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The Portland Gale of 1898, and the Cat that Saved a Life

Of all the storms that struck New England over the centuries, only one was named after its victim: The Portland Gale of Nov. 26, 1898.

The monumental double storm killed more than 400 people and sank 150 vessels, including the steamship Portland in the worst marine tragedy of the 19^th century.

It created a storm surge of 10 feet in Cohasset Harbor, blocked a harbor for months on Martha’s Vineyard and changed the course of the North River in Scituate. It deposited so much water in Boston that people rowed dories on Atlantic Avenue.

Sailing master Joseph Kemp compared the Portland Gale to the Great Hurricane of 1938.

Lt. Worth G. Ross, a life-saving station inspector, also witnessed the storm. “The wild fury of the wind and driving snow continued without abatement until late in the afternoon,” he wrote. “At times the force and roar of the tempest were so appalling as to be indescribable.”

The last photo of the SS Portland before she sank in the Portland Gale.

The Portland Gale

Two low pressure masses headed toward New England on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. One came from the Great Lakes, the other from the Gulf of Mexico. The weather service only predicted the storm from the Midwest would strike New England. Had it noticed the two would merge, hundreds of lives might have been saved.

The S.S. Portland, a 280-foot wooden sidewheeler, was moored at Indian Wharf in Boston on Nov. 26, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Many passengers were returning home after visiting family from as far away as Philadelphia and New York.

Though the skies were clear that afternoon in Boston, they developed an ominous yellow light late in the day. “It was the greasiest evening you ever saw,” Kemp remembered.

Capt. Hollis Blanchard, the Portland’s skipper, went ashore as freight was loaded aboard the steamship. He called the captain of the Portland’s sister ship, the Bay State. Knowing only of the one storm headed his way, he said he would beat it before it reached Portland.

At 5:30 pm, the general manager ordered the steamship line’s vessels held until 9 pm, when the weather situation clear. Blanchard either didn’t get the message or ignored it.

A man from Brooklin, Maine, named Gott saw a cat leaving the steamer, taking her kittens down the gangway one by one. He decided the cat knew something he didn’t and got off the boat.

Sightings

At 7 pm the Portland cast off, before the sudden violent outburst of wind and snow. A number of other vessels, scurrying toward safe harbors, later reported seeing the steamship.

The Portland saluted the Kennebec and then the Mount Desert as she steamed out of Boston Harbor.

Several schooners caught sight of the Portland near Thacher’s Island off Gloucester. By then, the fierce storm had begun. At 11:45 pm, the schooner Edgar Randall nearly collided with a badly damaged steamship running without lights.

During a lull in the storm Sunday morning, the schooner Ruth M. Martin spotted the Portland off Highland Light in North Truro.

Blanchard may have headed into the storm toward open water. Over the years, fishermen recovered wreckage from her path. At some point on Sunday morning, the hull of the Portland opened up to the sea.

No one really knows what exactly happened. Some think she rammed another vessel. Some think the Portland Gale swept off her superstructure and she sunk like a stone.

Recovery

Around 7 pm on Sunday, bodies started washing up on shore halfway between the Race Point and Peaked Bars lifesaving stations. Watches on the bodies had all stopped between 9 and 10. The Portland Gale had cut off all communication between Boston and Cape Cod, and relatives began besieging the steamship line with telephone calls.

A Boston Herald reporter in Hyannis got part of a telegram from Truro, which convinced him the Portland had sunk. He left Hyannis by train and went as far as he could, but the storm had washed out coastal railroad tracks. He continued on foot, horseback and then train to Boston, where he filed the story on Tuesday and alerted the world to the Portland disaster.

The passenger list went down with the ship, so no one really knows how many died. Estimates range from 176 to 192 passengers and crew. Searchers found only 36 bodies.

Aftermath of the Portland Gale

The three-masted schooner Newburgh slammed into Union Wharf on Martha’s Vineyard and went completely through. The bow and stern stuck out of the sides, which blocked shipping to the wharves. The Bertha Glover, which carried lime, caught fire and burned in Vineyard Haven Harbor for a week. Wrecked ships littered the coast after the Portland Gale. Among those that sank were the Calvin F. Baker, the Meris H. Perry, the Albert L. Butler, the Pentagoet and the Columbia.

The Portland Gale destroyed dozens of piers and houses along the South Shore of Massachusetts. It damaged coastal railroads, severed telegraph and electric lines and destroyed the ferris wheel and roller coaster in Hull.

