a weekly serial for a Congregationalist newspaper, The Independent. In April , the start of the Civil War inter rupted her work again—“Who could write stories that had a son to send to battle, with Washington beleaguered and the whole country shaken as with an earthquake?”—but Stowe nally n ished the serial in April , and the rst American edition of the completed book was published shortly thereafter. Critics greeted The Pearl of Orr’s Island as “a ‘sea idyll,’ the ‘most perfect’ of Mrs. Stowe’s later works, and a book one ‘can with con dence leave in the hands of a family with a daughter.’” The novel follows three children as they grow
Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, . C. E. Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, – . See Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and E. Bruce Kirkham, “The Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” Colby Quarterly ( ): – . Jean W. Ashton, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Reference Guide (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, ), . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to young adulthood on the island. We have the “Pearl”— delicate, saintly Mara Lincoln, an orphan living with her Pen nel grandparents—as well as proud, roguish Moses Pennel, her adopted brother. Mara’s best friend—robust, outdoorsy Sally Kittridge—completes the triangle. A work of parlor literature, intended to be read aloud to all the family, Pearl contained
something for everyone. There are shipwrecks and smugglers, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 mystery and romance, ghost stories and religious re ection. The novel is rich, too, in domestic realism. In its pages, readers could learn how to soothe a colicky baby, refurbish a bonnet, or make clam chowder. Audiences especially enjoyed the novel’s humor, provided by two memorable characters in supporting roles—the yarn spinning Captain Kittridge and the wise spin ster Aunt Roxy Toothacre. In the words of Stowe scholar E. Bruce Kirkham, these characters are the book, “all others are small clams on their beach.” Joseph Conforti has called Stowe “the mother superior” of New England ction. Subtitled A Story of the Coast of Maine, The Pearl of Orr’s Island was a landmark work of “local color.” Scholars typically date the local color movement from – . After the war, reading about America’s distinctive regions was considered patriotic as well as pleasurable, part of the work of national reuni cation. But Stowe had begun experimenting with literary regionalism as early as in one of her rst pub lished stories, “A New England Sketch,” and would eventually
E. Bruce Kirkham, “Introduction,” The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Hartford, CT: Stowe Day Foundation, ), n.p. Conforti, Imagining New England, . See Donna Campbell, “Regionalism and Local Color Fiction: ,” Lit erary Movements, Dept. of English, Washington State University, , https://public .wsu.edu/∼campbelld/amlit/lcolor.html (accessed November , ). Pearl, written in the midst of the Civil War, obviously does not partake in this reuni cation ethos. The novel criticizes the moral corruption of slaveholding cultures, and presents New En gland values as ideally hegemonic. After the war, however, Stowe purchased a winter cottage in Mandarin, Florida and embraced the healing virtues of local color writing. Her bestseller Palmetto Leaves ( ) made her an unlikely spokeswoman for early Florida tourism. See John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster, eds. Calling Yan kees to Florida: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Forgotten Tourist Articles (Cocoa, FL: Florida Historical Society Press, ). YARNS SPUN TO ORDER produce four local color novels set in New England. In The Pearl of Orr’s Island, she offers a fully mature template for local color literature that would in uence postwar writers including Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Celia Thaxter, and especially Sarah Orne Jewett, whose Maine novel Country of the Pointed Firs ( ), is in many ways an homage to Pearl.
Hallmarks of the local color genre include focus on a speci c Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 place, usually rural and remote, which shapes the story’s action, and on common folk with regional accents and quaint customs. A more sophisticated narrator with inside knowledge regards the story’s characters with sympathy and humor. Plot elements are drawn from sentimental romance (Pearl, for instance, has a love triangle and a young heroine’s death from consumption), but details of location, character, dialect, and customs are real istic, and, as Kirkham notes, there is a strong desire “to present accurate pictures of common things, whether they be houses . . . or kitchen drawers.” Perhaps most important, both The Pearl of Orr’s Island and the local color genre are suffused with nostalgia, “a yearning for the days gone by when times were simpler, families closer, and customs quainter.” Stowe’s novel is set well before her own brief residence in Maine, in an inde nite historical past she elsewhere described as “a period in New England . . . the impress of which is now rapidly fading away. . . . [T]he ante railroad times.” The only things that steam in The Pearl of Orr’s Island are cups of tea, damp rewood, and kettles of clam chowder (POI, , , ). Characters sail to Portland
Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (New York: Continuum, ), . The novels are The Minister’s Wooing ( ), The Pearl of Orr’s Island ( ), Oldtown Folks ( ), and Poganuc People ( ). Marjorie Pryse, “Stowe and Regionalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Har riet Beecher Stowe, ed. Cindy Weinstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), . Sarah Orne Jewett called Stowe “Eldress Harriet” and averred that The Pearl of Orr’s Island had taught her, as a young writer, to “see with new eyes.” In , Jewett both re read Pearl and attended Stowe’s funeral while writing Country of the Pointed Firs. See Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston, MA: Houghton Mif in, ), , , – . Kirkham, “Introduction.” Kirkham, “Introduction.” Stowe, Oldtown Folks, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mif in, ), . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY aboard Zephaniah Pennel’s shing smack, and Boston seems “about as far off at that time . . . as Paris now seems to a Boston belle” (POI, ). Stowe’s sentimentalized vision of Maine in the days before steam powered transportation would only be come more delectable to readers as the end of the Civil War accelerated the pace of the on rushing modernity she deplored.
Literary regionalism, Richard Brodhead tells us, found its Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 heyday in the nal decades of the nineteenth century, as the “linkage of American railroads into a transcontinental net work” inspired both “rapid corporate capitalist industrial devel opment” and the explosive growth of “great American cities . . . at the new junctions of transportation and commerce.” Between and , the United States changed from a pre dominantly rural to a predominantly urban society. In just a few decades, more than twenty percent of the nation’s population moved off the land in a quest for economic opportunity, joining millions of new immigrants crowding into cities almost unimag inably squalid by today’s standards. Stowe’s antebellum nostalgia for a vanishing rural past had become a late nineteenth century pandemic. A new kind of tourism inspired by local color writing arose, as the middle class sought escape from their increasingly urban reality not just on the page but in actual travel to literary ction’s “imagined world of pastoral beauty, rural independence, virtuous simplicity, and religious and ethnic homogeneity.” Mid coast Maine, the set ting of The Pearl of Orr’s Island, was well situated to accom modate such tourism. With help from Stowe, the bestselling author of her century and, in Conforti’s words, a “major custo dian” of New England’s regional identity, Maine was “reimag ined as a place with a heroic Yankee past, dramatic natural scenery, and undermodernized picturesque communities.”
Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nine teenth Century America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, ), – . “Population by Urban and Rural and Size of Place Based on . . . Pre Ur ban De nition: – ,” United States Summary: Census of Population and Housing (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Commerce, ), Table , . Brown, Inventing New England, – . Conforti, Imagining New England, , . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Ironically, these resources were soon under threat from the same modern transportation system that had created a demand for them by erasing America’s regional and rural identities in the rst place. The networking of national rail with steamship travel along the Eastern seaboard contributed to “spectacular growth” in Maine’s tourism industry during the nal years of
the nineteenth century, drawing increasing numbers of visi Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 tors to the state from the urban Northeast, the middle Atlantic states, and the Midwest. Let us, then, travel to Orr’s Island for a case study of how literary tourism transformed one small Maine community. In , Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published an ambitious two part travelogue by William Henry Bishop, a Yale educated journalist from Connecticut with an interest in marine lore. Ti tled “Fish and Men in the Maine Islands” and illustrated with handsome engravings by Milton J. Burns, the piece features the adventures of an authorial character named Middleton as he visits selected Maine islands to learn more about commer cial and recreational shing. Among all the islands in Casco Bay, Middleton chooses to visit Orr’s precisely because of its connection to Stowe’s novel: “What selection so judicious as that of Orr’s Island, one of the outermost of the group, about which the testimony of an amiable lady with the literary fac ulty, who had set foot on it to make it famous, was already on record?” (see Fig. ) Middleton nds an island unprepared for summer tourism. To reach his destination, he must take a “little steamer” to Harpswell from Portland’s Commercial Wharf and then hire someone to row him across “the swift deep channel” from Harpswell to Orr’s Island. There is no hotel, and he must board at a local home. The charge is four dollars a week, including some rowing and sailing, but Middleton nds the price extrav agant because the meals included are so poor. He “derive[s] an
Richard R. Wescott, “Tourism in Maine,” in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Pre history to the Present, ed. Richard W. Judd et al. (Orono: University of Maine Press, ), . W. H. Bishop, “Fish and Men in the Maine Islands,” Harper’s New Monthly Mag azine, (August ): – . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY impression of an unhygienic style of diet among the islanders” when he is served “‘half a mess’ of clams, heavy dough bis cuits, tea without milk, three kinds of cake, stewed peaches, and stewed prunes” for breakfast. The island’s industry is not tourism but shing for cod, haddock, pollock, and hake. Mid dleton remarks on hillsides and yards covered with “lattice
work ‘ akes,’ or tables for drying the sh. . . . The Maine Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 islander has them about his house as a farmer elsewhere might have rows of bee hives, or milk pans, or a vineyard.” Yet Middleton’s rst thoughts when he steps ashore are not of sh and men, but of characters and scenes from Stowe’s novel:
No sooner was he landed than he discovered a potential “Pearl of Orr’s Island,” and Moses as well, under the bashful hats of brown little children going “berrying” along the single, central road. He saw the distant white spire of Parson Sewell’s meeting house, to which the characters used to sail on a Sunday, on Harpswell, over the top of a couple of the most delightfully old hulks in a cove. And the lively Sally Kittredge, he gured, was the young woman at whose house he dined at noon . . . who had been at a seminary on the mainland, and who wove wonderful mats for the oors out of no other material than common rags.
Middleton is not alone. A “bluff old gentleman . . . a really ven erable and picturesque gure, who was said by popular report to be the Captain Pennell of the narrative” tells him that people are now coming from as far away as “the West, and even from ‘Canedy,’ [to] give themselves unnecessary trouble in hunting for caverns that never existed, and cut the bark from his fruit trees for mementos.”
Bishop, “Fish and Men,” . Such discomfort was common during the early days of boardinghouse tourism, when visitors expecting “fresh seasonal simplicity” encoun tered the reality of “plain country fare”—see Brown, Inventing New England, . Bishop, “Fish and Men,” , , . Bishop, “Fish and Men,” . Bishop, “Fish and Men,” . In The Pearl of Orr’s Island, the captain’s name is spelled Pennel. In Orr’s Island publicity, it is often spelled Pennell. Kittridge in the novel becomes Kittredge on the island. Elsewhere, different sources offer variant spellings of Merryconeag and Merriconeag. YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Pearl of Orr’s Island tourism, enabled by the nation’s bur geoning transportation network of connected railroads and steamship lines, had begun without any effort on the island’s part—and already included efforts to identify “picturesque” is land residents with characters in the novel and to locate cti tious places. Middleton consults islanders about “Mrs. Stowe’s
book,” and learns that they are “rather disposed to resent a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 willful misrepresentation of them” and believe “that the novel should con ne itself strictly to a line of events which had actu ally happened.” He colorizes their responses with his own ren dition of Maine dialect: “Yis,” said one interlocutor, severely. . . . “There was never was no such folks, and no such talkin’ folks. There ain’t no caves and no smugglers. My brother ’n law’s farm’s been alongside ’o Long’s Cove for fty year, and he never sor ’em. They couldn’t get in, what’s more, smugglers couldn’t; there ain’t water to oat ’em.” The interlocutor’s complaint details particular sore points. Is landers resented Stowe’s invention of Orr’s Island characters (“no such folks”), her rendition of Maine dialect (the ironic “no such talkin’ folks”), her creation of ctitious places that tourists were wild to see, especially the sea cave or “grotto” where Moses and Sally enjoy a romantic tryst, and her inclusion of ctitious events, such as smugglers meeting at Long Cove in the dead of night. But the world of Bishop’s “Fish and Men” was about to change. In , the newly organized Harpswell Steamboat Company began offering summer service from Portland to is lands in the eastern half of Casco Bay, including a stop at Orr’s Island. “The route is twenty miles long and passes through the most picturesque scenery of Casco Bay,” wrote islander William Doughty. “She runs alongside the landing in about two hours out of Portland, when on time.” In the race to
Bishop, “Fish and Men,” . Richard R. Wescott, A History of Harpswell, Maine (Brunswick, ME: Harpswell Historical Society, ), . William H. Doughty, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, with Landscape Descrip tions ([Portland, ME]: Six Towns Times Print, ), . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY accommodate the in ux of tourists and would be summer res idents, Orr’s Island began to experience a real estate and con struction boom. On June , , for instance, the island’s occasional newspaper, The New Dory, reported that “Mrs. Ada Prince has nished her house and has it well tted up for company,” “Mr. Wm. Reed is building a new cottage for Mr.
