The subject property is located on the ocean . . . in the Hulls Cove neighborhood . . . in the Town of Bar Harbor . . . within one mile of the official entrance to Acadia National Park . . . on Mount Desert Island . . . in “Downeast” Coastal Maine.

1. Oceanfront property

The subject property is located directly on the ocean at Hulls Cove in Bar Harbor.

The property com prises 1.5 acres and is part of a peninsula which reaches eastward into Frenchman’s Bay, a part of the much larger Penobscot Bay which is more than a hundred miles in width. A private, posted road (Lookout Point Road) circumnavigates that peninsula.

2. Private location

The subject home is separated from Lookout Point Road, and further from public access, by a driveway that is almost 1,000' long. The driveway begins at a pink-granite stone wall, and then slopes down through old oaks and white pines past a spring-fed pond to the house itself.

The added privacy and remoteness make for a nature preserve of sorts whereas deer are frequent visitors to the pond, and to the lawn behind the house on some occasions. Rare birds are not so rare visitors for hairy woodpeckers and pileated woodpeckers and two bald eagles living in the trees on the peninsula.

3. Views

The property faces south thereby offering views of both the sun and m oon rising and setting over the North Atlantic.

Farther down the ocean shoreline are the Town’s active harbor at the foot of the Cadillac Mountain range, and the Porcupine Islands reaching like stepping stones away from the Town into Frenchman’s Bay. The world’s greatest cruise ships, including the Queen Elizabeth II and the new Queen Mary, moor among those islands in the summer and fall, in easy and full view from the lawn of the subject property.

4. Things to do

Guests launch kayaks (rent-able in town) and rowing sculls from the shore in front of the house.

On request, a mooring can be placed in the cove in front of the house, so that a sailboat of considerable size could be maintained there, although a mooring at the Bar Harbor Yacht Club might serve as well. (The Bar Harbor Yacht Club is located on the other side of Hulls Cove from our property, along with some of the Gilded Age’s vestigial cliffside mansions).

The property is within one mile of Acadia National Park’s main entrance on the inland side of Route 3 in the Hulls Cove neighborhood. This means one could bicycle in minutes from the house to the beginning of 100 miles of bicycling, hiking walking and mountain-climbing trails, without having to unload and load a bicycle or look for parking spaces.

The property is also within minutes of the Island’s best hotels, almost all of which are perched above Frenchman’s Bay. The hotels include the island’s best restaurants, bars, swimming pools, tennis courts, and other recreational facilities. (The hotels’ proximity is sometimes an advantage to those of our guests who are part of a much larger party staying on the Island for a wedding or the like).

Hulls Cove is both a cove, as the name suggests, and a neighborhood within the Town of Bar Harbor.

1. The cove

Hulls Cove, which is a remarkably beautiful and serene inlet on the northeast shore of Mount Desert Island, has drawn admirers since 6,000 years ago when prehistoric Indians first came there and stayed for eons, as discussed below.

In the 1800s, Hulls Cove, the neighborhood, was the seat of the town when the town was called Eden. Ship-building was conducted on the shore of Hulls Cove (hence the name), because the cove was generally protected, the water being less violent than farther down the shoreline of the Mount Desert Island.

2. The neighborhood

In the late 1800s, during the Gilded Age, financially elite American fam ilies built Victorian mansions along the shore and on the promontory that is the northern side of Hulls Cove.

That same neighborhood on the north side of the cove is still a peninsula accessible only via a private, posted road (Lookout Point Road). Only a dozen or more homes – including the subject property – now occupy that enclave on Lookout Point Road.

Some of the homeowners in that historic neighborhood are well known, as was the case long ago with the original homeowners.

The subject property, which has been leased for 15 years, is the only property in the Hulls Cove and Lookout Point Road neighborhood to be so operated as a seasonal rental.

Bar Harbor is the largest and most historic community on Mount Desert Island.

Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island offer all of the following:

1. Dozens of superior shorefront and mountaintop restaurants, bars, and nightclubs.

   Some of Bar Harbor’s best hotels plus several athletic facilities (e.g., the nationally renowned and stunningly beautiful golf course, Kebo) are proxim ate to the subject property.

2. Salt and fresh water beaches that include the enchanting Echo Lake, and the broad pink-sand Sand Beach which receives unending ocean rollers.

3. Convenient and abundant connections to commercial airports in Bangor (45 miles from subject property) and from Trenton (15 m iles from subject property).

4. Ferry service to Canada, whale watching, deep sea fishing, sailing, shopping at nearby LL Bean (Ellsworth), etc.

5. Sailing up and down Penobscot Bay, as lushly depicted in Walter Cronkite’s book North by Northeast. (The famed Hinckley Yachts are crafted on Mount Desert Island).

6. Maine’s signature lobsters, night and day.

1. General

Acadia National Park comprises approximately 30,000 acres on Mount Desert Island.

Acadia National Park is the 2nd-most-visited National Park, notwithstanding its distance from major population centers. Acadia’s appeal lies in Mount Desert Island’s mountain-meeting-the-sea landscape of visually majestic proportions, a scenic national treasure.

2. Hulls Cove and Acadia National Park

The official entrance to Acadia National Park is within one mile of the subject property on the other side of Hulls Cove.

3. Past and Present


1. Past

The seminal event leading to the creation of Acadia National Park was the assemblage of land in the early 1900's by affluent summer residents intending to thwart the logging of Mount Desert Island’s gorgeous and nearly virginal stands of spruce, fir, and pine. The Rockefellers later joined in the conservation effort in order to maintain a prohibition on, ironically enough, the use of gas powered automobiles on Mount Desert Island.