Provincetown got hit especially hard. It destroyed half of the town’s wharves and businesses along the shore. Afterward, lumber, wharf pilings and planks from the wharves filled the west side of the harbor. The whole mass writhed like snakes as if the surf tossed them, according to an account in the Provincetown Advocate.

The newspaper also reported that Mrs. Henry Spears “watched from her windows while men cut frozen bodies out of the Jordan L. Mott’s rigging.

“From that time on, she kept the shades drawn on every window facing the harbor.”

The Portland disaster accelerated the shift from wood to steel-hulled ships, and from sidewheels to propellers.

In 2002, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and the National Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut, located the Portland. They used data from American Underwater Search and Survey to identify her image in the Stellwagen Bank sanctuary at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay between Cape Cod and Cape Ann.

This story was updated in 2022.

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6 Historic Stagecoach Stops You Can Visit

The history of New England’s post roads and their stagecoach stops mirror the history of the country. The roads date back to the Pequots who used the trails that grew into the post roads for generations. The same trails carried John Winthrop on his journeys from Boston to Springfield.

Traffic on the roads shrank as King Philip’s War turned them into dangerous gauntlets. They expanded again as the war ended and horses made travel more enticing and the mails more efficient.

The heyday of the stagecoaches in the 1800s really drove a blossoming of the post roads. They grew from the first Upper Post Road into a maze of roads that wound their way into every corner of New England.

These stagecoaches created economic booms wherever they went, bringing commerce as well as jobs. Stagecoach stops, needed every 12 to 20 miles or so, were essential, especially in the early days of the stagecoach era. These inns provided income to their owners, and many others: drivers, ticket agents, coach makers, blacksmiths, stable hands and farmers.

Today, the vestiges of the stagecoach era remain with us. Many of the roads New Englanders travel today were once used by the stagecoaches. And along those roads, some of the old stagecoach stops still serve up food, drink and comfort to the weary traveler.

Here are six still open to the public today, one in each New England state:

Old Riverton Inn

The Old Riverton Inn, one of Connecticut’s many, many stagecoach stops back in the day.

Several years before the American Revolution, stagecoaches and stagecoach stops appeared on the Upper Post Road from New York to Boston, and from Hartford to Norwich and Providence. The war interrupted service, but resumed when it wound down. Stagecoach service expanded quickly on the new turnpike roads and postal routes.

Levi Pease began a stage service between New York and Boston on the Upper Post Road. He got the mail contract for all of New England from the U.S. Congress in 1789. Then he expanded his business into Northern New England and to Albany.

By 1827 Connecticut had 26 stage routes. By then it took only 36 hours to travel between New York and Boston vs. the previous six days. Taverns were generally 12 to 18 miles apart. Drivers announced their arrival at stagecoach stops by blowing on a trumpet.

During the early part of the 19^th century, Connecticut developed the most complex network of toll roads in New England. The state had few centers of wealth like Providence or Boston, and market towns competed fiercely for the trade of the back country. Between 1792 and 1839, 1,600 miles of turnpike road were created in Connecticut. The Talcott Mountain Turnpike was a key part of the route from Hartford to Albany.

Jess Ives opened the Ives Tavern or Ives Hotel in 1796 along the Hartford-to-Albany Route in Riverton, Conn. Today it’s known as the Old Riverton Inn and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It overlooks a wild and scenic section of the Farmington River.

The artist who painted murals on the walls of the Hobby Horse Bar also painted murals for the 1936 New York World’s Fair. The inn features bar stools made of saddles on kegs.

For more information about the Old Riverton Inn, click here.

Coach Stop Inn

The Coach Stop Inn, one of the stagecoach stops along the way from Bar Harbor to Maine’s interior.

Stagecoach lines began regular service between Maine towns after the Revolutionary War. The first stages ran between Portland and Portsmouth, N.H., a journey that took three days in 1787. By 1825, a stage could make the journey between Bangor and Portland in 36 hours.

The Coach Stop Inn in Bar Harbor was built in 1804 for newcomers who came to build homes, farms and ships on Mount Desert Island. Known as the Halfway Tavern, it often hosted sailors in the early days. Patrons would arrive by sea and take a stagecoach from the tavern into Maine’s interior towns.