Thompson of Lisbon,” and S. C. Prince is advertising “a desir Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 able cottage lot” for sale. In , a visiting reporter from New York stayed at a house called Kittredge Cottage. Older island residents and visitors have “agreed,” he wrote, that “this is the ‘one story, gambrel roofed cottage’ where lived the Captain Kittridge” in Stowe’s novel. Gone were Bishop’s “interlocutors” stoutly maintaining that “there never was no such folks.” The reporter is skepti cal, noting that no family by the name of Kittredge has ever been known “on the island or the neighboring coast.” A careful reader of the novel, he also notes that instead of facing Stowe’s “‘ocean waters making up amid picturesque rocks, shaggy and solemn,’” the boardinghouse faces “the placid waters of Mer ryconeag Bay . . . with Harpswell on the other side.” This seems to have been the reporter’s sole encounter with Pearl themed tourism on Orr’s Island. “Fishing and sailing are the chief amusements that offer,” he wrote, and “[t]he scenery . . . is beautiful.” But all of Casco Bay’s islands had beautiful scenery to recom mend them, along with boating, bathing, shing, sea breezes, and seafood. Orr’s Island was the last stop on the Harpswell Steamboat line, which also served Long, Little, Hope, and Cliff Islands, the Harpswell peninsula, and Bailey’s Island. The is land needed to distinguish itself from its competition in some way, and both local businesses and the Harpswell Steamboat
“Local News,” The New Dory (Orr’s Island, ME), June , , . Brown Library, Maine Historical Society, Portland, ME. Again, island spelling—Kittredge—differs from Stowe’s spelling—Kittridge. “Islands of Casco Bay. For Weary City Toilers Beautiful Scenery and Ocean Breezes. Sailing and Fishing—The Scene of One of Mrs. Stowe’s Novels,” Special to The New Dory, August , , . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Company began marketing Orr’s Island as “the scene of Har riet Beecher Stowe’s fascinating story.” This strategy bore fruit on July , , when Stowe qui etly passed away at the venerable age of eighty ve. The death of the celebrated author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a heroine to many—was front page news around the world, sparking a
resurgence of interest in her life and writing. Stowe’s pub Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 lisher, Houghton Mif in, brought out a commemorative River side Edition of her work in sixteen volumes, including The Pearl of Orr’s Island. The small island in Maine immediately felt the shock. “Orr’s Island, Harpswell, Me., has been a fa vorite resort this summer,” announced the Kansas City Star, “[t]he recent death of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe has revived . . . interest in her story ‘The Pearl of Orr’s Island.’” Tourists from “Boston and nearby places” as well as “New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and many of the Western states” arrived in unprecedented numbers. The Harpswell Steamboat Com pany had grown rapidly, and in summer , the “elegant new steamers” Merryconeag and Sebascodegan between them of fered four round trips a day to Orr’s Island. A lavishly illustrated travel guide, Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay, offers an example of how pro motion of Orr’s Island as a Pearl themed tourist destination blurred boundaries between fact and ction. The guide book’s description of Orr’s Island emphasizes that its scenery has been “immortalized” by Mrs. Stowe, and quotes extensively from a passage in the novel well suited to attracting tourists. A ride across “this island” is “a constant succession of pictures”; groves of trees “produce a sort of strange, dreamy wonder”; the sea “seems to ash and glitter like some strange gem”; and “neat white houses” nestle “like sheltered doves in the beautiful
Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay ([Portland, ME]: G. W. Morris, ), , . “Notables at Orr’s Island,” The Kansas City Star, September , , . Amer ica’s Historical Newspapers: , http://www.newsbank.com (accessed Novem ber , ). Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay, . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY solitude.” The only problem is that the quotation, taken out of context, actually describes a carriage ride across Great Island, the overland route to the Orr’s Island bridge. Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay then offers this suggestion: “While on Orr’s Island visit the ‘Grotto,’ the Pennell House, and ‘The Pearl of Orr’s Island’ house.” The disgrun
tled islanders who once rmly informed Middleton that “There Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ain’t no caves,” were now marketing Stowe’s ctitious grotto as a place one could actually visit, for a fee. The Pennell House and the Pearl House offered duelling opportunities to tour the ctitious home where Stowe’s heroine Mara, the Pearl, lived with her Pennel grandparents. The Pearl House would soon an nihilate its competition, becoming the best known and longest lasting of the Stowe attractions on Orr’s Island—even though it was a white Cape on Johnson’s Point, facing Harpswell Sound, and not, like the Pennel house in the novel, a “brown house of the kind that the natives call ‘lean to,’” “facing the open ocean” (POI, ). The guide book includes a full page photograph of the Pearl House with a superimposed cameo of Harriet Beecher Stowe. “The White House Is The Home Of The Pearl Of Orr’s Island,” the caption says determinedly, adding “Reached Only by Steamers of Harpswell Steamboat Company. (see Fig. ) Maine native and Boston area journalist Elizabeth Orr Williams was among the many tourists who boarded the Mer ryconeag for Orr’s Island in . Her subsequent newspaper article offers the most comprehensive picture of Pearl based tourism in its prime. “Taking a copy of the famous story . . . for a Baedeker,” she “sailed for the spot, determined to explore its recesses, to become acquainted with its inhabitants, and to read the story anew upon its shores.” “Upon landing,” Williams felt that “the rst thing of importance to be done seemed to be go ing over the ‘Devil’s Back,’” a high, steep rock formation with precipitous sides described in Stowe’s novel. She rents a horse and carriage, places “the story book on the carriage seat,” takes
Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay, ; see POI, – . Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay, . Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay, . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER up the reins, and drives three miles to “the devil’s domains,” where she soon nds herself holding her breath “as the wheel tires rolled . . . fearfully near that precipice.” Once over the Devil’s Back, she nds the “thicket or ravine . . . where Atkin son, the smuggler captain from Bath, once held high carnival, and where he attempted to initiate ‘Moses’ into the smuggler’s
art.” There is no “interlocutor” to tell her that “There ain’t... Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 no smugglers.” Leaving “the adventurous for the social development,” Williams next makes a call at “the supposed home of Aunt Roxy,” Stowe’s “vigorous, spicy, and decided” spinster, a Maine “cunning woman” (EOW, ; POI, , ). The house almost certainly took in summer guests. Williams does not mention the home’s architecture, but later postcards of “Aunt Roxy House” show a two story, double chimneyed, Federal style farmhouse, while the novel speci es a one story gambrel roofed cottage. Williams simply records her pleasure in “the old house, with its heavy beams exposed to view, [and] its capacious chimney, with its ancient crane and andirons” (EOW, ). Like the old houses in The Pearl of Orr’s Island, described with Stowe’s trademark domestic realism, the supposed home of Aunt Roxy evoked nostalgia for “the days of the genial open kitchen re, with the crane, the pot hooks, and trammels . . . where steamed the huge dinner pot, in whose ample depths beets, carrots, pota toes, and turnips boiled in jolly sociability with the pork or corned beef” (POI, ). Williams also engages in china collect ing, an early form of “antiquing,” and comes away with “an old Staffordshire blue plate as a souvenir” (EOW, ). Williams next visits “the alleged home of the Kittridges,” and nds a gambrel roofed house near a curved beach, “where Pearl and Sally Kittridge played together.” Like the reporter
Elizabeth Orr Williams, “Pearl of Orr’s Island. The Story of One of Mrs. Stowe’s Heroines. Her Footprints on Orr’s Island—Home of ‘Pearl,’” The Indianapolis Journal, July , , . Originally published in the Boston Transcript. Née Orr, the author states that she “claims no kinship with” the founders of Orr’s Island. www.newspapers .com (accessed November , ). Hereafter cited in text as EOW. For a period account of this hobby, see Alice Morse Earle, China Collecting in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ). THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY who apparently boarded here in , Williams notes that the “alleged home” does not match the description in the novel. She nds only photographs to support the ction that the Orr’s Island house once belonged to Stowe’s old sea captain. “In the parlor hang the photographs of Captain Kittridge as supposed,” she writes, “There is a twinkle in his eyes that make one think
