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Eastport Maine

The Wreck of the Circus Ship, Royal Tar

In 1836, when the steamship Royal Tar launched the first regular service between St. John, New Brunswick, and Portland, Maine, her owners claimed her the safest ship on the sea.

She was 164 feet long, with a wooden side wheel and elegant passengers’ quarters that rivaled the finest hotels.

The Royal Tar, named after King William IV, created a sensation in St. John when she made her maiden voyage around the harbor. To mark the occasion, her owners served a hot lunch to hundreds of onlookers, and they drank ‘rivers of sherry and oceans of champagne.’

On June 5, 1836, the steamer broke a speed record by sailing between Eastport, Maine, and St. John in less than five hours.

In October that year, a circus called Burgess and Dexter’s Zoological Institute chartered the Royal Tar.

The circus included an elephant, a tiger, two camels, exotic snakes, birds, a waxworks exhibit, gaudy show wagons and horses to pull them.

Wreck of the Royal Tar

On Oct. 21, 1836, the Royal Tar left Peter’s Wharf in Eastport, heavily overloaded with a crew of 21, 70 passengers, a brass band and the Fuller menagerie. The crew removed two lifeboats to make room for the animal cages, leaving only two others. The cages made it difficult to move on deck, and the passengers pretty much stayed in their quarters.

As was the custom, passengers put their valuables – gold and silver coins and expensive jewelry — into the ship’s safe.

The steamship ran into heavy weather and put into a safe harbor. After three days, the Royal Tar tried to make headway. Facing heavy seas and a west wind, the steamer put into Machias Bay and dropped anchor.

At midnight the wind shifted and Capt. Thomas Reed decided to continue the voyage.

Steamers were an unusual sight along coastal Maine. An eyewitness remembers her father putting her, her brother and her sister into a small boat to wave at the Royal Tar as it passed through the Deer Isle Thoroughfare. They called out to the passengers on the steamer, and the passengers called back. None apparently knew about the smoldering fire below.

Fire!

Just east of the Fox Islands in Penobscot Bay, Capt. Reed ordered the engines stopped and the anchor dropped. The ship’s engineer had told him the water level in the boiler had fallen to a dangerously low level.

The crew extinguished the fire in the furnace, but about a half hour later they discovered the steamer had caught fire under the middle of the deck.

High winds fanned the flames and consumed the firefighting equipment.

Sixteen able-bodied men decided to save themselves and abandon the others. They lowered the larger lifeboat and rowed toward Isle Au Haut, now part of Acadia National Park.

Isle au Haut today

The terrified passengers began to jump overboard amid the screams of caged animals. Several people clung to a makeshift wooden raft in the water. According to lore, the panicked elephant jumped overboard onto the raft, killing the people who clung to it.

Another legend has it that a man filled his pockets with gold from his luggage, jumped overboard and drowned, dragged underwater by the weight of the metal.

The U.S. revenue cutter Veto came on the scene about a half hour after the fire started. The Veto’s commander refused to go too near the burning Royal Tar, as the cutter carried a quantity of gunpowder.

Survivors

Captain Reed managed to ferry 40 passengers in the remaining lifeboat to safety aboard the Veto.

A fisherman named William Barter of Isle au Haut also picked up some survivors. He took them home, where his wife fed them hasty pudding and put some of them into feather beds. Others slept on the floor. That night, the Barters killed a lamb, cooked beans and baked bread to feed the hungry survivors. A vessel then took them to Thomaston the next day.

In the end, however 32 human lives were lost, including four men, nine women and 10 children. All the animals perished except for two horses.

Four hours after catching fire, the Royal Tar sank beneath the waves.

Penobscot Bay

Aftermath

Captain Reed returned to St. John only to discover his son had died on the same day the Royal Tar sank.

Stories vary about the fate of the animals. According to some, they all perished under the waves. According to others, the larger animals, including the tiger, made it to shore, only to be killed by farmers. Local legend has it that Crotch Island, just south of Deer Isle, harbored a population of exotic snakes for years afterward.

On Nov. 12, 1836, a schooner arrived in Portland and reported passing a burned steamer. It picked up a traveler’s trunk with $90 in it – the only thing recovered from the wreck.

