EAGLE LAKE WATER SAVES BAR HARBOR

Bar Harbor Times
October 30, 1915


HOW WATER WAS BROUGHT TO TOWN

Edwin Deslsle Tells of Tapping Lake

Led Through Ditches

Triangle, Plumb And Level Only Instruments For Determining Grade - Plan Saved The Town

How the system of water supple from Eagle Lake was first installed in Bar Harbor and how the water was run through ditches and flumes instead of pipes is all interestingly told by the man with whom the idea originated - Edwin G. Des lsle, former proprietor of the Atlantic House, now the Louisburg, later of the Hotel Des Isle and also Postmaster.  Mr. and Mrs. Des Isle are now here in town after spending the summer at their cottage at Lamoine and are visiting their son, Leslie, until next Monday when they will go to Arlington, Mass., for the winter with their daughter, Mrs. A. Bird Cough.  Mr. Des Isle, who will celebrate his 78th birthday this Sunday, Oct. 31, is still active, in good health, eats well, sleeps well, but complains of having nothing to do.  He impressed upon the Times that he did not want to appear in the foreground of what the seribl might say in relating to his little story which he was prevailed upon to tell.
It was in the winter of 1874 that work was begun to put in a water system.  Typhoid had afflicted the resort the preceding summer and Mr. Des Isle realized that something must be done to save the place.  At that time water was hauled in hogsheads from Squaw Hollow Brook but Mr. Des Isle conceived of a better way.
He had had some experience in fuming as a miner in California and he believed he could conduct the water into town from Eagle lake.  Accordingly he invested (rest of sentence unreadable).  Mr. Des Isle than put the proportion up to Fountain Rodrick who agreed to go halves with Mr. Des Isle in taking up the balance of the stock - some 80 shares - and Mr. Des Isle gave him credit for being the only man who would do it.  With the company organized, a charter was secured from the state legislature.
Than came the actual work of leading the water into town.  Mr. Des Isle and Fountain Rodrick went out to New Mills Meadow and from a tree which they climbed mapped out the course and sat down under the tree to figure it all out,  Mr. Rodick being convinced that Mr. Des Isle's plan would work.  Mr. Des Isle then went to Ellsworth and from a Mr. Grant obtained on credit the lumber needed to flume the water where ditches were impossible.  It is interesting to hear Mr. Des Isle relate how they laid their grade with a with a fall of half an inch to ten feet by the use of a triangle, plumb and level, the only instruments used.  In this manner the water from the lake was run to a wooden reservoir on Scott's Hill.  With this part of the work completed, the rest was easy,  Mr. Des Isle than went to Portland where he secured from the superintendent of the Portland Water Company enough six inch pipe to finish the main desired to conduct the water from the reservoir to the village.  The hotels were all connected and some few houses, but Mr. Des Isles said that there was not enough to pay and that in 1876 he sold out his shares to Mr. Rodick.  He said he had lost money by the deal, but felt that something had to be done to save the place.  He also told of how at the outset he and Mr. Rodick built a dam between Bubble Pond and Eagle lake so as to be able to keep up the supply in case the lake should shrink so much as to make it impossible to get water from it to the reservoir through the channel constructed and of finding an old beach near the lake.
Mr. Rodick retained his interest until about 1888, when he was succeeded by the Bar Harbor Water Company which secured a new charter from the legislature.  This was the only way Bar Harbor first secured the water supply for which it is now famous.

FLUME CROSSING DUCK BROOK

I copied this following story from one of the newspapers and do not have the date it was written.