he enjoyed telling ‘sea yarns.’ His estimable wife, in photograph Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 . . . so often a checkrein in his stories, hangs there also” (EOW, ). After visiting the “supposed home of Aunt Roxy” and the “al leged home of the Kittridges,” the indefatigable Williams natu rally continues on to the “so called ‘home of Pearl,’” the island’s best known boardinghouse. At Pearl House she nds “two very genial, lovable, obliging women . . .” and, still collecting china, acquires “a very old sugar bowl as a memento” (EOW, ). Per haps to avoid offending her hostesses, Williams describes Pearl House, but does not comment on how it differs from the Pen nel house in Stowe’s novel. Refreshed by an overnight stay at Ocean View Cottage, “a private home thrown open to summer visitors,” Williams heads for “the ocean side” of the island, where “old Neptune sends the breakers up on the rocks, as if he were tearing mad.” There she visits “a secluded nook guarded and shaded by cedars and spruces,” one version of a popular Pearl attraction called “The Grotto” after a location in the novel where Moses, “when a boy,” went to “watch the gradual rise of the tide till the grotto was entirely cut off from all approach,” and then “look out in a sort of hermit like security over the open ocean” (EOW, , POI, ). Williams’s nal visit is to the Orr’s Island cemetery. “The village burial place attracts the stranger,” she writes, “by its well kept grounds, the fresh white tombstones, and its original epitaphs.” Here she is intrigued by the story of “an unhappy woman who drowned herself in Long Cove, near the Devil’s Back.” “Her distracted husband,” Williams writes, “partially healed his broken heart through the means of the poetic muse.” She quotes two lines of his “effusion,” carved on his wife’s headstone—“With nerves and sails unfurled she steered her YARNS SPUN TO ORDER bark to yonder world”—and adds this sarcastic observation— “All this cut and lettered in marble and free to the reading public” (EOW ). The unhappy woman was Elizabeth Dunning Wyer, whose suicide by drowning on February , ought to have noth ing to do with The Pearl of Orr’s Island although it did take
place during Stowe’s residence in Maine, and the author may Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 have heard about it from friends in the ministry. But the novel includes the discovery of a drowned woman’s body washed ashore after a shipwreck, her living child—Moses—clasped in her dead arms. The mystery of her identity becomes central to the novel’s plot. Confronted by Pearl tourists who believed that a real woman was actually washed ashore, some Orr’s Island in terpreters further entangled fact and ction by eliding Stowe’s character with Elizabeth Wyer, whose unusual headstone, with its pathetic poetry by her husband James, was a visible attraction. When Williams visited Orr’s Island in , then, she found a veritable Pearl of Orr’s Island theme park, ooded with tourists. She marveled at the steamboats coming and going, car rying people from as far away as “the West and California.” Tourists could visit or stay at the homes of the Pearl, Cap tain Kittridge, or Aunt Roxy, visit the Grotto or the smugglers’ cove, and drive along the Devil’s Back. But still, they were not satis ed. Astonished by their rudeness, Williams mentions two young men busily “snapping the kodak” and knocking on the doors of private homes to inquire, “‘Can you tell us where the Harriet Beecher Stowe House is?’” (EOW, ). This desire of tourists to visit a Stowe house on Orr’s Island, coupled with the fact that she visited brie y just once or twice, accounts for one island historian’s later assertion that guides pointed out “sev eral cottages” as “one in which she was actually entertained at luncheon.”
“Elizabeth Dunning Wyer,” Find a Grave Memorial # , Orr’s Island Cemetery, Orr’s Island, ME, https:// ndagrave.com (accessed November , ), and Annie Haven Thwing, The Story of Orr’s Island, Maine (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis Co., ), . Thwing, Story of Orr’s Island, – . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Tourism during this period, Dona Brown asserts, made do with whatever materials were at hand for manufacturing “the special nostalgic ambience of bygone days,” sometimes with considerable “disregard for reality.” In an era of heritage tourism, when tourists especially sought historic house muse ums and literary shrines, Orr’s Island naturally capitalized on
its connection with Stowe and her novel by inventing associa Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 tions for houses, places, and even people. A sophisticated trav eler, Elizabeth Orr Williams is never taken in by the ctional experience of The Pearl of Orr’s Island offered to her but in stead enjoys the Kittridge like efforts of island storytellers to please literal boatloads of Stowe enthusiasts: “In strict justice to the kind and courteous people now living on the island . . . neither they nor any of their ancestors have ever claimed any identity with the characters mentioned in the story of ‘Pearl.’ But when they nd that all visitors wish to indulge in the feel ing that local facts were actually incorporated in the ction they very graciously try to assent” (EOW, ). As the twentieth century approached, the business of sum mering on Orr’s Island, boosted by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, continued to grow exponentially. In , the Harpswell Steamboat Company added a third vessel, the Aucocisco, and the following year carried , passengers. In , the island’s rst hotel, Merritt House, opened its doors, followed shortly by Mascot House. Cottages sprang up overnight, as islanders subdivided their land for sale. In , islander William H. Doughty decided to publish his own guidebook for tourists, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, with Landscape Descriptions. Doughty, a shopkeeper, had been to sea as a boy and served throughout the Civil War in
Brown, Inventing New England, , . Conforti, Imagining New England, , . See Edwin M. Burdett, Literary Pil grimages in New England (New York: Silver, Burdett, ) for period information about authentic Stowe sites elsewhere. Wescott, History of Harpswell, . Doughty, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, – . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER
Company F of the th Maine Volunteers. He offers a fac tual description of the island’s history, its families, and its neigh borhoods with their distinctive attractions. Outlining a six hour walking tour, he advises visitors on where to nd the most spec tacular views of rockbound coast or see the shing eet come in. Doughty emphasizes that shing is the principal business of Orr’s Island, and cautions tourists against viewing shermen Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 as quaint or insular: “[F]ishermen . . . are not what strangers have been taught in some cases to think them. . . . Very few of the men but are able to take charge of a vessel and navigate her from the banks of Newfoundland to the coast of Florida; very few of them but what have visited every seaport city on the coast of the United States, and some have visited foreign ports.” A man of integrity who understood the responsibility of putting words in print, Doughty might have preferred to avoid the topic of Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Pearl of Orr’s Is land altogether. Nevertheless, his Historical Sketch not only re views the problems inherent in locating scenes from the novel on the island, but hints at the competition and acrimony the lucrative Pearl industry was causing in this small community of year round residents. Risking censure, Doughty begins: “We do not wish to antagonize anyone’s opinion but our rep utation is to some extent at stake in the production of our sketch of Orr’s Island which must hereafter be considered his torical. . . .” There is “some con icting among local celebri ties as to where the Pearl’s house and the grotto were located,” he notes. Just as Portland and Its Scenic Gems of Casco Bay had showed two different sites being promoted as the home of the Pearl in , so early twentieth century postcards show two different sites being promoted as “The Grotto.” Such
“William H. Doughty,” Find a Grave Memorial # , Orr’s Island Cemetery, Orr’s Island, ME, https:// ndagrave.com (accessed November , ). Doughty, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, . Doughty, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, , , . The Grotto and The Shady Grotto, Orr’s Cove, Postcards of Orr’s Island, Me., by Hugh C. Leighton Co., Portland, ME. Both sent cards have divided backs, rst permitted in , and are postmarked . Author’s collection. THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY identi cations, Doughty suggests, were more mercenary than factual: “We must conclude after reading Mrs. Stowe’s book that in xing locations . . . individuals have been very partial to their own interests.” Even in a business listing for the popu lar Pearl House, he insists on calling it “the Clement Skol eld Place,” after its most recent owner.