In the panic that followed the outbreak of fire, the ship’s safe had been left behind.

Several months later, a salvage ship tried to recover the safe. It was the first of many such attempts.

Today, the gold, silver and jewelry would be worth $1 million.

This story about the Royal Tar was updated in 2022. Image of Penobscot Bay By Centpacrr at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38015693. Isle au Haut By Flickr user nschouterden – https://www.flickr.com/photos/24429031@N06/10767344353/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47767004.

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6 Places That Became a Summer White House

The summer White House has featured in presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C.

Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed presidents to sense the country’s mood and to thank their wealthy donors. New England’s wealth and cool weather attracted presidential families in the days before air conditioning.

Here are places in each of the six New England states that became a summer White House.

The Thimble Islands, Branford, Conn.

A Thimble island

According to Connecticut legend, President William Taft spent part of a presidential summer on the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are an archipelago of 365 small islands off the coast of Branford in the Long Island Sound.

The Branford Historical Society cautions that Taft probably only visited the Thimbles as a Yale student, though ConneticutHistory claims Taft had a summer home there for two years in the 1900s.

Rutherford B. Hayes did visit Branford as president. His grandfather was born in Branford, and his great-grandfather had built the Totoket Hotel on Main Street. In 1889, President Hayes came to Branford to see the hotel his great-grandfather built. The townspeople presented him with an axe made by his great-grandfather at a reception outside the hotel.

Totoket Hotel, photo courtesy the Branford Historical Society.

The Totoket Hotel has long disappeared, but you can still visit the Thimble Islands.

Bar Harbor, Maine

President Taft’s first summer White House in Beverly.

President William Howard Taft’s summer White House started out in Beverly, Mass. For four summers, his staff ran the government from borrowed offices in downtown Beverly.

Taft’s first hostess in the city got sick and tired of Secret Service interference, nosy tourists and the hubbub surrounding the president. She told Taft not to come back at all. She even threatened to tear down the house, located at Lynch Park. Instead, she cut it in pieces, floated it across the harbor to Marblehead and left Taft to move to a new house in the neighborhood.

Taft then announced with great fanfare in July of 1910 that he would make an extended trip to Maine. With stops planned for Eastport, Bangor, Ellsworth, Rockland and Islesboro, Taft would base his operations in Bar Harbor. There, he would stay on the 273-foot presidential yacht Mayflower, with its crew of 200.

Hancock House

A Summer White House in Maine

Taft first touched land in Eastport, then sailed on to Bar Harbor for a three-day stop.

He spent much of his time with wealthy summer residents. This caused a bit of a stir among the year-rounders, which Taft tamped down by giving a speech on the town bandstand.

“The three days that have passed in Bar Harbor will be red letter days in my life,” he told the crowd. “The air is like champagne in a Prohibition state, and without the uncomfortable consequences that follow imbibing that liquor.”

However, Taft’s visit to Mount Desert Island was not without trouble. He shot a 23 on a single hole during one round of golf when he got stuck in a sand trap. On the same course, the 300-pound-plus president tripped and sprained an ankle.

Taft at his summer White House

And, when he spoke to a crowd at the Hancock House in Ellsworth, pickpockets made off with hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting Mainers who came to hear him speak.

Most of the spots Taft visited are either gone or in private hands, but a few survive. The Bangor House Hotel is still at the corner of Main and Union streets, though it’s now housing. Taft participated in services at the stately Ellsworth Congregational Church. He took tea at the Jordan Pond House and the Kebo Country Club — the scene of Taft’s rough game — remains open to this day.

Hyannis Port, Mass.

The Kennedy Big House

The summer cottage that Joseph P. Kennedy rented in Hyannis Port in 1926 would eventually become the summer White House. Hyannis then (and now) belonged to the Irish Riviera.

The waterfront house had commanding views of Nantucket Harbor. Kennedy bought it in 1928 and set about enlarging and improving it for his growing family. It had six bedrooms and four servants’ rooms on the second floor, a wine cellar in the shape of a ship’s hull and a motion picture theater in the basement.

