The Bar Harbor Cottage Era (Gilded Age)

By the late 1890s, more than 175 summer homes stood in Bar Harbor — though "homes" undersells it, and "cottages" undersells it further. The people who built them called the structures cottages either because the word seemed appropriately rustic against their winter residences, or because they imagined themselves arriving at something wilder. Either way, they called themselves "rusticators." Colonel William F. Holland of Savannah built both Graycote Cottage and Primrose Cottage on the avenue that still bears his name, both in 1878; Graycote is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Baron Hengelmuller — Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to the United States until the outbreak of World War I — summered at Castlemaine Cottage.