Considering the amount of ink devoted to Bar Harbor and environs over the years, Mainers can be excused for having the impression only Vanderbilts and Rockefellers inhabited summer vacation retreats in their state a century ago, while the local folks waited on tables. In fact, a growing number of financially secure people from Bangor and other Maine towns were finding the leisure time to build summer cottages or camps on Maine’s sea and lake fronts just as were the gilded gang from New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

As Memorial Day weekend approached a century ago, these Bangoreans were getting ready to open their vacation dwellings. They were usually located within 50 miles of the city within easy access of the growing web of train, trolley and steamer connections that made weekend commutes an easy possibility for families.

“The prospect is that more people will live out of town this summer than ever before, and many new recruits will join the ranks of the vacationists who do not own cottages but will rent them for the season,” wrote an anonymous scribe for the Bangor Daily Commercial on May 26, 1906.

This, of course, was long before average workers went anywhere for vacations beyond a trip home once or twice a year to see how Ma and Pa were making out on the farm or a few days of hunting. Leisure time as well as money was the problem. This was still the age of the six day work week. While a company’s owners and a few top managers – the same people who hired servants and belonged to private clubs – might expect to take Saturday afternoon off and perhaps part of Monday morning, the long weekend was still a long way away for the factory worker and the farm laborer.

Hancock Point had what may have been the largest colony of Bangor residents, according to the Commercial. At Northport and Islesboro other large groups of Bangor people rusticated. Smaller groups divided their time between the Queen City and Sorrento, Fort Point, Castine, Camden, Seal Harbor and Southwest Harbor. Several lakes a few miles from Bangor also attracted large gatherings, the largest delegation choosing Green Lake. Other popular fresh water destinations were Phillips Lake, Holbrook Pond, Hinds Pond, Cold Stream Pond, Pushaw Pond and spots along the Penobscot River, especially in Hampden.

But what of Bar Harbor, where people like Joseph Pulitzer and George Vanderbilt summered? At least one Bangor man went there and he was Joseph Parker Bass, none other than the owner of the Bangor Daily Commercial, which devoted unusually large amounts of space to the summer scene in Bar Harbor. “At Bar Harbor there were several Bangor cottagers in former years, but now only one is left, Hon. J. P. Bass whose hospitable home is in The Field,” the Commercial’s audience was informed.

Perhaps Bass’ own newspaper had revealed a few years before why few Bangoreans peopled Bar Harbor: “Many think that Bar Harbor … is a place that only the very rich can afford to spend the summer. There is room enough for all classes of people and they all can enjoy themselves in their way. To be sure it might be difficult for a man of moderate means, but who had aspirations to social life, to come to Bar Harbor and have entree to the old aristocratic families of the country, but he could have thorough enjoyment in his own sphere…” (Quoted in Judith S. Goldstein’s “Crossing Lines: Histories of Jews and Gentiles in Three Communities.”) That caveat might have been enough to dissuade all but the most socially impetuous like Bass.

One must ask if Bass himself ordered up such stories in order to trumpet his own high standing in Bar Harbor summer society. But any success he had there was purely imaginary, claimed Maine’s great political satirist William R. Pattangall. He skewered Bass this way a few years later: “[Bass] longs for a position in society. Longs for it! Rather does he hunger for it, thirst for it, crave it as the opium fiend craves the drug….”

Pattangall went on to describe how Bass, after helping push a bill through the Legislature favoring rich summer people “was rewarded by an invitation to call at some of the best houses in Bar Harbor, the invitation being coupled with but two conditions, namely, that he should come on a day when no one else was there and should enter the house by the side door.” Such tales, whether true or not, would have done a great deal to encourage even rich Mainers to avoid Bar Harbor.

State historian Earle Shettleworth suggests there were reasons other than fear of social ostracism why the well to do of Bangor and other Maine cities did not settle in Bar Harbor. Summer communities of Mainers had evolved over a long period of time. They were composed of friends and relatives looking for natural beauty, congenial neighbors and ease of transportation. Each city or cluster of Maine cities had its own favorite spots. Portlanders favored Cape Elizabeth and the Casco Bay islands, according to Shettleworth.

In fact, Hancock Point was easier to get to than Mount Desert. Perhaps Bangoreans preferred something a little quieter and less ostentatious. “Bar Harbor was viewed by the turn of the century as a very social place. The literature of the day promoting the summer colonies across from Bar Harbor … all stress the relatively less formal, more relaxed style of these places,” according to Shettleworth. Whatever the case may be – whoever was snubbing whom – most Bangoreans and other Mainers tailored their summer idylls to their own tastes.

For a detailed account of one summer colony inhabited by many Bangor and other Maine people, see “The Sun Never Sets on Hancock Point” in two volumes edited by Sanford Phippen. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.