In 1956, Joseph Kennedy’s son John bought a smaller home of his own near the big house. In 1959, the youngest child, Edward, bought a house next to the other two in 1959. He sold it to his brother Robert and his wife, Ethel, in 1961, and later bought another home nearby.

John F. Kennedy used the compound as his headquarters for his 1960 campaign for president. He then used it as the summer White House during his presidency.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

The main house was recently donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The compound can’t be visited, but it can be seen from the tour boats that leave from Hyannis.

To see rare photos of the Kennedy family at the Hyannis Port compound, click here.

Cornish, N.H.

Harlakenden House

Woodrow Wilson spent several weeks in the summers of 1913 through 1915 at Harlakenden, a country estate in Cornish, N.H. Wilson leased his summer White House from Winston Churchill – the American Winston Churchill, a writer who lost a race for governor of New Hampshire in 1906.

Harlakenden sat on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish was the center of an art colony of about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the central figure in the colony, which included Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

On Sept. 12, 1913, a play called Sanctuary: A Bird Masque was performed in Cornish with Wilson, his wife and the British ambassador in the audience. Miss Eleanor Wilson played the lead role and Miss Margaret Wilson sang the opening song, The Hermit Thrush. The play’s theme was the senseless slaughter of birds for frivolous purposes.

The occasion was the dedication of the Meriden, N.H., bird sanctuary – one of the first in the nation.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress . Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for decorative purposes. The play helped keep the heat on. Wilson returned from his summer White House early because the tariff bill had passed, with the language about birds intact.

Harlakenden burned to the ground, but the Cornish art colony survives as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Newport, R.I.

Eisenhower House

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, decamped to the Naval Base in Newport, R.I. There he dealt with the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Ark.

He also summered in Newport during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 Eisenhower stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. So he moved to a mansion at Fort Adams for two summers in Newport.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

It now belongs to Fort Adams State Park, and you can rent it for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Plymouth Notch

Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Though Coolidge spent most of his adult life in Northampton, Mass., he often visited his family home. It is a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property. In the summer of 1924, a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings are the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Brigadoon as a Summer White House

The Coolidge homestead is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.”

Coolidge and his sons in Plymouth Notch, 1916

Coolidge expressed his feelings about his home state in an eloquent speech that followed the disastrous flood of 1927.

“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.^”

Photo of the Thimble Islands by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49575458.

This story about the summer White House in each state was updated in 2023.

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The Great New England Sea Serpents

When a New England sea serpent was beached off the coast of Scituate, Mass., in 1970, it marked the continuation of a New England tradition going back to 1638. Ever since then, sea serpents frequently visited the New England seashore.

It started in 1641, when credulous English traveler John Josselyn wrote An Account of Two Voyages to New England. In it, he described a sea serpent seen three years earlier by passersby off the coast of Gloucester, Mass.:

They told me of a sea serpent or snake, that lay coiled up like a cable upon a rock at Cape Ann; a boat passing by with two English on board, and two Indians, they would have shot the serpent, but the Indians dissuaded them, saying that if he were not killed outright, they would be in danger of their lives.

Drawing of the Gloucester sea serpent of 1817.

The most spectacular sea serpent sightings in 1817 fooled the eminent natural scientists of the day. It took a fisherman to figure out what everyone was all excited about. The scientists, of course, didn’t believe him.

Sea Serpents

Just a few years after Josselyn recorded the sea monster sighting in Gloucester, someone spotted another creature off the coast of Lynn, Mass. The sightings would continue for decades.

Some sea serpents were hoaxes, some may have been giant anacondas and some may have been the product of an overwrought Puritan imagination. The Puritans seemed all too eager to believe in strange creatures and unearthly phenomena prowling through the howling wilderness.

Snake With Tumors

Not until the 19^th century did sea monster sightings happen seasonally. Throughout the summer of 1817, hundreds of people — including the crews of four whaling vessels — sighted a sea serpent in Gloucester Harbor.