William Doughty beautifully summarizes the insurmountable Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 dif culties awaiting any literary biographer or Maine historian attempting to prove a relationship between Harriet Beecher Stowe, her ction, and any person or place on Orr’s Island: Was the Pearl of Orr’s Island a whole cloth romance or was it based on facts? And we say we do not know. One thing is vouched for, however, by good authority, that Mrs. Stowe did not write the book on Orr’s Island but after she left the Island. She secured her material here. Whether she had a model or not we cannot say. . . . There are so many con icting stories that the only way to arrive at any clear conclusions is to come to Orr’s Island and take the book and after studying it seek out the positions and satisy yourself. This bucket of cold water did nothing to quench the lucra tive association of Orr’s Island with Stowe’s novel. As summer trade continued to swell during the rst years of the twenti eth century—the Harpswell Steamboat Company added yet an other boat, the Maquoit, to its eet in —a new business arose on the island, the sale of souvenirs. The Orr’s Island gen eral store, owned by the Prince family and located near the steamer dock, received an infusion of capital from investors in the Harpswell line and became the rst shop to engage in this trade. “Private mailing cards” with black and white images of “The Pearl House” began circulating almost as soon as the US Congress authorized the sale of privately printed postcards, a new medium, on May , . Between the years – , the so called “Golden Age of Postcards,” beautifully col ored German chromolithographs of the Kittredge [sic] House,
Doughty, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, – , . Doughty, Historical Sketch of Orr’s Island, . Wescott, History of Harpswell, – . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Aunt Roxy House, and two different Grottos joined several views of the Pearl House, marking a thriving Pearl industry. “Miss Prince’s Souvenir Store” sold “Indian baskets, r pillows, leather goods, sodas, candies, cigars, [and] a wonderful assort ment of post cards of Casco Bay,” as well as “‘The Pearl of Orr’s Island’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe ( editions, cents each).”
(see Fig. ) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Tourists in the s cut bark from fruit trees, but tourists in the rst decade of the s found more impressive sou venirs on offer. A nationwide craze for collectible blue and white Staffordshire souvenir plates had begun at the end of the previous century, a craze islanders may have been trying to emulate in when they gave Elizabeth Orr Williams an “old Staffordshire blue plate” and a “very old sugar bowl” as mementos (EOW, ). But by , Orr’s Island was sell ing its own Staffordshire blue plates, manufactured by Wedg wood, with a distinctive cabbage rose border and a central im age of the Pearl House on its rocky shore. To go with them, a tourist could purchase other tableware with images of the Pearl House, including a tiny gilt rimmed pitcher from Germany, or Mauchline ware napkin rings of varnished sycamore, imported from Scotland. (see Fig. ) Souvenir images of the Pearl House became so ubiquitous that a correspondent for the Lewiston Evening Journal, visit ing Orr’s Island in August , wrote: “The Pearl House, that is the present one, for there have been several . . . is a dear, lit tle, old fashioned house . . . on the very edge of the shore, just as one sees in the pictures and upon the souvenir plates.” So ciologist John Urry reminds us that tourism involves “the col lection of signs.” In other words, tourists seek out and linger over particular views believed to signify the spirit of the place
Arene Wiemers Burgess, A Collector’s Guide to Souvenir Plates (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, ), , . David Trachtenberg and Thomas Keith, Mauchline Ware: A Collector’s Guide (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, ), – , . “A Drive to Orr’s Island, Interesting Landmarks Pointed Out on Picturesque Road,” Lewiston Saturday Journal, August , , . https://news.google .com/newspapers?nid=oQQVFBP nzwC&dat= &printsec=frontpage&hl=en (accessed November , ). THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY they have come to experience. Their gaze is then “visually ob jecti ed” and “endlessly reproduced” in postcards and other collectible merchandise. The “hermeneutic circle” is complete when sight seers arrive at a place to collect “their version of the images they had seen before they set off.” The primacy of the Pearl House image de nes the nostal
gia sending early twentieth century tourists to Orr’s Island in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 search of Stowe’s ctional world. Pearl House was the island’s most visited tourist site as well as a boardinghouse, located a short distance from the busy steamship wharf landing thou sands of tourists each summer. But in souvenir images, the small house always appears in the distance, as if isolated on a remote shore. The “romantic gaze” constructs nature as “an ab solutely central positional good,” Urry tells us, and the “appeal of rural heritage” was equally important to this era’s tourists. The eighteenth century vernacular Cape, with its central chim ney, hints at family togetherness around a large hearth while its large barn and wooden boat launch evoke an agrarian and mar itime past. Placing the Pearl House image on a reproduction “antique” plate, a type of souvenir popular at heritage sites na tionwide, provided an additional—and collectible—illusion of having visited that past. Not coincidentally, the Lewiston Evening Journal correspon dent encouraged by souvenir images to seek out the “dear, lit tle, old fashioned house” was from Maine’s largest industrial city, an inland rivertown specializing in manufacturing textiles and shoes. She arrived at Orr’s Island by taking a train to Brunswick and then traveling to the island by horse drawn car riage. Once there, she encountered a Pearl industry as our ishing and mendacious as ever: “Many people . . . come here frequently to see for themselves the Pearl house, the Kittredge house, the Grotto . . . and the many other places described by Harriet Beecher Stowe. That her pictures are true, that she has correctly interpreted the spirit of the place, seems to be con ceded by all. . . . Even dear old aunt Roxy, when questioned about the book, admitted that although she couldn’t always tell
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, nd ed. (London: SAGE Publications, ), , . Urry, The Tourist Gaze, . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER just exactly which house or which person was meant, yet the picture was an accurate one of life upon the island, although it could not perhaps be called a bona de history.” The reporter seems unaware that “dear old aunt Roxy” is ac tually a role player. Islander Martha Alexander Sinnett, then approaching her nineties, was so identi ed with the character that the name “Aunt Roxy” appears on her headstone. She Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 was old enough possibly to have met Stowe when the author visited Orr’s Island between and , but too young then to have inspired an elderly spinster aunt. In , Martha mar ried sherman and boardinghouse keeper George Sinnett, and helped to make their home “one of great cheer and helpful ness . . . the favorite resort for many city boarders.” As “Aunt Roxy,” the now elderly widow had some stretchers of her own to add to the not precisely “bona de history” of Orr’s Island: “Of Harriet Beecher Stowe she has the pleasantest remem brances, and loves to tell of the days when she used to visit here, for weeks and weeks at a time.” “Tourism,” writes Dona Brown, “lured tourists into a world where all experiences were for sale.” On Orr’s Island, those experiences included laying out drowned bodies. In The Pearl of Orr’s Island, when a ship goes down in a storm and the corpse of Moses’s mother washes ashore, Aunt Roxy prepares the body for burial: “‘There,’ said Miss Roxy, coming out of the keeping room at sunset; ‘I wouldn’t ask to see a better lookin’ corpse. . . . I guess I shook a double handful of stones and them little shells out of her hair,—now she reely looks beautiful” (POI, ). Martha Sinnett, in her role of Aunt Roxy, joined other islanders in eliding the actual suicide by drowning of Elizabeth Wyer with the wholly ctitious death by shipwreck of Moses’s mother. When a tourist who has either
“A Drive to Orr’s Island,” . “Martha W. Alexander Sinnett,” Find a Grave Memorial # , Orr’s Island Cemetery, Orr’s Island, ME, https:// ndagrave.com (accessed November , ). Rev. Charles Nelson Sinnett, Michael Sinnett of Harpswell, Maine, His Ances try and Descendants (Concord, NH: The Rumford Press, ), – . Sinnett gives Martha’s dates as – ; her headstone reads – . “A Drive to Orr’s Island,” . Brown, Inventing New England, . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY misread the novel—or been misled by a visit to Wyer’s grave— asks “Aunt Roxy” about her experience, she receives a convo luted response: “When questioned about the laying out of the body of the woman who drowned herself, Aunt Roxy said that it was really true that the woman did go out early one morn ing and jump into the water, and was found in the little cove
above the Kittredge house, and that she was sent for to lay the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 body out, but, said Aunt Roxy leaning forward in her eager ness to make the exact state of the case . . . understood: ‘There weren’t any seashells in her hair, not even one. Of course, there might have been, but there weren’t—that’s just in the story.’” Here a role player impersonating a ctional character corrobo rates the false impressions of a tourist by substituting an actual occurrence for a ctional one, and then criticizes the novel for including invented details while acknowledging that they are realistic. This is no place for a careful historian. The reporter also visits an authentic islander, Captain Charles Black. At age eighty nine, he was the oldest man on Orr’s Is land, the archetypal crusty sherman. Black once captained his own schooners on the Banks, but now “he occasionally takes parties out in his little sailing craft” and “needless to say,” the “features of these trips” are his “tales of the sea.” A type of yarn spinning Captain Kittridge, Black is a member of a van ishing breed. “Old salts” were now ineluctably quaint, people imagined as historical relics, the subjects of postcards and sou venir photos. Ian McKay describes this phenomenon as “mar itimicity,” a “peculiar petit bourgeois rhetoric of lobster pots, grizzled shermen, wharves, and schooners . . . a Golden Age mythology in a region that has become economically dependent on tourism.” (see Fig. )
“A Drive to Orr’s Island,” . “A Drive to Orr’s Island, . The article includes a photograph of Captain Black. See also Annie Haven Thwing’s extra illustrated edition of The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Special Collections, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, ME. Thwing includes a pho tograph of a man who appears to be Black, and labels him “Zephaniah Pennell.” Brown, Inventing New England, . Ian McKay, “Twilight at Peggy’s Cove: Towards a Genealogy of ‘Maritimicity’ in Nova Scotia,” Border/Lines Summer , . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021
F . .—Harriet Beecher Stowe and Orr’s Island. “Phostint” postcard mailed . De troit Publishing Company. Collection of the author.
