BAR HARBOR, Maine — The trees have grown back now, the rubble is long gone, and Bar Harbor shows little signs of the wildfire from October of 1947 that came frighteningly close to destroying the town.
But here and there, you can see remnants of the world that existed there before the fire.
Stone steps along Route 3 that once led to elegant mansions remain in the quaint town, along with the Bluenose Inn that stands above a huge, arched stone foundation that once supported another mansion.
Those palatial homes, called “summer cottages" by the wealthy, defined life in Bar Harbor for decades before the fire. But the flames that swept down on the town destroyed 67 of those cottages and changed the town into the tourist mecca it is today.
“Seventeen-thousand acres burned, over 8,000 acres in Bar Harbor itself,” Deb Dyer, who keeps Bar Harbor's history, and who was born just one year after the fire ravaged Mount Desert Island, said.
“What I heard [about] was family history of my mother’s two sisters who lost everything in the fire,” Dyer added.
More than 100 other local families, along with the summer residents, would have similar stories.
The fire started at a dump west of town, but was small at first.
Firefighters thought they had it out. But the fire continued to smolder underground for several days.
The timing in late October could not have been worse. Maine had gone through a very dry summer and fall. That meant woods, fields, and the forest floor were all literally tinder dry. When the fire emerged from the ground, there was plenty of fuel.
And winds.
“And once it popped up it took the wind,” Dyer said. “And once the wind took it everything was history after that.”
The fire began to spread, burning part of Acadia National Park and moving closer to the Bar Harbor village. The wind picked up and moved to the northwest, blowing the flames directly toward the town. Houses caught fire, and then the big mansions along Route 3, which some called "millionaire’s row," did too.
The flames were closing in on the town, and people rushed to escape.
Dottie Cooke was 14 years old that year and said she and some friends had just finished making sandwiches for firefighters when they sensed the fire had become worse.
“I got home about the same time the whistle started blowing for evacuation. And my mother said, 'Oh that’s nothing,' and I said, 'Mum, we’ve got to get out!'” Cooke said.
Cooke said her father got home soon after, and they loaded some clothes in the car and took off. But Route 3, the main road off of the island, was blocked by fire.
She remembered they headed in through the park, hoping to drive around the fire and make it off the island. It worked, Cooke said, but they had to drive close to the flames to make it.
Cooke added her father believed they were one of the last cars to get out.
But hundreds of others couldn’t drive out, so they headed to the town dock, hoping for rescue by boat.
Fishermen from across the bay took 400 people off the island to safety. Later that day, according to the National Park Service, a bulldozer was able to clear a path through debris on Route 3 so cars could drive out of town again.
Most of the village of Bar Harbor did not burn, in part, Deb Dyer said, because of a courageous stand by firefighters from several towns that came to help Mount Desert Island.
They deliberately destroyed the Degregoire Hotel, so the approaching fire wouldn’t ignite it and send out more flaming embers. Dyer said without that fuel, the fire veered away from the heart of the village.
“That’s what they wanted to do, was prevent it from coming down into Bar Harbor,” Dyer explained.
“So, it saved all these houses on West Street. They would have gone one after the other,” Dyer added.
The fire consumed several large hotels and many houses, as well as the large summer cottages. It continued to burn through the park and finally into the sea at Sand Beach and beyond.
Dottie Cooke and her family came back to the island a week later to find that their house in town had been spared, but several large hotels nearby were destroyed, as were many local homes a short distance away.
“It looked like a war,” Cooke said. “We could see the film of the [World War II] cities bombed out, and chimneys left standing. When we drove back to Bar Harbor a week after, that’s what I saw.”
Bar Harbor was damaged and then saved, but soon discovered a crisis, according to historian Deb Dyer.
“Because, you see, 67 of the palatial homes were gone, 100 of the year-round residents lost homes. What has the town got for tax base?" Dyer said.
She said that many of the long-time wealthy summer families weren’t likely to rebuild. That left Bar Harbor leaders needing to plan for the future and the town’s rebuilding.
That decision, she said, was to look to new visitors: tourists.
Bar Harbor, which for decades had been a place for wealthy summer families, would transform itself into a tourist town, with the ocean and Acadia National Park to attract people.
Longtime local newspaper editor Earl Brechlin said it took some real work to get that started since most of the town’s hotels had been destroyed.
“The town partnered with the business community to expand the Bar Harbor Inn and get the hotel era really rocking here, which we have today. It was really the birth of our modern tourism industry,” Brechlin explained.
He said it was also something of a daring move, considering all the destruction.
“I think the resiliency of the town when you’re surrounded by a blackened landscape, and the first thought that occurs is, 'Let's encourage tourism?' when you really didn’t have a very pretty picture at that time,” Brechlin added.
He said the foresight of those local leaders paid off, and as the park grew back and more residents returned and rebuilt, tourist numbers steadily increased.
Today, with only a few visible relics of the fire, Bar Harbor attracts millions of visitors each year.
Some of them stop at the Bar Harbor Historical Society, now housed in one of the old summer mansions on West Street that was built in 1903.
Brechlin and Dyer said that 75 years ago the flames were stopped literally next door to the brick building—one of the few old summer homes that did not burn in 1947.
Inside, in addition to the collections of photos, paintings, and artifacts, several rooms of the elegant seaside home are set up and furnished as they would have been back in the days when wealthy families and their servants would come from New York and other places and move in for the summer season.
It's an era long gone now, but Dyer said in those rooms, at least, visitors can picture how the upper crust once lived.
“It's very typical of the summer cottages that were here. Prior to the fire," Dyer said.