Wealthy patrons charmed by fresh air, beautiful scenery and hiking trails made Bar Harbor a fashionable summer resort during the Gilded Age. In 1947, a fire that burned much of Maine also destroyed some of Bar Harbor’s hotels and mansions. The oldest hotel to survive the fire is now the Coach Stop Inn, a luxurious bed and breakfast.

For more information, click here.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn

The most famous of the stagecoach stops, The Wayside Inn.

The Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass., boasts that it’s the oldest operating inn in the United States. It has accommodated travelers along the Boston Post Road since 1716. Just a few miles down the road from historic Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, it began life 300 years ago as Howe’s Tavern. David Howe ran it as an extension of his own home.

David handed the property to his son Ezekial – a soldier in Sudbury’s militia during the American Revolution. The Howe family continued to operate and expand the inn until 1861, serving traffic between Worcester and Boston.

The inn stopped operating as a traditional inn in 1861. The owners converted it into something more like a boarding house and dance hall.

But in 1862, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sealed the inn’s place in history. Longfellow visited the building and published his now-famous Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863. From that time on, the inn was the destination of tourists and literary pilgrims who wanted to see first-hand the inspiration for Longfellow’s book.

In 1923, the inn took another important step into immortality when automobile magnate Henry Ford bought the property. Ford then began the restoration and expansion that gave shape to the inn’s current configuration.

For more information, click here.

Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern

The Coach Stop, one of New Hampshire’s many stagecoach stops in the early 19th century.

In 1786 the legislature in New Hampshire expanded the system of post roads to travel to four sections of the state. Though the earlier post roads moved mail and people between Portsmouth and some points west and north, only later did the routes reach deep into the western portion of the state.

One such line ran from Portsmouth across the state’s southern tier over to Amherst and back, creating the need for taverns and inns along the way.

Londonderry’s Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern began life in 1810 as the home of the town’s doctor. Later in the 1800s it was maintained as Plummer’s Tavern, located at the junction of two post roads. One carried coaches east and west to Nashua and the other carried traffic north and south to Manchester and Concord. For a map of all stagecoach lines operating in New Hampshire in 1833, click here.

Today the restaurant and inn maintains much of its historical charm, with signs of the original elements of its days as a coach stop remaining intact.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach House Inn

The Stagecoach House Inn, for many years one of the stagecoach stops along the New London Turnpike.

Settlers first came to Wyoming, a historic village in Richmond, Rhode Island, in 1757. Wyoming grew and prospered when the Brand’s Iron Works was founded across the Wood River in Hopkinton in 1787. Sometime around 1800, an inn was built at a strategic crossroads in Wyoming.

Textile mills sprang up in the area, and in 1815 the New London Turnpike opened right past the inn. The new road brought stagecoach riders between Richmond and New London, Connecticut

By 1835, the New London Turnpike – now Route 3 – connected Providence and New London. It proved to be faster and more direct than the Old Post Road, which followed the coastal route. The village thrived, and for many years an inn once known as Dawley Tavern continued as a stagecoach stop.

By the 20^th century, industry began to founder along the Wood River. That, however, allowed Hopkinton and Wyoming to retain much of their historic 19^th century character. The National Register of Historic Places lists almost a square mile of the two villages as the Wyoming Village Historic District. It includes the old ironworks, Greek Revival, Late Victorian, and Federal architecture in both Wyoming and Hopkinton.

Today the Dawley Tavern is called the Stagecoach House Inn at 1136 Main Street.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach Inn

The Stagecoach Inn, a fitting name for one of Vermont’s old stagecoach stops.

At the start of the 19th century, ancient footpaths connected Burlington and Montpelier in Vermont. In 1805, the 36-mile Winooski Turnpike along the Winooski River was chartered to connect the two major towns.

The old Winooski Turnpike turned into U.S. Route 2, the main highway connecting the White Mountains to the Adirondacks. It cuts through Waterbury, the town where Ben and Jerry’s make their ice cream.

In 1826 either a Mr. Parmalee or a lawyer named Dan Carpenter had a structure built on the corner of the Winooski Turnpike and what is now Route 100. The building served as a tavern and inn for travelers and as a meeting place for locals.

By the mid-1800s, a farming family named the Henrys owned the inn. Their eccentric daughter Nettie married an Ohio rubber baron, Albert Spencer. Nettie smoked cigarettes, chewed tobacco and wore a celluloid eyeshade. She expanded and improved the old family house in Queen Anne Style.