F . .—Marinescape of The Pearl of Orr’s Island. Map by Erin Greb. Property of the author. THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021
F . .—Unidenti ed Casco Bay scene by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Ca. . Gouache. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, CT.
F . .—Engraving of Orr’s Island scene by Milton J. Burns for W. H. Bishop’s “Fish and Men in the Maine Islands,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (August ). Collection of the author. YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021
F . .—Advertisement for “Pearl House” from Portland and the Scenic Gems of Casco Bay, Portland: G. W. Morris, . Collection of the author.
F . .—Private Mailing Card printed ca. . Collection of the author. THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021
F . .—Souvenir plate. “The Scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Fascinating Story ‘The Pearl of Orr’s Island.’” Wedgwood, . Controlled by T.F. Foss Sons, Portland. Collection of the author.
F . .—Souvenir photograph of Orr’s Island sherman by Charles Davis and Sons, Firdale Studios, Orr’s Island. Published by the Harp swell Steamboat Line, ca. . Collec tion of the author. YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021
F . .—The “improved” automobile route to the Orr’s Island Bridge. Albertype Post Card ca. . Collection of the author.
F . .—Dust jacket from Pearl of Orr’s Island photoplay edition capitalizing on the silent movie, The Pearl of Love, starring Gladys Leslie as Mara. Collection of the author. THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY With every hotel, boardinghouse, summer residence, and rental cottage on Orr’s Island full to over owing in that sum mer of , the reporter realizes that the island is no longera shing community, but has completed its metamorphosis into a resort. “It is a signi cant fact that now only four schooners are owned by residents of Orr’s Island,” she writes, “and that
even these four are manned by sailors from other places. . . . Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Summer inhabitants have taken the place of the shing indus try . . . they are more easily caught . . . and the shermen . . . no longer nd it necessary to go to sea to sh.” But she also notes the steamers disgorging boatloads of tourists clam oring for “nice fresh lobster.” The age of shing under sail may have drawn to a close, but tourist demand for lobster was creating a new, mechanized shery in local waters. Just the previous year, Orr’s Island sherman D. Perry Sinnett had built one of Maine’s earliest engine powered lobster boats—the King sher—and equipped it with a motorized trap hauler that would revolutionize lobstering. Manners, mores, and literary tastes were changing too. Af uent tourists were losing interest in Old New England’s Puri tan heritage, which implied, as Brown tells us, a “narrow and rigid morality . . . distinctly out of step” with their social aspira tions. In , a hack writer named William Jasper Nicolls at tempted to rewrite The Pearl of Orr’s Island for the times. The entertaining result, Brunhilda of Orr’s Island, was a frothy ro mance expressly written for the vacation trade, which had cre ated its own genre. Today we would call Brunhilda a “beach read,” then, it was a “hammock companion.” If The Pearl of Orr’s Island had once been used to market the charms of Maine to potential tourists, now advertisers invoked “romantic Casco Bay” and “the quaint sherfolk of Orr’s Island” as rea sons to buy Brunhilda.
“A Drive to Orr’s Island,” . Wescott, History of Harpswell, . Brown, Inventing New England, . Review of Brunhilda of Orr’s Island, by William Jasper Nicolls, The Tennesseean (Nashville, TN), August , , , https://newsbank.com (accessed November , ). Review of Brunhilda of Orr’s Island, The Tennesseean, August , , . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER Like Mara, heroine of The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Brunhilda (Hilda to her friends) is an orphan and lives in a charming, old fashioned Orr’s Island cottage with a kind and crusty sh erman, her uncle Captain Gunther. But Hilda is no Victorian “angel in the house” (POI, ). The novel’s color frontispiece shows a “New Woman” of the Gibson Girl era, wearing a middy
blouse, stubborn chin raised. The story begins when Hilda, on Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 a dare, and having missed the Aucocisco, rows out from Little Diamond Island, where she has been staying with friends, and hitches a ride home to Orr’s on a millionaire’s yacht. A sturdy oarswoman, as be ts a girl named for a Viking shield maiden, Hilda makes a picture on the water: “In a small boat, feath ering her oars and bending gracefully to each stroke, not over fty feet away, was a young woman. . . . [w]ith masses of uffy hair glinting in the yellow afterglow. . . . She wore no hat and her rm round arms were bare to the elbow.” It’s love at rst sight for rich dilettante Nelson Thomas, trav eling on his steam yacht between the fashionable resorts of Newport and Bar Harbor. Like Moses in Stowe’s novel, Thomas is an unregenerate young man with an illegal attraction to alco hol (in the run up to Prohibition, Maine was a dry state from forward). Unlike Moses, the martini drinking, cigarette smoking Thomas, who has written a book titled Creative Crudities endorsing Darwin’s theory of evolution, will remain unreformed. After much romantic to and fro, he proposes to Hilda in a “nature room,” a cleft in the rockbound coast in debted to Stowe’s Grotto. Hilda agrees to marry Thomas if he can defeat her island suitor, a sherman named Kenneth, in a sailboat race. Kenneth’s boat, tellingly named Pearl, is “the slickest thing that ever came into this harbor,” but Thomas meets the challenge by purchasing a thirty foot Herreshof racer, the Irene, and of course wins the day, despite Kenneth’s attempt to cheat. Nicolls strove to lighten Stowe’s novel for a new generation of readers by jettisoning her heavy moralizing. If Nelson Thomas
William Jasper Nicolls, Brunhilda of Orr’s Island (Philadelphia, PA: George W. Jacobs & Company, ), – . Nicolls, Brunhilda of Orr’s Island, , , . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY enjoys a martini, Captain Gunther enjoys an occasional tumbler of bootleg whiskey. There are no pious children. No one’s soul requires salvation. And, there is kissing. Kissing followed by el lipses, scarlet cheeks, and tumbled hair. This is not the world of Pearl, where gentlemen are not at liberty to express “that kind of free admiration” to a pretty young woman (POI, – ).
