BAR HARBOR, MAINE (ME), USA
Bar Harbor bed and breakfast stay in atmospheric harbor town
Bar Harbor bed and breakfast visitors are usually in Maine to enjoy the restful atmosphere of an old harbor town, a place that is redolent of history. The publisher Joseph Pulitzer came from Bar Harbor, as did actress Katharine Hepburn and the super-wealthy Vanderbilt family. Bar Harbor is a town on Mount Desert Island in Hancock County. Bar Harbor is a famous summer colony in the Down East region of Maine and that is why it has a range of B&B, lodge and inn accommodation available. It is also a port of entry for Bay Ferries from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Some bed and breakfast visitors go to Bar Harbor to do business in connection with the College of the Atlantic, Jackson Laboratory and the Mount Desert Biological Laboratory. One reason that Bar Harbor has retained its timeless beauty is because it is home to the largest parts of the Acadia National Park, including Cadillac Mountain. Several Bar Harbor B&B visitors each year go to climb the mountain, which is the highest point within 25 miles of the US east coast.
Abenaki Native Americans called the island Pemetic, meaning sloping land. The first European to alight there was the French explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1604. It was first settled in 1763 by Israel Higgins and John Thomas and the initial industries were shipbuilding, lumbering and farming. Its rugged maritime scenery attracted the Hudson River School and Luminism artists Frederick Church, William Hart, Thomas Cole and Fitz Hugh Lane. Hotels soon sprang up to accommodate interested visitors, so the present Bar Harbor bed and breakfast industry has a venerable history, with no fewer than thirty hotels in Bar Harbor by 1880. Many B&B, lodge and inn visitors stroll along the Shore Path to get a glimpse of the incredibly leisured and moneyed lifestyle that people led at the turn of the century when they vacationed in Bar Harbor, with the rich and famous trying to outdo one another. The walkway skirts the waterfront lawns of the fabulous mansions that rival those of Newport, Rhode Island. So flush were its summer residents that the name Bar Harbor became synonymous with elite wealth. Things changed for Bar Harbor in 1947 when a wildfire razed the island, including some of the palatial summer homes, but spaed the business district. Thus Bar Harbor bed and breakfast visitors can still enjoy the downtown Victorian architecture. Also spared was Mount Desert Street where several former summer homes in the historic district operate as B&Bs, lodges and inns, making Bar Harbor a tourist attraction for US and foreign tourists.