Nettie Spencer died in 1947. The home was later run as a rooming house and fell into disrepair. A young couple from Boston bought the property in 1985 and rebuilt the house. Today it’s the Old Stagecoach Inn, a historic bed-and-breakfast in the center of downtown Waterbury.

For more information about the Stagecoach Inn click here.

This story about New England stagecoach stops was updated in 2021. If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about six Revolutionary taverns here.

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The Purple Fire Snowstorm of 1853 – 20 Minutes of Terror Downeast

A snowstorm raged for a full day in Downeast Maine on March 13, 1853, when at sundown the winds suddenly grew calm. The snow continued falling steadily, gently down, and the people of Bar Harbor remarked at the stillness as the night sky darkened.

It was not, it turned out, a good sign. It was the start of the purple fire snowstorm of 1853.

Storm-Tossed Ships Wrecked on a Rocky Coast (National Gallery of Art, Johann Christoph Dietzsch)

More than 30 years later, a writer would recall: “I don’t believe there ever was a worse lot of frightened people in the world than the inhabitants of Bar Harbor were that night.”

The signs that something worse was on its way emerged around 7 pm with a rumbling of thunder from the west. Then, as the snow continued, lightning flashes began illuminating the sky.

Purple Fire Snowstorm

The thunder intensified, becoming so strong it rattled the houses. Balls of lightning began streaking down from the sky, rolling along the ground leaving havoc in their wake.

A syndicated account of the storm was carried in newspapers around the country. A correspondent of the Gardiner, Maine, Fountain, writing from Bass Harbor, Mt. Desert, described the storm as ‘awful and sublime.’

“A severe snow storm accompanied by lightning occurred in a part of Maine on the 13th,” wrote the correspondent. “A thunder cloud passed over the place, which, for terrific appearance, exceeded anything ever witnessed here.”

The lightning was purple, he wrote, and sometimes appeared like balls of fire. It came in through windows and doors and down chimneys, while houses trembled and shook to their foundations.

“Mrs. E. Holden was near a window, winding up a clock,” he wrote. “A ball of fire came in through the window and struck her hand, which benumbed her hand and arm. She then, with all in the house, retreated into the entry. Another flash succeeded, and, in the room from which they had retired, resembled a volume of fire, whirling round and producing a crackling noise.”

Many people saw the fire and heard the crackling noises inside their houses, the Fountain reported. Some said the noise sounded like breaking glass.

Injuries, But No Deaths

“Capt. Maurice Rich had his light extinguished, and his wife was injured,” continued the Fountain. “He got his wife on to a bed, and found a match; at that instant another flash came and ignited the match, and threw him several feet backwards.”

A man named John L. Martin received so severe a shock that he could not speak for a long time.

Many people received slight injuries, according to the Fountain.

“Some were struck in the feet, some in the eye; while others were electricized, some powerfully and some lightly,” the newspaper reported. “But what was very singular, not a person was killed or seriously injured, or a building damaged.”

The purple fire snowstorm created a bizarre effect among a cluster of trees, fortunately away from any buildings. The ‘electric fluid’ took them out by the roots and threw them in every direction. Some hung by their roots from the tops of the adjacent trees, their roots up and their tops down.

Truly Awful

The lightning then struck the earth to the depth of several feet and about 10 feet in diameter, and divided into four different directions.

In one direction it made a chasm several feet deep and 370 feet long, ‘lifting, overturning, and throwing out chunks of frozen earth, some of which were 10 or 11 feet long, by 4 feet wide, and hurling at a distance rocks, stones, and roots,’ the Fountain reported.

“The power here displayed was truly awful, and had it fallen on a building, it would have thrown it, with its inmates, into ten thousand fragments,” reported the Fountain.

The purple fire snowstorm also destroyed the masts of several vessels in Southwest Harbor and Northeast Harbor. It knocked down one man, but didn’t kill him.

New England has no shortage of stories about blizzards and storms, as snow is a part of life. And the purple fire snowstorm lasted only about 20 minutes before it pushed out to sea.

It stayed, however, in the memory of the people who witnessed it forever. In 1884, the New York Times published an article recalling the singular purple fire snowstorm of 31 years earlier.

This story about the purple fire snowstorm was updated in 2022.

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Beatrix Farrand Breaks the (Green) Glass Ceiling

Famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1893 dismissed 21-year-old Beatrix Farrand as a dilettante gardener, but six years later she had risen to the top of the field.

Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Yale University Library.

At 27, Beatrix Farrand had earned a reputation that allowed her to help found the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Her clients had estates in Newport, the Berkshires and Maine, but she also consulted with universities such as Yale and Princeton. She also designed public gardens such as the rose garden at the New York Botanical Garden and the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden.

Throughout her life she insisted on calling herself a landscape gardener.

Beatrix Farrand

She was born June 19, 1872, the only child of a New York society couple. Her rich father, Frederic Rhinelander Jones, had no ambition and loved to have fun. His serious little sister Edith became the novelist known as Edith Wharton. Beatrix’s mother, Mary Cadwalader Rawle, was also rich, but lively and bookish.

Beatrix’s parents’ marriage failed, and then after she turned 10 her father absented himself from her life.

She grew up surrounded by her mother’s women friends and, occasionally, Philadelphia lawyers, soldiers, artists and writers. “Always beautifully turned out, with an awesome briskness of manner,’ wrote Jane Brown in Arnoldia. ”She was formal, not jolly and good fun,” a friend of the family told the The New York Times in 2003.

“She had an elegant reserve, a perfectionism that suffered no fools,” the Times reported.

Reef Point gardens, managed by Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

Reef Point

Beatrix and her mother spent summers at her family’s summer home, Reef Point, on Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor, Maine. There she learned to love the outdoors, especially plants and trees. While still a teenager she took over the management of the Reef Point gardens.

Charles Sprague Sargent, who helped Beatrix Farrand with her gardening.

She also had the good fortune to meet Charles Sprague Sargent, director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. He was perhaps the only person at that time who was willing and able to help her enter the exclusively male world of landscape architecture. Sargent, a stern and aloof Brahmin, appreciated Beatrix Jones’ knowledge and enthusiasm for plants.

Flowering trees at Holm Lea. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

On their trips between New York and Maine, Beatrix and her mother stayed at the Sargents’ Brookline home, Holm Lea.

Frederick Law Olmsted

In October 1893, the Sargents took Beatrix Farrand to Chicago to see Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape settings for the World’s Columbian Exposition. The next summer they took her and her mother to see Olmsted’s gardens at the Biltmore estate in North Carolina.

Olmsted, then at the height of his fame, commented that Beatrix was ‘inclined to dabble in landscape architecture.’ The slight was widely quoted in landscape architecture circles.

The Arnold Arboretum in 2005.

After her visit to Biltmore, she stayed at Holm Lea for a summer, studying at the Arboretum. Sargent took her to see H.H. Hunnewell’s rhododendron collection at his home in Wellesley, Mass. He also took her to Frederic Law Olmsted’s home office – when Frederic Law Olmsted was away. There, Beatrix saw how designers sketched layouts for gardens on tracing paper over site surveys. She saw as well how they made plans for planting by referring to a card index describing each plant.

Clashing Azaleas

And she returned Olmsted’s slight (which she probably never heard) by recording in her notebook some badly arranged shrubs and clashing azaleas in pinkish blue and bright orange. (Anyone can visit Olmsted’s home office now; it’s now a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service.)

That fall she arranged for private tutors from Columbia University’s School of Architecture to teach her technical drawing and surveying. During a trip to Europe she studied formal gardens and the natural landscape. By 1897, Sargent had found her first job: thinning trees and remodeling plants on a garden slope. At 25, she was on her way, working from the top floor of her mother’s brownstone on East 11^th St. in New York City.

Farrand designed this rustic bridge in a birch grove at the Herbert Livingston Satterlee house, Bar Harbor. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

As a woman she was excluded from public projects, but she managed to find private clients among her family friends in Bar Harbor. Her Aunt Edith Wharton also helped with her connections. She designed the rustic bridge and the birch grove pictured above for the Herbert L. Satterlee estate in Bar Harbor.

White House garden designed by Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1913 she designed the East Colonial Garden at the White House for the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. It was replaced by the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.

Aerial view of Harkness Memorial Park.

She designed the Italian, Oriental and cutting gardens for Eolia, the Waterford, Conn., estate of wealthy philanthropist Edward Harkness. Harkness left Eolia to the state of Connecticut in 1950. It is now open to the public as Harkness Memorial State Park, and the 42-room mansion can be rented for weddings and parties.

