Catalog entry

Mount Desert was in the Frenchman's Bay Customs District, and in 1850 the district ranked 4th, at 11.2%, among Maine's 13 customs districts, for its investment in the cod fisheries. The thick, old-growth forest provided ample opportunity for sawmills and the export of pine lumber and timber, as well as shipbuilding, which went hand-in-hand with fishing vessels for the cod fisheries.The coasters of the island found ample freight in the shipment of lumber from the sawmills of the Union River at Ellsworth. The rugged interior of the island limited settlements to the coastal fringe, creating a number of independent, isolated communities. Mount Desert's small fishing and farming communities, in the early 1850s, were set like small diamonds in an incredible crown of natural beauty. These small, isolated villages, clinging to a jagged coastline which stood resolute against the breaking sea, would have reminded artists like Lane of an America untouched by the progress of time. This was New England as it had once been, and there were few places in coastal New England where this claim could still be made.

Mount Desert, as it is colloquially known, has been known by many names throughout its history. The Etchemin called it Pem-etn-ic, "a range of mountains," as seen from the sea, "where the hills rise in a long saw-toothed range," Champlain called the island, notable for its granite mountains, of which one rises 1530 feet , "Isle des Monts Deserts," "barren mountains Island," and Sieur de la Mothe de Cadillac, who was granted a large tract at the head of Frenchman Bay in 1687, called Douaquet. Cadillac is one of a number of Frenchman whose presence in history is denoted by Frenchman's Bay.

At the beginning of recorded history Asticou was an Etchemin Sakom who lived seasonally on Mount Desert with his band. His larger homeland, Ketakamigwa, "the big land on the seacoast," was "an ecologically diverse coastal woodland environment, combining a saltwater archipelago with a 1000 mi.² freshwater hinterland broken by hills, swamps, lakes and ponds, and drained by a few major rivers in numerous smaller streams." The highly mobile Wabenaki families, ethnically identified as Etchemins, inhabited Penobscot Bay, making full use of the abundance of natural resources, including the building of a fish weir, K'chi-siti-mokan'gan, "The Great Fish Weir," between Little and Big Deer Isle, from which Eggemoggin Reach is derived), and shaping the natural environment to suit their needs.

Asticou, or members of his band, were on hand to greet Champlain in 1604, and he was at Manchester Point in 1613 when Father Baird and three Jesuit priests dropped anchor on their way to establish a Catholic mission on the Penobscot River. Asticou invited them to stay, the invitation was accepted, and the mission of St. Sauveur at Fernald Point began to be built. The work had barely begun when the mission was destroyed by Capt. Samuel Argall, an English privateer from Jamestown.

Champlain named Mount Desert but left its sentinel rock, 26 miles off shore, unidentified. The island was given the name of Mount Desert Dry Rock in the 18th century, and shortened somewhat after this. The island served as a navigational aid, not a hazard, for coastal seamen. The US government purchased this pile of rocks from the State of Maine in 1829, there surely must have been a few laughs over this transaction, and the government authorized $5000 to build a light station, which began operation in 1830.

– Mark Honey

References:

Conkling, Philip W, "Islands in Time," A Natural and Cultural History of the Islands of the Gulf of Maine, Island Institute, Rockland, and Downeast Books, Camden.

Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy, "Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast," University of Maine Studies, 2nd Series, #55, November 1941, reprinted 1960 by the University of Maine Press.  Frank G Speck's "Penobscot Man," University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940.

Duncan, Roger F, "Coastal Maine, A Maritime History," WW Norton & Company, New York, 1992.

 Prins, Harald E L, and McBride, Bunny, "Asticou's Island Domain: Wabenaki Peoples at Mount Desert Island," 1500-2000, Acadia National Park, Ethnographic Overview and Assessment, Volume 1, repaired under cooperative agreement with The Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor, Maine, Northeast Regional Ethnography Program, National Park Service, Boston, Massachusetts, September, 2007.

Rowe, William Hutchinson, "The Maritime History of Maine," Harpswell Press, 1996.

Southwest Harbor and Northeast Harbor flank Somes Sound of Mount Desert. The harbor is shared by two small villages, Manset, to the south, and Southwest Harbor and Clark Point to the north.The community often sent fishing vessels to the Labrador fleet. The swelling tide of artists, sightseers, philosophers, and pilgrims in the 1830s, '40s, and '50s would inspire such entrepreneurs as Deacon Henry H. Clark of Southwest Harbor, a shipwright, to build hotels to accommodate the travelers. This was a growth industry would sustain the prosperity of the island communities and their small farms in the years after the Civil War.

