From Golden Age to Lost Remains

The gate on Cleftstone Road

On 8 November 1902 Charles T. How sold "Anne M. Archbold" about three acres on the west side of Cleftstone Road, as surveyed by Edgar I. Lord on 15 October 1902. The deed was recorded a week later in Book 382, page 528, and it carried the Acadia Lane right of way and the 25 feet of shore. Archbold was 28, an artist who had studied in Paris and Florence.

In 1903 she began a house based on a model she had had made in Paris and inspired by villas she had seen in Tuscany. It was designed by the Bar Harbor architect Frederick Lincoln Savage and finished in 1904, with a terraced garden and fountain, twelve stucco arches looking out over the forest, the mountains and the sea, and a spiral stair from the main bedroom to a tower with a view in every direction. A local newspaper called it one of the most unusual houses in Bar Harbor. The 1904 map shows a drive winding up to it from Cleftstone Road.

The villa terrace and its fountains

Archbold designed the villa together with the sculptor Janet Scudder and Fred Savage. Its garden centered on a circular lily pool with a dolphin fountain modeled on an 18th-century French original, and all of the decorative concrete was made by Eric Ellis Soderholtz, the West Gouldsboro potter whose garden urns and balustrades decorated many of the great Bar Harbor estates.

That concrete has outlasted the house. On 20 August 2009 the crew found the large fountain in front of the house, the small circular pool beside it, and a double staircase "up to house," with pieces of the terrace walls still standing in the woods. Behind the house they found a 20-inch drain and, a few days later, a stair, an iron pipe and an old wooden post.

Roof tiles and enameled brick

Downhill from the villa, near the road, the crew found a pile of broken red clay roof tiles. Several are stamped "Ludowici-Celadon Co. Chicago," the best-known American maker of clay roof tile in those years. Near the fountains lay white glazed bricks stamped "Blue Ridge Enameled Brick Company, Prudential Bldg., Newark, N.J." Red tile would suit an Italian villa, but we cannot say for certain which building on the estate these came from.

On 22 August a debris field turned up pieces of china, patterned tile, small ceramic figures and iron. Everything was photographed and left where it lay.

Equal rights

Back in America, Archbold settled in Washington, D.C., where she built Hillandale on Reservoir Road and in 1924, with the banker Charles C. Glover, gave the land that became Glover-Archbold Park. She joined the National Woman's Party and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment. On Valentine's Day 1924 ten New England members formed a deputation to the President to ask that Congress give the amendment full consideration. The photograph in the archive lists "Mrs. Anne Archbold, Maine" second from the left, next to Jessica Henderson of Brookline. Two other members of the group, Mrs. William Draper and Mrs. Ernest Schelling, were also listed from Maine, as was Gail Laughlin of Portland.

Barberry Ledge

On 30 December 1916 How's heirs, Frank C. Bates and Samuel W. Bates, sold Frank Bailey Rowell and Christine Baker Rowell, "both of the Borough of Manhattan," three acres on Cleftstone Road. The lot began at a stone post 107 feet north of the line of "land of Anne M. Saunderson." The Rowells also received rights over Cleftstone Road, Devon Road, Acadia Lane and Acadia Landing, and the right to run drains and electric wires in a 20-foot strip between the Dimock and Auchincloss lands across the road.

The Maine Historic Preservation Commission lists a 1917 commission for the "Residence of Frank Bailey Rowell, Bar Harbor" among the works of Beatrix Farrand, the landscape architect of Reef Point and, later, Dumbarton Oaks. Frank Rowell served as secretary of the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association, the society that built and kept the village paths. The 1941 Lynam real estate map lists the place as "Barberry Ledge," and on 22 August 2009 the crew logged a Japanese barberry still growing on the lot.

Our field notes recorded the foundation here as the Anne Archbold foundation. Measured along the road by the deed courses, though, it falls on the Rowell lot, and the Great Hill trail study reached the same conclusion: these are "the remains of the Rowell estate which was burned in the fire."

The garage and the roads

In 1929 the next generation of Bates heirs, Mary H., Van Ness H. and Paul Bates of Boston and Samuel W. Bates of Bar Harbor, sold the Rowells a strip 75 feet deep along the north side of their lot (Book 628, page 16). A second deed of 7 October 1929 confirmed their rights of way over Cleftstone Road, Acadia Lane and Acadia Landing. In the Drive folder the first deed is filed as the "garage" deed.

On 4 September 1935 the Rowells deeded the lot to Dorothy C. Carroll of Ellsworth, and she deeded it straight back to them on the same day. Each deed was for a dollar "but not more than one hundred dollars," and the return deed made the couple joint tenants, with the land passing to the survivor. Frank Rowell's will was proved on 1 June 1937, and he left everything to Christine.

Rockefeller's boundary markers

The same day they sold the garage strip, the Bates family sold George B. Dorr, the father of Acadia National Park, the land around the Rowells. Its bounds ran from the New Eagle Lake Road along Bloomfield Road and Cleftstone Road to "land of Frank Bailey Rowell and Christine Baker Rowell," then around the Rowell lot by four courses to stone bounds and back to Cleftstone Road. Dorr passed the land to John D. Rockefeller Jr., as he did with many parcels he gathered for the park. By 1949 the United States owned the land on three sides of the Rowell lot.

Between 22 and 31 August 2009 the crew searched for those lines and found four "JDR" boundary markers, a bronze disc set in granite and several plain boundary stones. One short stone, "almost buried," was found by projecting a compass line from JDR marker 1.

Twenty steps to the Overlook

The estates were built against one of Bar Harbor's oldest path systems. The 1896 path map shows a trail from Bloomfield Road, opposite Woodbury Park, climbing to the Overlook on Great Hill and coming down to Cleftstone Road. That lower end began about a quarter mile north of the Eagle Lake Road, at a flight of about 20 stone steps leading diagonally up the bank. From the top it ran west, past an old cairn, to the concrete foundation of the Rowell garage, then turned north on a faint woods road.

The Great Hill study suggests the path first ran diagonally across what became the Rowell land and was moved to the steps along the property line when the estate was built. Since the early 1950s the Paradise Hill Road has cut through the slope below the Overlook, but walkers can still cross it and scramble up to the ledge, which has a view over Bar Harbor and the Porcupine Islands.

Great Hill in 2009

In the 1890s Great Hill was a popular walk. The 1891 report of the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association lists the Royal Fern Path and the Bracken Path, which circled its base and may be two of the oldest planned trails on Mount Desert. Paths over the two summits followed between 1896 and 1901, and the 1915 Path Guide describes them as its first walk. None were reopened after the 1947 fire. In 2007 the park removed a network of rogue trails here, and some historic cairns may have been lost with them.

In August 2009, over the same weeks as the estate survey, the crew worked across the hill with the 1942 map: the Southwest Trail down to the Bracken Path, the junction of the Bracken and Fawn Pond paths, the old water company road, and a beaver pond at the western foot. They noted steps that "may be natural but looked placed to me," an old tree "jammed and propped into rocks sticking straight up" as a pole marker, a run of cairns leading northwest and "a lot of old wire here. Telephone line?"