W. Jeffrey Bolster, in The Mortal Sea, described the excitement that followed. The Linnaean Society of New England traveled to Gloucester to collect evidence, distributing questionnaires to witnesses. One witness said the serpent’s head looked like the head of a turtle, but larger than a dog. Another likened it to the head of a rattlesnake but as large as a horse’s head.

The Linnaeans found a small serpent with bumpy skin, which they identified as the sea serpent’s baby. After dissecting the serpent, the Linnaeans published a pamphlet announcing the discovery of an entirely new genus, the Scoliophis Atlanticus.

It turned out to be a “Colubar constrictor with tumors” — a cancerous black snake. That didn’t deter the Linnaean Society, an elitist group of gentlemen. The society issued a report on Scoliophis Atlanticus, printed in London. Harvard professor William Dandridge Peck submitted a paper to the American Academy of Arts and Scientists about “an enormous animal of the serpentine order.”

Even William Bentley, Salem’s beloved Unitarian minister and diarist, believed in it. “His repeated appearance last week is not doubted,” he wrote.

Captain Rich Catches the Monster

A Gloucester sea captain named Rich decided to find out the truth. He knew that sea serpents showed up when barometric pressure was high and the sea glassy. He hired a crew of respectable men who had seen the serpent. They sailed to a spot where they’d seen the serpent.

The Boston Weekly Messenger described what happened next. Harpoons at the ready, the crew waited in a whaleboat. The

crew all agreed to a man, that what we then saw was the supposed Serpent, which had been seen at that place and at Gloucester Harbur.

Captain Rich said he’d swear under oath that he’d seen a hundred-foot serpent.

They decided to harpoon it, but they first had to chase the monster for five days. Finally, when they harpooned it, wrapped it in a sail and brought it aboard, they discovered its true identity: a bluefin tuna.

How had people mistaken it for a 100-foot sea monster? “The supposed Serpent is no other than the wake of a fish such as we have taken.” He explained that on a calm day, the speedy tuna heaved up “little waves the true color of the ocean.” Those waves appeared at a distance like the humps of a serpent’s back.

But people still believed in sea serpents.

More Serpents

Two years later, people reported a serpent off the coast of Nahant, Mass..

On Aug. 2, 1868,people saw a sea monster floundering in a salt marsh on the west side of Eastport, Maine. It looked like a shark, but it seemed part beast and part fish. Spectators rushed to the edge of the marsh to stare at the creature, then shoot at it. It received 70 musket balls, but didn’t die until the next day. Harper’s Weekly ran an illustration of the “wonderful fish” in its Oct. 24, 1868 issue.

Harper’s Weekly illustration of the “wonderful fish” — probably a basking shark.

The creature was then taken to Bangor, Maine, and put on display, according to the Bangor Daily News. It was over 30 feet long and weighed 11 tons with one enormous dorsal fin, two side belly fins, a sharklike tail and two huge legs ending in web feet. Its teeth resembled “sharp-pointed popcorn.” After a while the carcass began to stink, and someone hauled it away before anyone could identify it.

Hoax

In 1910, off the coast of Ipswich, Mass., a photographer named George Dexter perpetrated a sea serpent hoax.

Hoax photo of the Ipswich sea serpent

Gordon Harris describes the hoax in the Stories from Ipswich blog:

The caption reads “Only photo of the Sea Serpent posed expressly for Residents at Little Neck Ipswich Mass.” A small child is in the creature’s mouth. Dexter was known for his hoax photos, which included a child sitting in a tree with a wise old owl, and a clam shell as large as the cart that is carrying it.

In November 1970, word went round that a sea monster had washed up on Mannhill Beach in Scituate, Mass. Thousands came to the shore to see the carcass of the 30-foot, four-ton sea monster.

Cecil, the Seasick Sea Serpent

The Harvard Crimson put to rest the belief that ‘Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent’ was an unknown genus. The newspaper reported Harvard’s assistant curator of Fishes took a long hard look at the “monster.”

They have definitely determined that the carcass is that of a mangled basking shark, which may have died at sea and was partially eaten by other sea life as it drifted ashore.

And then came Jaws.

If you’re interested in sea serpents, you may also want to read about Champ, Vermont’s lake monster. This story last updated in 2023.

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