Southwest Harbor, which included Tremont until 1848, sent six schooners averaging 58 tons with the Labrador fleet in 1839. The smallest of these vessels was the 35 ton "Four Sisters" which could not have exceeded 50 feet. The Labrador fishery was ideal for such a small craft, for it allowed vessels to anchor in safe harbors, unbending their sails, and setting their men adrift in small boats near the shore. This practice would continue into the 1860s. These small vessels were ideal for men with limited capital who could easily afford to build and maintain these small vessels. More often than not, the crew would consist of a father and his sons, or all of the able-bodied men living in a small island community.

The British raided what is now Southwest Harbor in 1775 and attacked the home of John Manchester. The British killed or stole the livestock, took all of the winter provisions, and returned to the westward on board the "Falmouth Packet," but not before they told Mrs. Manchester that she could starve for all they cared. John Bunker, Manchester's brother-in-law, paddled his canoe westward in pursuit of the marauding British. He found them on the Sheepscot River at Wiscasset, and the "Falmouth Packet" at anchor with her crew on shore. He cut the lines in the dark of night, let the schooner drift with the tide, and then made sail, heading back to Mount Desert. The supplies were badly needed, as Downeast Maine was caught in the grip of a British embargo and families were starving. The supplies would carry the settlers through the winter. The British would come calling again on August 8, 1814, aboard the sloop of war "Tenados," and lost seven soldiers in a skirmish off Clark's Point. Capt. Benjamin Spurling of Cranberry Isle, whose grandson would be awarded the Medal of Honor after the Civil War, was in the thick of fighting with a ragtag band of fishermen who could only loosely be called a militia. Capt. Spurling would command a privateer during the war.

– Mark Honey

References:

Duncan, Roger F, "Coastal Maine, A Maritime History," WW Norton & Company, New York, 1992

 O'Leary, Wayne M, "Maine Sea Fisheries," The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830-1890, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1996.

"Superior" and its Pilot Getchell, were hired by Joseph Stevens, Jr., Lane, and three others (Adams, Witherle, and Tilden) to take them on a week-long excursion in August of 1852 in Penobscot Bay.

Schooners in Lane’s time were, with few exceptions, two-masted vessels carrying a fore-and-aft rig having one or two jibs, a fore staysail, gaff-rigged fore- and main sails, and often fore- and main topsails. One variant was the topsail schooner, which set a square topsail on the fore topmast. The hulls of both types were basically similar, their rigs having been chosen for sailing close to the wind. This was an advantage in the coastal trade, where entering confined ports required sailing into the wind and frequent tacking. The square topsail proved useful on longer coastwise voyages, the topsail providing a steadier motion in offshore swells, reducing wear and tear on canvas from the slatting of the fore-and-aft sails. (1)

Schooners of the types portrayed by Lane varied in size from 70 to 100 feet on deck. Their weight was never determined, and the term “tonnage” was a figure derived from a formula which assigned an approximation of hull volume for purposes of imposing duties (port taxes) oncargoes and other official levies. (2)

Crews of smaller schooners numbered three or four men. Larger schooners might carry four to six if a lengthy voyage was planned. The relative simplicity of the rig made sail handling much easier than on a square-rigged vessel. Schooner captains often owned shares in their vessels, but most schooners were majority-owned by land-based firms or by individuals who had the time and business connections to manage the tasks of acquiring and distributing the goods to be carried. (3)

Many schooners were informally “classified” by the nature of their work or the cargoes they carried, the terminology coined by their owners, agents, and crews—even sometimes by casual bystanders. In Lane’s lifetime, the following terms were commonly used for the schooner types he portrayed:

Fishing Schooners: While the port of Gloucester is synonymous with fishing and the schooner rig, Lane depicted only a few examples of fishing schooners in a Gloucester setting. Lane’s early years coincided with the preeminence of Gloucester’s foreign trade, which dominated the harbor while fishing was carried on from other Cape Ann communities under far less prosperous conditions than later. Only by the early 1850s was there a re-ascendency of the fishing industry in Gloucester Harbor, documented in a few of Lane’s paintings and lithographs. Depictions of fishing schooners at sea and at work are likewise few. Only A Smart Blow, c.1856 (inv. 9), showing cod fishing on Georges Bank (4), and At the Fishing Grounds, 1851 (inv. 276), showing mackerel jigging on Georges Bank, are known examples. (5)

– Erik Ronnberg 

References:

1. Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1935), 258. While three-masted schooners were in use in Lane’s time, none have appeared in his surviving work; and Charles S. Morgan, “New England Coasting Schooners”, The American Neptune 23, no. 1 (DATE): 5–9, from an article which deals mostly with later and larger schooner types.

