Deer Isle Maine Archives - New England Historical Society

John Jacob Astor made a fortune. But did he do it as a fur trader, as he told everyone? Or, did he actually base his fortune on buried pirate treasure discovered in Deer Isle, Maine? And did he keep it secret so he didn’t have to return it to its rightful owners?

That’s what Franklin Head told the world.

Well, in actuality Astor built his fortune on fur trading. But the myth that he discovered buried treasure on the coast of Maine has persisted – ever since it was created by a Chicago lawyer and bon vivant who liked to entertain his rich friends with fanciful historical spoofs.

John Jacob Astor by John Wesley Jarvis

Franklin Harvey Head was the lawyer who invented the story. Born in New York, he went west to Wisconsin to practice law. His career took him to California and Utah, where he had mining and cattle interests. And finally he landed back in Chicago as a bank director and president of the Chicago Malleable Iron Company.

During his off hours, Head liked to socialize with Chicago’s literary society. To entertain his wealthy friends, he published humorous books based upon fanciful tales.

Shakespeare’s Insomnia

Franklin Head (inset)

For example, Head noticed that William Shakespeare’s characters frequently express their wish for a restful sleep to ease their minds. He then published: Shakespeare’s Insomnia and the Causes Thereof. In the parody he included “newly-discovered” correspondence between the playwright and Sir Walter Raleigh, actor William Kempe and money lender “Mordecai Shylock.” The fictitious letters highlighted Shakespeare’s money and marital difficulties. Head argued they caused the insomnia that influenced his plays.

Head had wealthy friends who founded the exclusive Jekyll Island Club, a retreat off the Georgia coast. For their entertainment, Head published Studies in Early American History: The Legends of Jekyll Island. The fictitious history interweaves real and fake historical names and stories with the names and photographs of Head’s friends. Yet many took the book as truth, and incorporated into later histories of the island.

Jekyll Island clubhouse

A Head book dealing with Maine spawned the Astor story. Head was dining with the daughter of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted when the subject of his Maine property came up. Olmsted owned an estate on Maine’s Deer Isle and spent one summer there before his death.

The pirate William Kidd was a favorite of Head’s. He had also worked him into his Jekyll Island history. From his Olmsted conversation came Studies in Early American History: A Notable Lawsuit. The story described how Olmstead’s descendants had sued the Astor family to recover William Kidd’s pirate treasure.

Frederick Law Olmsted

The Astor Fortune

According to Head’s account, a trapper had discovered a buried treasure chest from William Kidd on land that Olmsted’s ancestors owned on Deer Isle. The trapper stole the chest and, not knowing its actual value, sold it to Astor. It then formed the basis for the Astor fortune.

Barred Island, part of the Deer Isle property owned by Frederick Law Olmsted

In Head’s account, generations later the Olmsteds discovered the theft and sued Astor for compensation. That includED back rent on all his Manhattan real estate, which he could not have purchased without the stolen treasure.

The book is full of tipoffs that it is not factual, including references to Olmsted ancestors Cotton Mather Olmsted and Oliver Cromwell Olmsted. Perhaps the most glaring indicator that the story was not true was the absence of any lawsuit that the book was supposedly based upon.

Nevertheless, the appetite for news of the wealthy was so strong the story came to be taken as truth. Liberty Magazine then published it as fact. People would tell and it would be told and reprinted many times over the years.

William Kidd

The Hoax Has Legs

Originally printed in 1892, the story then surfaced in 1926 when a California historian presented it as true. It then made its way into newspapers around the world. Not to be outdone, newspapers in the state of Maine even postulated that the state could recover the treasure. After all, selling stolen goods was illegal.

There’s no indication that Head, who died in 1914, intended his stories to be taken seriously — or even that they would be distributed beyond his circle of friends.

This story about the Astor fortune last updated in 2021. Images: Jekyll Island clubhouse by By Lawrence G. Miller (Lawrence G. Miller on en.wikipedia) – Photograph created by Miller using a Casio QV-2000UX digital camera., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8489632.

