Lost Trails and Paths of Acadia · Features · Talks & Videos
The Island's Log
Recorded talks on Mount Desert's seafaring past
Anna Durand
Researcher and writer on Mount Desert Island history
Long before the summer cottages and the carriage roads, Mount Desert Island lived by the sea. Its schooners carried salt cod and barrel staves south and came home with molasses, sugar and rum. Anna Durand follows that trade, and the people caught up in it, through the island's ledgers, newspapers and archives. Her recorded talks are below, in the order she gave them.
The Log
Two recorded talks · each loads only when you press play
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Eden's Other Sons: MDI Seafarers, Shipbuilders, and the Slavery-Based Economies of the West Indies Trade
Given at Jesup Memorial Library, Bar Harbor, in person and online Hosted by Jesup Memorial Library with the Mount Desert Island Historical Society Recording Jesup Memorial Library, on Vimeo When Mount Desert Island seafarers traded salt cod and barrel staves for rum, sugar and molasses, they became partners, knowingly or not, with the slave-holding plantations of the West Indies. Drawing on the Historical Society's collections, archival newspapers and first-person accounts of enslavement and resistance, this talk looks at what that trade meant for the island and for the people on the other end of it (MDI Historical Society program archive).
The talk was a preview of her article for the Historical Society's journal, Chebacco.
Also given as "Eden's Other Sons: Downeast Connections to 19th Century Slavery" for the Gouldsboro Historical Society, Prospect Harbor, August 2025.
Plays from the Jesup Memorial Library's Vimeo account.
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MDI's Nineteenth Century Foodways and Trade with the Slavery-Based West Indies
Given at Northeast Harbor Library Hosted by Northeast Harbor Library with the Mount Desert Island Historical Society Recording Mount Desert Island Historical Society, on YouTube Molasses, coffee, sugar and rum came to the island in exchange for its wood products and dried cod, and they found their way into gingerbread, medicines, hot drinks and cured ham. Tracing them through store ledgers, newspapers and old recipes, this talk follows her Chebacco article "Baked Beans, Brown Bread, Ackee and Saltfish" into Mount Desert kitchens (MDI Historical Society program archive).
The article appears in Chebacco Volume XXVI (2025), "The Art of Nourishment".
Plays from the MDI Historical Society's YouTube channel.
On the Ways
Research under way · no recording yet
Captain Frederick Allen
Anna is researching Captain Frederick Allen, a Black mariner who commanded schooners along the Eastern Seaboard and who built a farm and raised a large family on Mount Desert Island. The work is part of Interco(a)stal, a Maine maritime-history project of the Walks for Historical & Ecological Recovery (WHERE researchers), whose public walk and museum program in Bath takes place on 18 October 2026.
If a talk or article on Captain Allen is recorded, it will be added here.
Of the Researcher
The society, the journal and the trail
Historical Society
Member of the Board of Directors of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society.
From the MDIHS board listingIn Print
Author in Chebacco, the Historical Society's annual journal, on the island's trade with the West Indies and what it put on island tables.
Chebacco Vol. XXVI, 2025Where It Began
Her interest in island history began in the late 1980s, clerking at the Hulls Cove General Store and listening to the old-timers tell their stories.
From her biography on the MDIHS program pageOn the Trail
A newer member of the Lost Trails crew, out on the old paths with the rest of us.
On This Site
The Frenchman Bay shore, on our maps
Notes & Rights
This page is published with Anna Durand's permission. The recordings belong to the organizations that made them and to the speaker. They play from the Jesup Memorial Library's Vimeo account and the MDI Historical Society's YouTube channel and are not copied to this site. A video loads only when you press play, using YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode and Vimeo's do-not-track setting.
The chart is a detail of a plate from J.F.W. Des Barres's The Atlantic Neptune (London, 1776), a public-domain work; see the Library of Congress Atlantic Neptune Collection. The compass rose is drawn for this page. Talk descriptions are drawn from the hosts' published program listings.
This page was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the Lost Trails crew.