Maine Undertakings

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Another philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hired her to design plantings that framed vistas and bridges along his 45 miles of carriage roads, now part of Acadia National Park. Much of her work was destroyed by fire in 1947. Above is the Duck Brook Bridge, spanning Duck Brook between Witch Hole Loop and New Eagle Lake Road in Bar Harbor.

Beatrix Farrand remained single until she was over 40. In 1913, she married Max Farrand, chairman of the Yale History Department.

Max and Beatrix Farrand set up Reef Point as an educational institution, but attracted few students. She used the grounds as a laboratory for her plants, studying soils and finding ways to protect tender plants.

By 1955, Max Farrand had died and she couldn’t find an institution willing to undertake the expense of maintaining Reef Point. In 1955, she ordered the house torn down and gave away her plants, keeping some of her favorites. She gave her library of 2,700 books and her herbarium to the University of California at Berkeley.

Charles Savage, an artist and innkeeper, took most of the plants, building the Asticou Azalea Garden and Thuya Garden in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Both are now open to the public.

Asticou Azalea Garden.

Garland Farm

Beatrix Farrand then moved six miles down the road, to Garland Farm, owned by Lewis Garland, her driver and handyman. His horticulturist wife Amy supervised the Reef Point gardens. She built an addition to the house that included a room for Clementine Walters, her companion and caregiver.

She lived at Garland Farm until her death on Feb. 28, 1959.

Garland Farm had two private owners until 2004, when the Beatrix Farrand Society bought the farm. It is open to visitors on Open Days and by appointment. The Society renovated the barn as an educational center for workshops, lectures and other programs.

With thanks to Lady into Landscape Gardener: Beatrix Farrand’s Early Years at the Arnold Arboretum by Jane Brown in Arnoldia. The photo Arnold Arboretum – Aug 2005(b) courtesy of Daderot at Wikipedia. The photo of the Asticou Azalea Gardens “Asticou Azalea Garden 2003 1” courtesy of Dudesleeper at Wikipedia. This story about Beatrix Farrand ws updated in 2022.

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John Godfrey Moore and How Acadia National Park Got its Name

John Godfrey Moore loved Maine and money – not necessarily in that order. But it’s fitting that Acadia National Park, the state’s most popular destination for visitors, would not be what it is today if it weren’t for this son of Steuben. He went to New York to make his fortune, but left some of it behind for his native state to enjoy.

John Godfrey Moore

Moore was born in 1847, the son of a Steuben sea captain. Both he and his cousin Henry would leave Maine to make their fortunes. Henry in railroading and tobacco, John in the telegraph industry and then in finance.

His first success came in partnership with John Evans. Moore had moved to New York as a young man and worked for his uncle, trading lumber. He and Evans launched their own firm, National Dredging Company, and prospered as contractors for the War Department.

But the men saw a better opportunity in telegraphs. They built a telegraph company, American Union Telegraph Co., in competition with Western Union. They had one goal: to get so big that Western Union would have to buy them out. Moore and Evans succeeded and made a fortune. They then began building the Mutual Telegraph Co.

John Godfrey Moore Makes the Big Bucks

This time, Evans would die before the men completed their plans, but Moore managed to battle Western Union to a draw. The big company would lease Moore’s lines, making him even wealthier. Western Union put him on its board of directors, apparently preferring to cooperate rather than compete with him. But Moore didn’t stop there. He believed the way to bigger money was in banking, and he and Grant B. Schley established the banking and brokerage firm Moore and Schley.

Grant Schley

Moore was the money; Schley was the hustle. Moore would serve on more than 20 boards of directors for the largest corporations in America, and his firm served as private bank and stockbroker for many of the famous fortunes of the gilded age – Whitney, Morgan, Rockefeller, Havemeyer.

In 1893, he became a hero to the wealthy Wall Streeters when he sued the government charging that the newly enacted income tax was unconstitutional. He won, too, delaying implementation of an income tax until 1913. Timing, shrewdness, hard work and good fortune were his hallmarks.

The Sugar Trust

His luck would hold again when his firm narrowly avoided being swept up in the Sugar Trust scandal of 1894. Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich was at the heart of that scandal. Aldrich accepted payoffs for years from wealthy Wall Street bankers who wanted a friend in the Senate.

Aldrich very publicly intervened for sugar importers in setting tariffs to benefit their industry, and he turned the floor of the Senate into a circus with his parliamentary maneuvering on their behalf. The spectacle raised eyebrows, but there was probably nothing corrupt about it initially. He was truly arguing his position.

