After the Fire of '47

The blow-up of October 23

On 21 October strong winds drove the fire out of control (NPS). National Park Service firefighters, flown in for the purpose, stopped its western advance with a backfire at Aunt Betty Pond (NPS Multiple Property Documentation).

Then, on 23 October, the wind shifted and the fire became what the press called a "gale-driven inferno." It raced northeast to Hulls Cove and forced the village to evacuate. It then turned south and east, barely missing downtown Bar Harbor but destroying hotels and mansions in its path. It finally reached the sea, having consumed most of the forest from Sieur de Monts Spring to the edge of Otter Cliffs (NPS). In less than three hours it travelled six miles and left a path of destruction three miles wide (NPS).

With the roads out of Bar Harbor blocked by flames, local fishermen took at least 400 people off by boat. A bulldozed path along Route 3 finally let cars carrying 2,000 more people escape the island. Sixty-seven seasonal estates on "Millionaires' Row," 170 permanent homes and five large hotels were destroyed (NPS).

On the GIS map, 23 October alone accounts for about 10,700 acres, nearly two-thirds of the whole burn. On the afternoon of 24 October, Park Naturalist Paul Favour flew over the fire and sketched its edge onto topographic maps (Acadia archives finding aid). The fire was declared under control on 27 October, but it smoldered underground and was not pronounced out until 4 p.m. on 14 November (NPS).

What burned in the park

Inside Acadia National Park, the fire burned over 8,750 acres. Of that, 8,542 acres were forest, 184 grass and 24 brush. In the Park Service's 1948 report, The Mount Desert Island Fire of October 17 – November 14, 1947, Regional Forester Fred Arnold and Foresters Wilbur Savage and Robert Moore set out what had been lost.

Buildings

"In all, 15 park buildings and the Bear Brook Campground Amphitheater were razed to the ground." They ranged from two latrines at the Lake Wood beach, valued at $350 each, to the Homans House at $41,500. A footnote added later corrected the count: the Bear Brook Campground ranger quarters had not burned after all. The report asked Congress for $91,400 to rebuild everything except the Homans House.

The Homans House was almost certainly the old Homans cottage at Schooner Head. Eliza Homans and her husband, Dr. Charles Homans of Boston, summered from the 1870s at their cottage near the Schooner Head Overlook (NPS), on its south side (Acadia Memorials). In 1908 she gave the Bowl and the Beehive to the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, the first large gift of land toward what became Acadia (NPS). After her death her heirs sold the estate in 1924 to George Dorr, and it passed to the United States in 1928. In 1931 the park renovated the house as a guest house for visiting Interior Department officials. The house and the landscape around it burned in 1947 (The History Trust). The house was not rebuilt. All that remains of the estate, which once had a house, farmhouse and stable, is a covered well and some pipes (The History Trust).

At Sieur de Monts Spring the fire destroyed the spring building and restroom the CCC had built. It damaged the spring canopy, cracked the stone and plaque of the memorial to George Dorr dedicated only months before, and burned footbridges and plantings. The Abbe Museum, built to be fireproof, survived. The park rebuilt the spring building and restroom on the same sites in the same rustic style by 1949 (Sieur de Monts Cultural Landscape Inventory).

Roads, paths and the small things

"Damage to park roads and trails as a result of the fire was extensive." The report asked for $22,000 to repair it, and another $82,000 for repairs after the heavy salvage and cleanup work it expected to come. "Numerous minor park structures and facilities were also destroyed or damaged. These included signs, markers, gates, guard rails, foot bridges and deer traps." The log guardrails along the motor roads went, and so did most of Beatrix Farrand's plantings along the carriage roads (Motor Road Cultural Landscape Inventory).

The forest

"Fire damage to Acadia's forests varies greatly on different areas from slight to total destruction." On about 3,455 acres, or 40 percent of the park forest that burned, the forest cover was "completely destroyed." On another 4,625 acres, 54 percent, the damage ran "from low to heavy." Only about 670 acres were "slightly affected." The foresters put the commercial value of the timber destroyed inside the park, "conservatively," at $337,125, and the park's total loss at $586,125, not counting the cost of fighting the fire. Counting the loss of recreational value, they added, would bring it "to a seven-digit total."

