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Harriet Beecher Stowe's the Pearl of Orr's Island and the Advent of Maine Summer Tourism

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Harriet Beecher Stowe's the Pearl of Orr's Island and the Advent of Maine Summer Tourism XlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXlXl Yarns Spun to Order: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island and the Advent of Maine Summer Tourism 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_. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00792 by guest on 27 September 2021 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?’ 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 Bafn 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 Mifin, ), . 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, ), , . Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00792 by guest on 27 September 2021 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 to , when her husband Calvin briey 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 Mifin, ), . Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Letter from Maine—No. ,” The National Era, August , , newspaper clipping, Special Collections, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, ME. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00792 by guest on 27 September 2021 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. ) 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 Mifin, ), –; 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, ), :–. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00792 by guest on 27 September 2021 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. 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.
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