Many consider Bar Harbor, Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island as one place. In a sense you’d be right, because the history, geography and destiny of each have been interconnected with the other two.
To set the record straight, Bar Harbor is the best known and largest town in the northeast section of the island and leads to one of the entrances to the park.
When founded in 1796 settlers called it Eden to honor the English statesman Sir Richard Eden. They built up the prosperity of the town as fishermen, shipbuilders and lumberjacks.
As mentioned above, artists brought notoriety to Bar Harbor in the mid-1800s and they were followed by the rich and famous of their day who built mansions and elaborate estates. Over the years their luxurious lifestyle faded and ended in tragedy in 1947. In that year a severe drought cased a wildfire which devastated almost half the eastern side of the island. Included in the destruction were 67 mansions, 5 historic grand hotels, 170 private homes and 10,000 acres of Acadia National Park.
Favorable winds spared the downtown section of Bar Harbor from the fire, where several homes in the historic district operate as inns. The town also includes the villages of Hulls Cove, Salisbury Cove and Town Hill.
Today its lively downtown features many inns, hotels, restaurants, shops, galleries, boutiques and taverns. From here you can take whale watching and sight seeing cruises, fishing excursions and enjoy many water sports. Luxury cruise ships often make Bar Harbor a port of call and you can board a high speed ferry to Nova Scotia from the harbor.
While in downtown visit the Abbe Museum, Oceanarium and the Criterion Theater built in 1932 in the Art Deco style. Take Shore Path, which starts near the town pier and continues along the eastern shore. Bar Island, which you can walk to at low tide, gives you a spacatular view when you look back toward Bar Harbor with the towering mountain in the background.
Bar Harbor is home to College of the Atlantic where you can visit the Natural History Museum and see displays of mammals, birds and maritime life. It is also the site of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory Jackson Lab, the world’s largest mammalian genetic research facility.