2. John Lyman, “Register Tonnage and its Measurement”, The American Neptune V, nos. 3–4 (DATE). American tonnage laws in force in Lane’s lifetime are discussed in no. 3, pp. 226–27 and no. 4, p. 322.

3. Ship Registers of the District of Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1789–1875 (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1944). Vessels whose shipping or fishing voyages included visits to foreign ports were required to register with the Federal Customs agent at their home port. While the vessel’s trade or work was unrecorded, their owners and master were listed, in addition to registry dimensions and place where built. Records kept by the National Archives can be consulted for information on specific voyages and ports visited.

4. Howard I. Chapelle, The National Watercraft Collection (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1960), 74–76.

5. Howard I. Chapelle, The American Fishing Schooners (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973), 58–75, 76–101.

Samuel Adams, Jr. was a friend of Joseph L. Stevens, Jr. from Castine. He joined Stevens, Lane and Witherle on their excursions in the Penobscot Bay area in 1850 and 1852. (1)

Samuel Adams (1828-1861) married Mary Brewer Martin, daughter of Silas Martin and Margaret Crawford of Castine and Wilmington, North Carolina. He was the son of Deacon Samuel Adams, born in 1790, and Lucy Sewall Moulton. Deacon Adams was a merchant and shipbuilder, and in 1850 he was one of the wealthiest men in the community. Deacon Adams and his extended family were invested in the cod fisheries and the cotton trade with New Orleans, and financed the building of some of Castine's greatest ships. Samuel Adams's sister, Sarah F. Adams, was married to William H. Witherle.

-Mark Honey

References:

(1) Frederic Alan Sharf. "Fitz Hugh Lane: Visits to the Maine Coast, 1848–55." Essex Institute Historical Collections 98 (April 1962), 117.

Joseph Lowe Stevens, Jr. (1823–1908) was Lane's closest friend and traveling companion. He was also executor of Lane's estate, and a tireless promoter of Lane's work. He was a supporter of abolition and animal welfare, and an active member of the Gloucester Lyceum. It was the Stevens family who encouraged Lane to make a print of Castine and who published and promoted it there Castine, from Hospital Island, 1855 (inv. 448). Joseph first worked as a dry goods salesman and in later life “engaged in the wholesale dry-goods and woollen trade on Summer St. Boston, travelling daily to and fro” on the train. (1)

Joseph's father, Dr. Joseph Lowe Stevens, Sr., was born in Andover, Massachusetts, and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He married Dorothy Little of Castine, Maine, where the couple settled, and where Joseph Jr. was born in 1823. In the spring of 1840, at the age of seventeen, Joseph, Jr. left Maine and moved to Gloucester to work in his uncle’s Samuel Stevens' dry goods store and to live with his grandfather, Zachariah Stevens. Seven years later, Joseph, Jr. married his second cousin, Caroline Stevens Foster. The couple eventually had five children, one of whom died very young.

Like most of the educated population of the town, Joseph joined the Gloucester Lyceum shortly after arriving in town; the signature of John J. Piper appears next in the membership book; and the next after him was Fitz Henry Lane. (2) Joseph remained involved with the Gloucester Lyceum and Library for most of his life, acting as director for many years, and was the superintendent at the time it became incorporated as the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library.

Joseph also helped his father work on a history of Castine, and he was sufficiently concerned about the welfare of animals to serve on the boards of three animal-aid societies. He became the secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the New England Humane Education Society, and treasurer of the Band of Mercy. (3) Joseph was committed to more than animal welfare; he involved himself in the Free Soil movement and the slavery debate, to the extent that he left Gloucester for Kansas in 1855 “to see for himself what was going on,” returning about two years later. (4)

Joseph L. Stevens, Jr. first became friends with Lane after the artist had returned from Boston and had set up a studio on Elm Stree. That same year, Joseph invited Lane to accompany him to Castine. It was the first of many such trips to the Maine coast, where Lane sketched and painted and visited with Joseph’s parents.