The conifers suffered most. Most spruce, fir and mixed stands in the burned part of the park "were either totally or largely destroyed and the organic and mineral soil was consumed or reduced and impoverished." Some were killed by crown fire racing through the treetops. Others were killed from below, by ground fire burning through the thick organic soil and the roots, followed by wind.

That second kind of damage struck some of the finest old forest in the park. In the old-growth spruce on Otter Point, the report says, the fire was "confined principally to their root systems, the above-ground portions showing surprisingly little evidence of fire."

"With the supporting soil burned away and the root systems reduced to short stubs most of the trees were soon thrown down by subsequent winds, the trees crashing like jack-straws in tangled masses as each falling tree or group knocked others down with it."NPS, The Mount Desert Island Fire, 1948, p. 46

Hardwoods fared better. In the Otter Creek valley, where the burn was light, "relatively little damage is obvious now, even in the understory." In the beech stands near Bliss Field, where the fire was "extremely intense," perhaps 40 percent of the trees were killed or soon would die. The foresters cautioned that the full toll among the hardwoods would not be known "until the trees leaf out next spring or a year from then."

The same fate met The Bubbles, as Favour's caption records. On the Park Service map, North Bubble and the Bubble Divide burned on 23 October, the day of the blow-up. The cliffs on the west side of South Bubble, above Jordan Pond, burned in the last days, 24 to 27 October.

Estates and paths that never came back

Outside the park boundary, the 23 October blow-up swept through the estates of Bar Harbor. The atlas has already followed two of them. On Cleftstone Road, Anne Archbold's 1904 Italian villa and the Rowells' Barberry Ledge both burned. Today the land is part of Acadia National Park, and the Great Hill paths that climbed above them were never reopened (see From Golden Age to Lost Remains). On Eden Street, Fairview, built by Livingston and later the home of Mary Roberts Rinehart, was lost as well (see The Bar Harbor Water Company).

Great Head burned too. The fire razed the headland and left the Satterlee teahouse standing among the burned trees. In 1949 the two Satterlee daughters, Eleanor and Mabel, gave the estate, Sand Beach and Great Head to the National Park Service (NPS).

Most park trails in the burn were reopened by crews paid by the Village Improvement Associations and by John D. Rockefeller Jr. But "few people hiked them because of the ashes and soot," and "rapid growth of shrubs quickly obscured trails in the burned area, posing a continuing maintenance challenge" (NPS Hiking Trails Management Plan). The fire took sections of the 1901 Schooner Head Path, the old walk from the village to Schooner Head (National Register nomination). Some paths were moved.

That pattern shows up in our maps. About two-fifths of the lost and abandoned trail in the Atlas lies inside the 1947 burn. The fire was not the only reason these paths were given up: some went with the estates and some with changing park policy. But the burn line marks where many of them stopped being walked.

"Austere bareness": the cleanup

The cleanup began almost at once. The 1948 report asked for $196,000 "for forest cleanup and fire hazard reduction along 22 miles of park roadsides, to a width of 200 feet on each side, and over an additional 3,800 acres within the park." The purposes were to make new fires less likely, to slow any that started, "and to improve or relieve the present fire-ravaged appearances." The foresters estimated that it would take at least 30,000 man-days of labor. The report also asked for $50,000 to replant 1,000 acres where "natural regeneration is likely to occur slowly" and where enough soil remained to hold seedlings.

The work was done under at least three contracts, paid for by the Park Service and by Rockefeller, along with park crews. Over 3,746 acres of "burned area treatment," they salvaged 11,811,593 board feet of sawlogs and 820 cords of pulpwood. Logs too short or defective for the contractors went to a small lath mill in Bar Harbor, which made slats for snow fences and lobster traps (Friends of Acadia, "Ghosts of '47").

The clearing could be too thorough. The Park Service's chief forester complained about the "austere bareness" of the cutover land. He urged "leaving, on the areas still to be worked, some trees, even though dead, to relieve the bareness of the landscape, and also leaving a sufficient amount of the forest debris on the ground to help prevent erosion, give protection to reproduction and help enrich the soil" (Friends of Acadia). Some of those logs are still on the ground (NPS).