The Great Fire of Nineteen Forty Seven
Near Bar Harbor, Maine
In the autumn of nineteen forty seven, after a long dry summer, Maine was a tinderbox. On Friday, the seventeenth of October, a fire began smoldering near Hulls Cove, at the northern edge of Bar Harbor. For several days it stayed small, only a couple hundred acres.
Then, on the twenty first, the wind rose and the fire exploded out of control. It roared across the island and burned more than seventeen thousand acres, over ten thousand of them inside Acadia National Park. It swept through the great summer estates, destroying some sixty seven of the grand cottages along the millionaires' shore, along with about one hundred and seventy year round homes and five hotels.
People fled toward the sea and were evacuated by boat and by a single choked road out of town. On Mount Desert Island the fire claimed several lives, among them an elderly man who ran back into his burning house to save his cat, and an officer and a young woman killed in a crash while fleeing. Across the whole state that terrible fire season, sixteen people died.
The blaze ended the gilded age of Bar Harbor for good, and in a strange mercy, the burned forest grew back greener and more varied than before.