Prior to the year 1887, there were not any summer cottages at East Eden, and as very many of the older residents of Bar Harbor can tell us, the little cottage erected by Mr. J. C. Doane of Boston at Uncle Stephen Higgins Point, now known as Hardy's Point, for Mr. Alpheus Hardy of that city, was the first venture of our summer visitors in that direction.  Up to that year, and for several years afterward, there was no water supply, other than the water taken from wells, for drinking purposes, and also that taken from "New Bridge" Brook, dipped up into scuttle butt hogsheads, and carted to the several summer hotels, to be used for laundry purposes.  There were not any bath rooms or other conveniences for bathing in any of the hotels of that day.
Many of the school children of that period were employed by the summer tourists, to bring salt water in bucket, from the ocean to the hotels for bathings and the writer well remembers rigging up a sort of a yoke to fit across the shoulders, with a bucket suspected at each end, to make it easy to climb the ledges at the "lower shore".  When the wells got low in the mid-summer drought, water would be conveyed in glass and stone jugs, for drinking purposes, from the boiling spring at the lower end of the big meadow, owned in those days by Mr. Tobias Roberts, and we small boys were cautioned over and over, not to go too near this sparkling little hole, as the ground about it was very slumpy, and that there was not any bottom in the spring.  The Sieur de Monts Spring was hardly known at that time, but was on woodland owned at that time by my father, and indeed, I have taken lunch many times on the brink of that beautiful  supply of water, while chopping wood there in winter.
In the summer of 1872, about the first of August, a bit of sickness started at one of the larger hotels, among the summer guests, and it was immediately pronounced as typhoid fever, by a young summer doctor stopping at that hostelry, and he also attributed it's cause to the drinking of impure water from the very low water supply in the several wells about the little village.  I never heard that many suffering from this trifling epidemic, and surely not any deaths occurred, but every hotel and boarding house in Bar Harbor (P.O. address had been changed from East Eden to Bar Harbor about that time), was vacated on that mid-summer day, and it was the consensus of opinion among the inhabitants, that Bar Harbor as a summer resort, was doomed to failure, in the years to come, unless water could be made to flow into it from Eagle Lake (than known as Great Pond), Newport Pond or some other source.
Several meetings of the village property owners were held, and as it would cost so very much to run pipes to any available water supply, that it seemed to be utterly impossible to do this, as after the summer people had deserted the town, as before described, the real estate of the whole village would sell for hardly enough to purchase even the pipe of sufficient size.  What was to be done?  Something had to be done that fall and winter of 1872-73 and quickly enough to advertise such an important addition to the many natural attractions of Mt. Desert Island, before the following season.  The credit of this important event and its great success as it proved in the future years, was the most important event in the annals of the town, and was financed quite wholly by D. Rodick and sons, with Edwin G. Des Isle as an amateur engineer.  Mr. Des Isle, a local merchant, had spent several years on the Pacific Coast, mining, and had seen water supplies conducted long distances in wooden flumes, and being an excellent and persevering mechanic, he proved to be the all around man for the work.
An open spruce wood flume was started at a convenient place near Eagle lake.  The bottom of said flume was of board eight inches wide by one inch thick,  cotton wicking was trailed along either edge and the two side boards where than nailed on securely;  the sides were boards in the rough, six inches wide by one inch thick.  As I remember it, after surveying the route, measuring the distance to, and getting the elevation of this beautiful body of water, Mr. Fountain Rodick and Mr. Des Isle started their "box flume" at a convenient position near the lake, and giving it as near as possible an approximate grade of one inch to one foot, they succeeded in completing it that winter to the Eagle Lake Road near Central Avenue where it was carried under the surface of the street by the capon principle, and I am quite sure that not a single foot of iron or other metal piping was used in any of this work, until the water flowed in abundance into the new wooden reservoir on the summit of "School House Hill" that spring of 1873.
The new Bar Harbor Cornet Band, organized that spring, made its first appearance in public to celebrate the occasion of "water".  I would say that much of the distance from the lake to the reservoir, a distance of about two and one half miles, that where ever possible, and the grade permitting, the water was conducted out of the wooden flume into a trench dug into the soil, and than again into a wood conveyance, or perhaps a structure or (rest of sentence could not be read).

BAR HARBOR WATER COMPANY SAND FILTER SYSTEM
(SEE MY BLOG ON THE STONE TOWER)
Eagle Lake Road, Acadia National Park

THE   ITALIAN  ENCAMPMENT  AT  HOW'S  PARK

The Bar Harbor Record
Jan. 16, 1895

I visited the Italian encampment last week and found it quite a settlement.  These sons of sunny Italy are working like beavers on the line of the Bar Harbor Water System, and accomplishing a vast amount of work.  When I drove up to the encampment I was fortunate in finding Mr. Savage there, who took me into the camp and explained their method of living.
One big camp contains their bunks with accommodations for about 80.  The store room is at the end, in charge of an intelligent looking Italian who portions off the edibles to the others.  The room was redolent with the fumes of garlic.
Scattered about the big camp are dozens of smaller huts or wigwams built in all manner of styles.  In these different huts cliques get together and cook their rations over a fire built in the center, right on the ground.
It is a picturesque scene though not particularly attractive.
Accompanied by Mr. Savage, I walked the length of the trench from How's Park, where about twenty-five local laborers are at work, to duck Brook, and saw the Italians digging away all along the line.  Mr. Cusker, the contractor, was giving his personal attention to the work, which must be progressing to his satisfaction.