Brunhilda of Orr’s Island was not a particular success. Most Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 critics agreed with The Detroit Free Press that it was a “fair to average hammock novel.” But an anonymous critic for The Baltimore Sun, writing in the snarky style of that newspaper’s infamous H. L. Mencken, offered a glowing review of the book’s cover—“A Triumph in Bookbinding”—and then, about the story itself, viciously concluded “‘[I]t has been a melancholy task to read this book, and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it.’” In , the year of Brunhilda, the Harpswell Steamboat Company merged with two competitors—the Casco Bay Line and the Gurnet Line—as all three struggled to survive, hav ing overexpanded into the now hotly contested summer trade. Together they would face an ultimately insurmountable chal lenge that would change the American vacation forever—the coming of the automobile. In the years – , with funds from the newly formed Maine Highway Commission, Orr’s Is land undertook major improvements on its road to the main land, spending “$ , . . . to improve travel through Beautiful Maine to Picturesque Harpswell.” Postcards began to feature automobiles driving on the island’s newly designated state high way with its two lane bridge and a passage called “The Cut,” blasted through granite ledge. (see Fig. ) The modern tourist’s “gaze,” in Urry’s terms, had shifted away from undisturbed nature not only to “the view through
“Among the New Books. Novels New This Week,” Detroit Free Press, August , , , http://www.newsbank.com (accessed November , ). “A Triumph in Bookbinding,” The Baltimore Sun, August , , http://www .newsbank.com (accessed November , ). Wescott, History of Harpswell, and George S. Graves, Orr’s Island Bridge, Postcard, ca. . Author’s collection. YARNS SPUN TO ORDER the windscreen,” but to highway engineering itself. Once be hind the wheel, the new tourist was interested in indepen dence, speed, and mobility, as well as the gas stations, “motels,” diners, and roadside attractions that began to cluster along Maine’s new highways. Despite the efforts of Orr’s Island to attract automobile tourism, it was not a good t for an island
cul de sac. Gradually, automobile “weekenders” with their ex Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 treme transience would supersede the “summer people” who had once settled into hotels, boarding houses, and cottages for the season—with devastating effect on the economies of old style island resorts once fed by railroad and steamboat. The modern world was growing antithetical both to Stowe’s novel and its increasingly quaint seeming vision of Orr’s Island. In , when World War I was well underway in Europe and the millionth automobile had recently rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, a Connecticut author named “Williams” Haynes published a comical short story unmasking the island’s Pearl in dustry. Titled “Tainted Money,” the story appears in a folksy volume of Maine history and tall tales called Casco Bay Yarns. Haynes, who summered at Aucocisco House on Cliff Island, specialized in books and articles on industrial chemistry. Nev ertheless, he had no qualms about entering the yarn spinning business or faking his own authenticity. The frontispiece of Casco Bay Yarns shows Haynes with a pipe clenched in his teeth, baiting a lobster trap. “Tainted Money” involves a feud between two ctitious Orr’s Island families, the Harlows and the Skillings, who have “di vided the whole island into two warring camps.” The cause of the quarrel is “a purely academic question touching the literary methods of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” “Before summer visitors began coming to Casco Bay,” Haynes writes, “it was a matter of family pride on Orr’s Island not to have been used as a model
Urry, The Tourist Gaze, . See Wescott, “Tourism in Maine,” – and Brown, Inventing New England, – . Williams Haynes ( ), Division of History of Chemistry, American Chem ical Society, . http://www.scs.illinois.edu/∼mainzv/HIST/awards/Dexter% Papers /HaynesDexterBioJJB .pdf (accessed November , ). THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY for a character in ‘The Pearl’. . . . After the summer people came, it was a matter of nancial bene t to be able to claim connection with characters or scenes in the book.” The Harlows are proud that Stowe took no “literary liberties” with them; the Skillings pro t from claiming connections. The story opens at the funeral of Norman Skillings, who has
pro ted not only from showing tourists the cove where “the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Pearl washed ashore after the shipwreck,” but from “charging admissions to see the Smuggler’s Cave.” His family intends to erect a granite monument in his memory, bearing this legend: “Here lies Norman Skillings . . . who served Harriet Beecher Stowe as the original of the character of [Captain Kittridge],” despite the fact that Skillings was “only fteen years old” when the novel was written. When Cap’n Harlow, head of the ri val clan, learns about the monument, he erupts that it’s all a “durned lie” (CBY, , ). Haynes’s ction indirectly critiques some of the actual yarns being spun on the island—the dis tortions of Elizabeth Wyer’s drowning (Mara, the Pearl in the novel, is not washed ashore, but born the usual way), the du elling versions of the Grotto (there is no Smuggler’s Cave in Stowe’s book), and the name “Aunt Roxy” included on Martha Sinnett’s headstone. The local minister, Reverend Brigham, tries to convince Cap’n Harlow to abandon the feud now that Norman Skillings is dead. Harlow is having none of it: “I’ve allus held, Mr. Brigham, thet a woman who could write ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ wouldn’t need to take no people she knew an’ put ’em in ‘The Pearl of Orr’s Island.’ She’d have brains enough to make the hull thing up outer her head, wouldn’t she?” He continues: “Thar never was no such real people as the Pearl or Cap’n Kit tredge . . . an’ them as claims they is characters in the book, or kin t’ characters in et is fools, or worse!” (CBY, – ). The island feud has a Romeo and a Juliet. The late Norman Skillings’s son and heir, young Norman, and Cap’n Harlow’s daughter, Joanna, are in love and want to marry, but Harlow
Williams Haynes, Casco Bay Yarns (New York: D.O. Haynes & Co., ), , (hereafter cited in text as CBY). YARNS SPUN TO ORDER forbids them to see each other. When young Norman visits the minister to ask what to do, Reverend Brigham encourages him to give up “takin’ money under false pretenses” and charging “summer folks” to see the cove. The minister urges him to have done with “tainted money,” and make do with his shing and his lobster pots, his six acres of good land, and his “new motor
boat to take summer parties out sailing.” Norman protests that Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 the Cove brings four hundred dollars a season (admission is ten cents per person) and is worth more than his boat, the Scud der (CBY, ). Haynes’s numbers, if accurate, imply that a Pearl concession might garner , visitors a season, while an histor ical currency converter suggests that $ in might have an income value of $ , today. Nevertheless, Reverend Brigham tells Norman that “It’s the Cove or Joanna” (CBY, ). Reluctantly, young Norman decides to take the minister’s ad vice, give up the “tainted money,” and visit Cap’n Harlow to let him know and ask for Joanna’s hand in marriage. In a comical about face, when the captain learns what the Cove is worth, he not only encourages Norman to keep charging admission— “Mr. Brigham don’t know everything”—but to take his future father in law on as a business partner. While young Norman gives tours of the Cove, Cap’n Harlow will “take the summer folks off sailing in the Scudder. . . . You want an older man. . . . Someone who can spin yarns . . . and sorter drum up trade” (CBY, – ). “Tainted Money” ends with a twist when a lawyer arrives to acquaint young Norman with the contents of his father’s will. As it happens, the senior Skillings has left everything to his son— except the Pearl concession. “Desiring to meet [his] Maker with a clear conscience” and to end the feud between “[his] fam ily and that of Captain John Harlow,” Skillings has bequeathed “the inlet commonly known as the Smuggler’s Cove” and “the income derived from exhibiting said Cove” to the First Church of Orr’s Island. The story leaves the newly engaged couple and
“Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount— to Present.” MeasuringWorth.com. https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ (ac cessed November , ). THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Cap’n Harlow sitting on the verandah, wondering “what Mr. Brigham’s goin’ t’do with all that tainted money” (CBY, ). Together, Brunhilda of Orr’s Island, with its condescend ing amusement at Stowe’s moral vision, and “Tainted Money,” with its comic unmasking of the islanders’ machinations, hint at trouble for Pearl based tourism on Orr’s Island. However,
America’s entry into World War I on April , struck a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 truly lethal blow. The nation rose to the emergency by sending . million men and women to war while those who remained behind scrambled to maintain both essential services and a booming defense industry. In mid coast Maine, the Bath Iron Works constructed destroyers for the Navy while the Sewall shipyard turned out oil tankers for Texaco. These were not the “dreamy, cloud like, poetic” sailing ships of Stowe’s imag ination, and the sight of these grim vessels prowling Casco Bay on their sea trials might have given tourists a frisson had there been any tourists there to see them. Vacation travel was curtailed during the war, and the winter of – was ex ceptionally cold with ruinous results for Casco Bay hotels and steamers. Boats struggled in the ice and landings were dam aged. Just after the war’s conclusion, the Merriconeag “caught re, blew up, and burned while tied up for the night at the Orr’s Island dock.” The Casco Bay and Harpswell Line declared bankruptcy. The steamboat’s era of ascendancy was over. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s optimism, piety, and Victorian style too were gravely wounded in the world war that left . million dead on the eld of battle. The embittered young men and liberated young women of the Lost Generation had a darker vision with no room for The Pearl of Orr’s Island. By , with Prohibition and the Jazz Age in full swing, they were reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. Their daughters were reading a
Lawrence C. Allin, “Shipping and Shipbuilding in the Age of Steam and Steel,” in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present, ed. Richard W. Judd et al. (Orono: University of Maine Press, ), . H. B. Stowe, “Letter from Maine—No. .” Wescott, History of Harpswell, . YARNS SPUN TO ORDER different coming of age novel about an orphaned girl living with an elderly couple in an old fashioned house on an island. A direct descendant of Pearl, L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables ( ) offered a more modern heroine—and today is both the economic mainstay of tourism on Prince Edward Island and the focal point of a national park.
More than sixty years after its publication, The Pearl of Orr’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Island was losing relevance and readership with a concomitant erosion in Pearl tourism. In , in a brief historical sketch titled The Story of Orr’s Island Maine, Annie Haven Thwing made one nal attempt to compare descriptions in Stowe’s novel against the island homes and sites being marketed as settings from Pearl. A summer resident of Orr’s Island from and co founder of the island’s public library, Thwing was a wealthy heiress from Boston and well known amateur histo rian, author of a bestselling book, The Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston: – . In The Story of Orr’s Island, she offers her own opinions about Pearl sites and characters but nally concludes that Stowe’s ctional methods, the passage of time, and rivalry among islanders about disputed claims had made such efforts fruitless: “[M]any of the charac ters were no doubt taken from the life there; but whom they personate has been a matter of bitter controversy, and it is use less now to go into the subject.” The originals of Stowe’s char acters, Thwing observed, had “long since passed into the Great Beyond,” and “their immediate descendants, to whom the sub ject was a burning question,” were also gone. “Tradition now alone remains,” she concluded. The subject had become “an cient history.” In that watershed year of , director Leon E. Dadmun and the Lee Bradford Corporation endeavored to bring The Pearl of Orr’s Island into the modern era by transforming Stowe’s novel into a silent movie, The Pearl of Love, starring
Robert M. York, Bits and Pieces of the Orr’s Island Library Association (Orr’s Island, ME: Orr’s Island Library Association, ), , and “Annie Haven Thwing,” Find a Grave Memorial # , Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plains, MA. http://www. ndagrave.com (accessed November , ). Thwing, Story of Orr’s Island, . THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Gladys Leslie as Mara and Burr McIntosh as Captain Kittridge. One of , silent feature lms released between and , The Pearl of Love is unfortunately not among the only , that survive in some form today. All that remains of the lm are four still photographs in a “photoplay edi tion” of The Pearl of Orr’s Island published by A. L. Burt. (see
Fig. ) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 After publication of that movie “tie in,” Stowe’s novel sailed into oblivion for more than forty years. There would be no new edition of The Pearl of Orr’s Island until when AMS Press, an academic publisher, reprinted the book in re sponse to the efforts of a growing feminist movement to re claim works by America’s women writers. On Orr’s Island, surviving Pearl themed businesses dropped away one by one. Only their agship, the Pearl House, survived into the s and s, the subject of the era’s garish linen postcards. Two “charming hostesses” from Richmond, New York with family ties to the island, the widowed Lilly Johnson Rydstrom and her sister Hazel, together with their pair of friendly Scottie dogs, presided over the nal years of Pearl House as a tourist attrac tion. The two front rooms of the old house, the original kitchen and parlor, were open to visitors and housed a “museum of antiques.” There was also a gift shop. But in , after the sisters’ passing, Pearl House became the private summer residence of a New Jersey family. Some things, however, re mained the same. Local reporter Margaret Todd, writing about this transition, interviewed a “Captain William Sylvester . . . undisputed champion in the eld of sea tales, romance, and island history.” Along with some extreme nonsense about the originals of Mara and Aunt Roxy, he apparently told Todd with
See The Pearl of Love ( ), dir. Leon Danmun [sic], Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com and The Pearl of Love ( ), dir. Leon Dadmun, American Silent Feature Film Database, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas /html/silent lms/silent lms home.html. Both accessed November , . Editions and formats, ‘Pearl of Orr’s Island,’ OCLC WorldCat, https://www .worldcat.org (accessed November , ). Rose D. Neally, “Pearl House Still Owned by Johnsons as in Mrs. Stowe’s Day,” newspaper clipping with no identifying information, Orr’s Island Public Library, Orr’s Island, ME. YARNS SPUN TO ORDER a straight face that Harriet Beecher Stowe had written The Pearl of Orr’s Island in the Grotto. It was the end of an era. Having played a major role in the transformation of Orr’s Island from shing village to summer resort, the book quietly stole away. There are no Pearl sites ex hibited on the island today, no themed postcards or souvenirs
at the S.J. Prince shop. Only a handful of islanders preserve Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/7/1793446/tneq_a_00792.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 an interest in Stowe’s novel and its local history. And yet, per haps we might join Elizabeth Orr Williams in believing that “the land and the book will always be united” (EOW ) pro vided we also heed the old islander who reminded W.H. Bishop of “Cap’n Pennell”: “You don’t want to inquire too clost intera good story . . . it’s cert’in to spile it.”
Margaret Todd, “New Jersey Family Buys Famed Pearl House. Scene of Famous Novel Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe,” The Brunswick Record, May , , . Bishop, “Fish and Men,” .
Maine native Susan Beegel holds the PhD from Yale University. Recently retired she has been clinical professor at the Univer sity of Idaho and research associate of the Williams College Mystic Seaport Maritime Studies Program. Editor Emerita of T H R , Beegel has published four books and more than fty articles on American literature and history. She lives in Midcoast Maine and enjoys exploring Stowe’s con nections to the region’s maritime history.