The Millionaires' Summer Colony
Near Bar Harbor, Maine
Look along West Street and up the shore of Frenchman Bay and imagine mansions. Dozens of them, sprawling wooden palaces that their owners modestly called cottages. In the decades after the Civil War, Bar Harbor became one of the most fashionable summer resorts in America, a rival to Newport, Rhode Island.
The first summer cottage was built here in eighteen sixty eight, and by the eighteen eighties the very richest families in the nation were arriving each June. Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Astors, Pulitzers, Fords. They came to escape the heat and smoke of the cities, and they built along a stretch that became known as the millionaires' row.
At the height of the colony there were more than two hundred of these grand cottages on the island. The society was famous. Elaborate dinners, sailing regattas on the bay, and a private club at the social center of it all.
Servants and gardeners kept the estates running through the short northern summer. It was a world of enormous wealth and leisure set against the wild backdrop of the mountains, and it would last, in its full glory, until a single October fire destroyed dozens of the grand cottages.