When Lane fell out with his brother-in-law, Joseph Stevens came to the rescue by purchasing the contested stone house from Lane and evicting the troublesome in-laws. He was also at Lane’s side when he died and was named as one of two executors in Lane’s will. In addition, he inherited two-thirds of the residual property of the estate.

Joseph’s wife Caroline died in 1886, and Joseph left Gloucester nine years later to marry Charlotte M. Todd of Milton. He remained there until his own death. He is buried in Oak Grove cemetery alongside Caroline and their infant son. Lane is also buried in their family plot.

– Stephanie Buck

(1) Joseph L. Stevens Jr., letter written as Superintendent of the Sawyer Free Library, for the 1876 Women’s Time Capsule. Gloucester Archives, CC195 and AS300.

(2) Gloucester Lyceum Records, vol. 1, 1830–1852.

(3) The New England Humane Education Society is not to be confused with the coastal lifesaving institution which was then known as the Massachusetts Humane Society. The Band of Mercy was associated with the Massachusetts SPCA.

(4) F. A. Sharf, "Fitz Hugh Lane: Visits to the Maine Coast, 1848–1855," Essex Institute Historical Collection 98, no. 2 (April 1962): 112.

George Tilden was a lifelong resident of Castine. According to William Witherle's diary, George accompanied Lane and Stevens on their 1852 boat trip. The inscriptions from the drawings from the 1850 excursion indicate that he was on that trip as well.

George Francis Tilden, 1825-1883, was the son of Capt. Charles K. Tilden and Mary Reed of Castine. George was in partnership with his father at Castine, and though the family was a minor player in the cod fisheries, they still ranked 5th in terms of relative wealth in 1850. Capt. Charles K Tilden supplied lumber to the shipyards of Belfast and Castine, and had business interests as far afield as Vinalhaven. George had his own enterprise and invested in sawmills and timberlands at Cherryfield. Charles William Tilden, 1832-1914, the youngest son, would later enter the family enterprise. Charles would rise to prominence as a Col. in the 16th Maine Regiment, during the Civil War, and would earn the brevet of Brig. Gen. The expedition in 1852 began at the wharf of Capt. Charles K Tilden at Castine.

-Mark Honey

References:

Doudiet, Ellenore W, "Majabigwaduce, A History of Castine, Penobscot, and Brooksville, Castine Scientific Society (Wilson Museum), Castine, Maine, 1978.

Honey, Mark E, "Abigail & Sarah Hawes of Castine," Navigators & Educators, with Lois Moore Cyr, 1996.

Honey, Mark E, "Before the Mast," Volume IV, articles 7-9, Holbrook Island and the Holbrook family, and in particular, Robert Applebee, "Vessels of the Penobscot Customs District," Stephan Phillips Memorial Library, Penobscot Marine Museum, Searsport, which source also has the diaries of Capt. Jonathan Holbrook and the genealogy of the Holbrook family in the Priscilla Jones collection. The "Before the Mass" series can be found in the collections of the Castine Historical Society and the Wilson Museum, both in Castine.

Wheeler, Dr. George Augustus, "Four Flags," A History of Castine, Penobscot, and Brooksville.

William Howe Witherle (1821–1906) accompanied Lane and his close friend Joseph Stevens on painting expeditions on the New England boat "General Gates," sailing around Penobscot Bay and Mount Desert Island. Witherle recorded notes about one of these trips in his diary. 

Witherle was a merchant and shipbuilder of Castine. He married Sarah F. Adams (1822–56), daughter of Deacon Samuel and Lucy Adams. George H. Witherle (1831–1906), his younger brother, was in partnership with him in the family enterprise started by their father, William Witherle, Sr., who died at seventy-eight in 1860, and who came from Boston to Castine. Witherle, Sr. was married to "Sarah" Sally Bryant, a native of Marshfield, Massachusetts. In terms of both capital and influence, the two families enjoyed great prosperity, and their economic influence embraced Penobscot Bay and the greater world beyond. The Witherles were also invested in the cod fisheries and the cotton trade, and they financed the building of some of Castine's greatest ships.

– Mark Honey