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The Story of Mount Desert Island
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The Story of Mount Desert Island is part tribute to the glories and beauty of a place and part history of its people who could be "fisherman, sailor, farmer, lumberman, shipwright and quarryman rolled into one, and master of all." Originally conceived as a speech delivered to benefit local libraries, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison developed the text into a book first published in 1960.
This revised edition adds historical photographs and commentary by Morison's daughter, Emily Morison Beck, editor of Sailor Historian, an anthology of Morison's work, and Gregory M. Pfitzer, an associate professor at Skidmore College and author of Samuel Eliot Morison's Historical World. But the text is vintage Morison.
Morison's breezy style captures the high points of the island's glorious history and touches many of Morison's own passions: from the early Abnaki tribes to the great European explorers to the island residents and rusticators, of which Morison was one, owning "cottages" in both Northeast Harbor and Tremont.
The Story of Mount Desert Island is also colored by Morison's love
of the sea. He spent a lifetime sailing the island's surrounding waters,
exploring the outer islands and absorbing the sweeping beauty from the
peaks of "l'Isle des Monts-deserts."
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About the Author The legendary Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) was a giant among 20th century historians — twice winning the Pulitzer Prize and receiving numerous other honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and sitting as the first Harmsworth professor of American History at Oxford. Morison, who wrote with a signature sweep and flair, is credited with practically inventing the study of maritime history and influencing a generation of historians through both his beliefs and his dozens of books chronicling this nation’s history. |
At times outspoken and controversial, Morison sometimes clashed with other historians and writers on how history should be researched and written. Most famously, he sought to reconcile the often pedantic, dull style of academic research with his belief that history should reach a popular audience. He succeeded brilliantly in this effort to write carefully researched histories with a compelling narrative.
Morison was born in Boston, attended top private schools and earned his
degree from Harvard. He later taught there for most of four decades. Morison’s
family spent much of their summers on Mount Desert Island. It was there
as a child he learned to love the sea and explored his beloved island.
His family still summer there.
Excerpt from The Story of Mount Desert Island:
"Thus, the settlement of Mount Desert Island was well under way before
1800, and had taken on the character that still persists on the western
side of the island, despite an overlay of tourist and summer-colony interests.
By 1860 or 1880 almost every square rod of land that could be improved
for cornfield, hayfield or pasture, and every possible site for a saw
or grist mill had been taken up. The settlers came largely from Cape Ann,
Cape Cod, and southern Maine; and they came by sea, mostly in Chebacco
boats, the little double-ended type of pinkie schooner with no bowsprit
that originated in the Chebacco parish of Ipswich, later Essex."
They were representative pioneers of that mixed breed, the Yankee. Most of them, like the Manchesters, Kimballs, Someses and Higginses, were of English stock; others, like the Gilpatricks, Fenellys and Murphys, were Irish; the Stanleys and Savages were Scotch; the Obers and Lurveys had a remote German background, and there were some odd combinations, like the Lynams of Bar Harbor, descendents of a Prussian girl and a French army officer. James Richardson, fellow pioneer of Somesville with Abraham Somes, was the offspring of an early Lady Chatterly's Lover affair. His father, head gardener to a Scots laird, secretly married his employer's daughter, Lady Jane Montgomery; they eloped to America, and James was their son. There is even said to be considerable Russian blood on the "back side" of the Island, deriving from a six months' visit to Southwest Harbor by auxiliary cruiser Cimbria of the Imperial Russian Navy. This was in 1878, when war was threatened between Russia and England. She had seven hundred sailors on board, and one hundred at a time were given shore liberty; it may be presumed that they made a few conquests. Incidentally, the Cimbria was the last warship to replenish her water supply at Man o' War brook."