The real Burt Dow was an oceangoing man who lived in a Maine fishing village, liked kids and animals and was handy around the house. But he wasn’t exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be immortalized in a book and an opera.

He made friends, though, with children’s book author Robert McCloskey, who summered near his home on Deer Isle, Maine. McCloskey wrote a fictional tale featuring the real Burt Dow in 1963, the year before Dow died. Then in 2010, the Stonington Opera House turned Burt Dow, Deep Water Man, was into a children’s opera. Six years later, a local actor portrayed Burt Dow near his grave in the Mount Adams Cemetery as part of a fundraiser for the Stonington Public Library.

The village of Stonington at the tip of Deer Isle.

Burt Dow

In McCloskey’s book, Burt Dow takes his leaky boat, the Tidely-Idley, out on the water with his sidekick, the Giggling Gull. Along the way he gets swallowed by a whale. To extricate himself, he splashes the whale’s stomach with left-over boat paint and sediment sludge. The whale then gets indigestion and expels the contents of his stomach

Lobster boats off Deer Isle

The real Burt Dow never got swallowed by a whale. Whales have only swallowed people on rare occasions — three in recorded history, except for Jonah. And McCloskey’s description of a whale swallowing a human has an element of whimsy missing in the harrowing tale of a 19^th-century Cape Codder named Peleg Nye falling into a whale’s mouth. But the book has many elements of truth in it, especially the way it captures the essence of a coastal Maine fishing community.

Deer Isle

The Deer Isle Bridge

Deer Isle is a large island off the Blue Hill peninsula, accessible by a high iron suspension bridge over Eggemoggin Reach. The island is home to fishermen, farmers, stonecutters, artists and summer visitors, and includes the towns of Deer Isle and Stonington.

Stonington Opera House

In anticipation of the library fundraiser, Deer Isle residents went on a quest to discover the real Burt Dow.

From his headstone, which McCloskey helped pay for, we know his dates: born in 1882 and died in 1964, the year after the publication of the book about him.

Local people say he was on one of the last working three-masted schooners to sail around Cape Horn.

Wonderful Memories

Mary Lott, who summered on the island, knew and admired Burt Dow as a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “He would say, ‘I’m not a captain, I’m a mate’,” she said. She was pretty sure he had sailed around the world.

Her father kept a diary, and noted how Burt Dow showed up, then showed up again. “Burt said he had helped build our cottage,” Lott said. The stairs down to the water had washed out, and her father asked if he could make a ramp. He did.

Deer Isle cottage

“Dad said, ‘Could you do this, this and this’?” said Lott. Soon Burt Dow had a list of things to do, and he’d join the family for dinner.

She remembers Burt Dow had hairy ears and chewed tobacco, always carrying his can with him. He had a weathered complexion, and he wore wool pants and a raggedy sweater or shirt.

A Sweetheart

Most of all, she remembered him as sweet. He showed Mary and her brother the best place to find berries and where to fish for scallops. He taught them to row his little boat. Burt Dow also lent them a five-foot model schooner he had made – with rigging – to sail around the harbor near their home. And he gave the McCloskey girls a rabbit.

He lived with or near his brother, a farmer, and his sister, who sometimes babysat for young Mary Lott and her brother.

In the book, McCloskey wrote:

That pink plank,” he says, “is the color of Ginny Poor’s pantry… and the green one is the color of the floor and doors in Doc Walton’s waiting-room… and there’s the tan porch and trim color from Capt’n Haskell’s house.

Ray Dinsmore as Burt Dow

Burt Dow didn’t have a fishing boat of his own, but as a resident of Deer Isle he had a lobster license. So he borrowed the boat of his good friend, Capt. Stacy Haskell.

He did own a rowboat, which he did paint from leftover paint from Ginny Poor’s pantry. Today, island visitors can stay at one of two Ginny Poor’s cottages at the Pilgrim’s Inn.

As a fourth-grader, Mary Lott had to write an essay on the person she most admired. She chose Burt Dow. “I always had wonderful memories of Burt,” she said.

This story was updated in 2022.

Deer Isle Maine

Captain Kidd’s Treasure and the Secrets of the Astor Fortune