The 1947 Maine Fires

The summer of nineteen forty-seven was the driest in Maine's recorded history. By October, the ground was powder. On October seventeenth, fire broke out on the eastern side of Mount Desert Island, in the dry grass and pitch pine that cover the hills above Bar Harbor. The wind was from the northwest.

Over the following six days, the fire consumed seventeen thousand one hundred eighty-eight acres on the island, including ten thousand acres inside what was then Acadia National Park. In Bar Harbor itself, sixty-seven seasonal estates and one hundred seventy permanent homes and five hotels burned. Two hundred forty-two structures gone in less than a week. Five people died on the island, two of them in a car that did not reach the road in time.

The estates that burned were not summer cottages in any ordinary sense. They were the Gilded Age summer colony, twenty-to-sixty-room mansions built by the Pulitzers, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, families who had defined Bar Harbor as America's most exclusive summer address since the eighteen eighties. The fire moved faster than experienced crews expected. It jumped firebreaks that were supposed to hold. Some residents had refused to evacuate because they had seen fires come close before and stop.

None of those families rebuilt. The island's character had already been shifting for decades as the great fortunes contracted, but the fire accelerated what was already happening. The land where the mansions stood was eventually absorbed into the park or left vacant. The carriage road network Rockefeller had built survived largely intact; the ecology of the burned area is still visibly different from the surrounding forest, and ecologists who study it know why: Acadia's current forest is partly the product of that catastrophic reset.

What the fire ended, quietly and completely, was the assumption that Mount Desert Island belonged to a particular class of American family. What it left behind was a national park.