Elverton Chapman

By 1890, however, Aldrich needed money. His Senate salary was not providing an adequate income, and he began spreading the word about his plan to retire from politics so he could earn more. His industry friends’ blood ran cold at the thought of a future without Aldrich to represent them. So they stepped up with a straight-ahead bribe – an offer of more than $1 million – and more to come – so he could buy and improve the Union Railway Company. The investment Aldrich made in the railway made him a millionaire.

The manipulation of the sugar tariffs began to stink too much, however. President Taft allowed the tariff bill to become law, but he would not sign it because he didn’t want his signature on it.

The cry went out for an investigation, and senators convened an inquiry. Moore and Schley’s broker, Elverton Chapman, was called to testify. The senators wanted to know if other senators ever traded on insider information about the tariffs and other pending regulations. They also wanted to know whether Moore and Schley was the conduit for potential payoffs

Chapman stood up under fire. He refused to testify. The standoff continued until the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that Chapman had to talk before the Senate or go to jail. Chapman still refused, and he went to prison. Aldrich went on serving in the Senate until 1911.

Far From the Wolf

And John Godfrey Moore continued making money. In Maine, Moore had begun buying land in Winter Harbor. He enjoyed, he said, the horse-trading that went into assembling his 2,000-plus acre estate on the Schoodic Peninsula. He named his house (which was foreclosed and taken by a bank in 2014), “Far From the Wolf,” a reference to its comfortable distance from Wall Street.

Moore planned a luxury hotel, grand houses and a fine summer resort to match Bar Harbor. Best of all, he said, he could see his hometown of Steuben from the highest points on the land. Moore made as many waves in Maine as he did elsewhere, participating in a contentious fight to separate Winter Harbor from Gouldsboro to lower his and his neighbors’ property taxes.

Who knows what Moore might have made of his property if illness hadn’t intervened? At age 51, in 1899, he died. Moore’s second wife Louise and daughters Ruth and Faith did not share his aspirations for Winter Harbor, and their visits to the area became less frequent. His daughter married a British nobleman, and both Ruth and Faith moved to England.

George Dorr

His wife remarried, and keeping up with the taxes on the Schoodic land became a drain on the family finances. In 1922, more than 20 years after his death, Moore’s widow spoke with George Dorr about whether he might like to add the Moore property on Schoodic to the property on Mount Desert already set aside as a national park.

Acadia National Park (Jordan Pond and the Bubbles)

Dorr jumped at the opportunity. First they discussed adding only Louise’s share of the land, but soon they realized his daughters, too, were not eager to keep the property and might be willing to give it up as a permanent memorial to John Godfrey.

Before the deal could be realized, Louise died. But negotiations continued fitfully until just one minor hurdle remained – the name. Moore’s daughters were anglophiles, but Mount Desert has a deep French history. In creating Acadia as a park, it was first named Sieur de Monts National Monument for the French colonial governor who had overseen the area beginning in 1603.

Even after the American Revolution, the state legislature had seen fit to honor French land grants in Mount Desert, in part to recognize French support during the war. Sieur de Monts National Monument seemed a fitting name in 1916 when President Wilson commissioned it. In 1919, when he officially declared the land the first National Park east of the Mississippi, it was renamed Lafayette National Park for the French general who aided the American Revolution.

Such an honor for a French hero the Moores could not be a party to. And so Dorr, long accustomed to catering to the egos and peccadillos of the wealthy landowners that he needed to make his dream of Acadia come true, set a plan in motion.

Naming Acadia

He reached back to the name Acadia, a reference to the Greek region of Arcadia that early explorers from the 1500s, such as Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano, applied to the America. He told Ruth and Faith that he always thought it a very fitting name for the park, that it reflected the heritage of the region. With their blessing, be persuaded the government to change the name in order to clear the way for the gift of land, which was added to the new Acadia National Park in 1929.

The Schoodic slice of the park, roughly five percent of its total, isn’t the only charitable legacy left by the Moores. John’s cousin Henry provided funding for the Henry D. Moore Parish House and Library, which still serves Steuben today. And Ruth and her husband spent part of her fortune restoring an English country estate, Chequers, which they gave to the government of Britain. It is used to this day as the Prime Minister’s retreat and country house.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image of Jordan Pond and the Bubbles: By Plh1234us – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6837274.

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