In 1919, President Wilson formalized the creation of the national park on Mount Desert Island, the first such national park east of the Mississippi. The park became “Acadia” National Park in 1929, thereby bringing full circle a French connotation to the same island which had earlier been vanquished by English colonists and then absorbed by American revolutionaries hundreds of years earlier.

2. Present


1. Visitors

2,500,000 people annually visit Mount Desert Island, mostly during the summer and shoulder months of the summer. This contrasts with Mount Desert Island’s year-round residents which number perhaps 10,000.

Acadia is said to be one of the most richly photographed places in the world.

2. “Carriage roads”

The official entrance to Acadia National Park, which is just one mile from the subject property, is the gateway to almost 100 miles of meticulously maintained gravel “carriage roads” first constructed by the Rockefellers approximately 100 years ago.

The Rockefellers built the carriage roads with little regard to the cost of vaulting Romanesque bridges built over mountain gorges, or as to the cost of millions of tons of perfectly-crafted pink granite stonework still in perfect condition today.

The carriage roads are still completely devoid of all motorized vehicles of any kind.

3. “Things to do”

The Park offers almost 100 square miles of gorgeous lakes and ponds, and spectacularly beautiful ocean shorelines.

The Park also offers almost every outdoor activity contemplated by any LL Bean catalogue ever printed, barring hunting:

1. Hiking dozens of trails over and around the Cadillac m ountain range which includes the tallest m ountain peak on the East Coast(Cadillac Mountain).
2. Walking paths to remote lakes and ponds and waterfalls.
3. Mountain climbing.
4. Swimming and canoeing and kayaking and fishing at fresh water and salt water beaches.
5. Bicycle-riding and dog-walking and jogging on the carriage roads in warm-weather months.
6. Cross country skiing through idyllic landscapes to ice-skating and ice-fishing destinations in winter months.

1. General

Mount Desert Island comprises approximately 40,000 acres.

Mount Desert Island is 2nd largest island on the East Coast of the US. Long Island in New York is just ahead of Mount Desert Island, and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts is behind Mount Desert Island, both of the other islands likewise being historically fashionable and prestigious summer resorts.

2. History


1. Settlement

Mount Desert Island’s first settlers arrived 6,000 years ago.

They were prehistoric Indians advancing toward the retreating the Laurentide glacier, an ice mass which had stood, 25 millenia ago, a mile deep above what is now Mount Desert Island. The Indians occupied the beach at Hulls Cove, where their artifacts are still sometimes found.

In 1604, well before the Mayflower’s arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, Champlain claimed for Catholic France Mount Desert Island and its surroundings. (Champlain had initially anchored in Hulls Cove and replenished his water casks at a brook there).

In 1613, an expedition from the Protestant Jamestown Colony devastated the French colony on Mount Desert Island. The purge, which included setting Jesuit priests adrift on a row boat in the Gulf of Maine and putting others to the sword, established on and near Mount Desert Island a dangerous fault line between New France and New England.

The same area, eventually expanded to include what is now Eastern Canada and New England, would be contested for over 150 years by the French and by the British and by their respective Indian allies and then by the Americans. Most of two centuries were given over to inestimable slaughter.

Following the American Revolution, and following the later creation of Maine as a state carved from Massachusetts in 1820, residents of Mount Desert Island were primarily farmers and fishermen. By the mid 1800's, the principal community on Mount Desert Island was located at what is now Hulls Cove and was then called Eden.

2. The Gilded Age

By the late 1800s, Eden would become Bar Harbor. And Bar Harbor, like Newport, RI, would be a cockpit for high society swells in the US.

The most financially legendary American families (the Astors, the Fords, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, and others) would go on to erect, in Hulls Cove and on many other oceanfront hillsides of Bar Harbor, lavish Victorian residences. Every edifice was, of course, a monument to its owner and testimony to the extreme obscene disparity of personal wealth in America during the Gilded Age.

3. The Fire

As mentioned above, one of those heralded families, the Rockefellers, would be the financial catalyst for the assemblage of thousands of acres comprising Acadia National Park, and for an early experiment in conservation. Perhaps fittingly, a sometimes summer visitor to Hulls Cove had been Teddy Roosevelt, the archetypal conservationist.

The conservationists would later experience a horrific reversal when a wind-driven, forest fire burned flat 17,000 acres of Mount Desert Island in 1947.

The conflagration ended only when a 10-day cyclone of roaring flames, with nothing left to burn, diminished to a zephyr and died on the ocean cliffs above Frenchmans Bay. The fire had incinerated much of the east side of the island, the location of Bar Harbor itself and its numerous hilltop and oceanfront mansions.

4. Changing of the Guard

The Fire, which began near Hulls Cove, ended a way of life in Bar Harbor and on Mount Desert Island. Many of the rich and famous simply did not return – they moved to Nantucket and to the Hamptons where their descendants now see the mountains meet the sea only in darkened room s on wide-screen TVs.

But the coniferous forest on Mount Desert Island eventually reasserted itself. And the island community recovered.

Acadia is now the 2nd-most-visited National Park in the US.

Quiet communities on Mount Desert Island have regained their erstwhile luster of wealth and privilege and panache and cultural progressiveness, which some would say The Fire never completely drove from Mount Desert Island.

Mount Desert Island’s notable residents still include some of the old-name Rockefellers and Pultizers and Astors and Dorrances. But there are also newcomers like Martha Stewart who was the first self-made female American billionaire and who now owns the mountaintop estate mistakenly left behind by Edsel Ford.