Maine
How Maine became Vacationland
This story was initially printed in August 2019.
In the summertime of 1933, accompanied by her shut good friend Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt launched into a history-making street journey. Her husband, Franklin, had been president solely 4 months when the ladies set out for Quebec within the first girl’s Buick roadster convertible.
The 49-year-old Eleanor, initially awkward within the White Home, had lower a take care of the Secret Service earlier than escaping the Washington fishbowl. She wouldn’t must journey with an armed auto escort if she packed a revolver in her purse for cover. The distinctive association, unthinkable right now, concerned Mrs. Roosevelt taking capturing classes and retaining a low profile whereas behind the wheel.
After visiting the household cottage in Campobello, New Brunswick, and different Canadian locales, the pair encountered dense fog on U.S. Route 2 in tiny Dyer Brook, south of Houlton. They had been en path to Lakewood Theater in Madison, the place they had been to attend a play the next night. Unable to journey one other mile, the ladies pulled into the modest Ellis Farm vacationer courtroom (no motels again then), the place they spent the night time like extraordinary folks.
Maine’s previous is brimming with related oddball trip tales that includes guests “from away” on the unfastened in Vacationland, a nickname that first appeared on license plates in 1936.
E.B. White wrote essays about Vacationland. In 1960, John Steinbeck penned his basic 10,000-mile chronicle, “Travels with Charley: In Search of America.” With a normal poodle by his aspect, Steinbeck guided his camper across the nation, finally arriving in Deer Isle with a police escort when he grew to become misplaced whereas trying to find a good friend’s residence.
Steinbeck was advised by no means to ask a Maine native for instructions. “Why ever not?” he requested. The reply got here: “In some way we expect it’s humorous to misdirect folks, and we don’t smile after we do it, however we chuckle inwardly. It’s our nature.”
You would argue that our area’s first vacationers had been explorers with overseas names resembling Estevan Gomez and Samuel de Champlain, who, within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively, explored our shoreline and sailed up the Penobscot River to the long run metropolis of Bangor. However they might have been too busy retaining journals and charts to totally benefit from the expertise.
Quick ahead to the nineteenth century, when Maine, a state since 1820, grew to become a spot value visiting. Entrepreneurs touted the gorgeous and mysterious land that bordered two Canadian provinces and just one different state, that had islands no one had ever visited, and that was nearly as massive as the opposite 5 New England states mixed.
“Tourism in Maine actually boomed after the Civil Struggle,” writer Sanford Phippen mentioned. “Significantly within the Eighteen Eighties, steamboats had been sooner and rail traces had been improved. That drew guests from all through the nation.”
State historian Earle G. Shettleworth Jr. has written about this period of enlargement, particularly alongside the Maine coast. And in 1982, Phippen helped produce a video titled, “A Century of Summers,” which chronicles the combo of seasonal and full-time residents in his residence city of Hancock Level. Some married one another, making a mashup of cultures and lessons.
“Folks with names like Sheehan, O’Meara and McKernan, the ancestors of future Maine governor, John R. McKernan Jr., of Bangor, owned cottages right here,” Phippen mentioned. “It was a bustling place, the place millionaires and customary people handed by Mount Desert Ferry, a close-by steamboat hub that supplied entry to Bar Harbor, which lacked railway entry to the mainland.”
Henry Ford scored factors with the steamboat crew, Phippen mentioned, as he frolicked within the engine room, whereas fellow millionaire and seasonal Mount Desert Island resident, John D. Rockefeller Sr., sat stone-faced in first-class, a positive option to rub rock-ribbed Yankees the improper method.
Painters, poets and musicians often called “summer season rusticators” constructed seaside cottages at “The Level,” in addition to in Blue Hill, Bar Harbor and Northport. Many nonetheless stand as reminders of the Gilded Age, when one of the best ways to make associates in Maine was to not flaunt one’s affluence.
Mammoth inns in Poland Spring, Rockland and Kineo, on Moosehead Lake, started luring guests from Boston and New York. Many spent your entire summer season taking part in golf and “taking the air.”
Jim Harnedy, a Machiasport writer, recalled a protracted, however rewarding, drive in 1940 from his household’s residence in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Capen’s household farm and sporting camps on Moosehead’s Deer Island.
“A visit to Maine’s nice north woods area was a two-day trek,” Harnedy wrote in “Forgotten Tales of Down East Maine,” printed in Might by The Historical past Press. “The primary leg of the journey was a six- to seven-hour drive from Brookline to Augusta. … The subsequent morning we had been on the street once more by 7:30 a.m. It was nonetheless a protracted drive of greater than 150 miles from Augusta to Greenville, the place the street ended. …”
In 1947, the primary part of the Maine Turnpike linked Kittery with Portland. By the mid-Nineteen Fifties, the Turnpike Authority had prolonged the freeway to Augusta, enormously enhancing freeway journey. Finally, I-95 would stretch north to Houlton.
By then, Maine had the dual gems Baxter State Park and Acadia Nationwide Park to lure vacationers and a rising community of mountain and seaside trails. To not point out state-operated picnic areas, a lot of which have vanished from right now’s altering panorama.
Now, vacationers had another choice other than the previous U.S. Route 1 as they visited the midcoast meccas of Wiscasset, Boothbay Harbor and Rockland, the Casco Bay islands and Outdated Orchard Seaside, which boasts a seasonal Quebecois inhabitants. It is usually the place the place Joseph Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald fell in love earlier than marrying in 1914.
Peter Dow Bachelder wrote about Outdated Orchard’s previous within the 1998 ebook, “The Nice Seal Pier: An Illustrated Historical past of the Outdated Orchard Seaside Pier,” the place vacationing {couples} danced to the music of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey.
As we speak, households in all probability wouldn’t spend your entire summer season in a single large resort, as their ancestors had finished in an easier time. There are cruise ships to board, time-share items to go to, and Twitter and Fb to observe again at residence.
However the Pine Tree State remains to be Vacationland. A brand new signal on the Kittery border, impressed by Gov. Janet Mills, proclaims “Welcome House.” The Maine Tourism Affiliation works arduous to get guests white water rafting at The Forks, downhill snowboarding at Sugarloaf and antiquing in Hallowell. And there may be all the time the legacy of George and Barbara Bush to encourage a go to to Kennebunkport.
That is nonetheless “The Method Life Ought to Be,” and guarantees to remain that method for generations to return.
This story was initially printed in Bangor Metro’s August 2019 situation. To subscribe to the journal, click on right here.