The Dane Trail and Wildwood Stables

On the northwest side of Day Mountain in Acadia National Park is an old trail to the 583-foot summit. First appearing, unnamed, on a 1901 path map, it was later referred to as the Dane Trail. Over a hundred years later it is again nameless and nearly forgotten.

This unmaintained trail, which the Park listed as abandoned in 1999, starts on the Day Mountain carriage road 1/4 mile southwest of the Triad-Day Mountain Bridge over the Park Loop Road.*1  It is marked by a wooden sign attached to a tree that says "Day Mtn." Partially concealed steps are below it at the carriage road's edge.



Dane Trail - carriage road entrance

 

The summit end of the trail is unmarked. The .23-mile trail is a moderate climb guided by small cairns. In places it is blocked by fallen trees and branches; otherwise, the trail is useable if the hiker exercises care. Once at the summit the hiker can descend via the carriage road or the Park-maintained Day Mountain Trail to loop back.



Helen and Ernest Dane
Ancestry.com

The Dane Trail likely came by its name from the Dane property over which it crossed. It was not uncommon for hikers to attribute trail names to properties' owners. By 1911 Ernest Dane and his wife, Helen, had bought property, which they called Wildwood Farm, and were constructing buildings on it. Wildwood Stables now occupies the site.

The name "Wildwood Farm" was not unique to the Danes; it referred back to "Wildwood ranch," a farm run by W. E. Hadlock at the same location from at least 1887.*2  Intermediate owners also called the property "Wildwood."

Ernest Dane was a Brookline, MA, financier, philanthropist and Harvard graduate. In 1909 he bought Glengariff, the Seal Harbor waterfront estate of George Cooksey.*3  He promptly tore it down and replaced it in 1910, still retaining the Glengariff name.

Dane home Glengariff
Seal Harbor Library

A prominent yachtsman, Dane added a wharf to accommodate his boats, which later included the 240-foot diesel-powered, steel yacht Vanda built for him in 1928 at Maine's Bath Iron Works at a cost of $750,000.*4  Like fellow yachtsman J.P. Morgan (February's post), he was a member of the prestigious New York Yacht Club.

The Dane Trail did not originally begin at the carriage road. Rather, it started from an east-west road, built about 1889, known as the Wildwood Farm Road. This connector road provided access to the scenic Bubble Pond and Jordan Pond on the northeast and west sides of Pemetic Mountain. At the Wildwood Farm Road the trail joined trails north to The Triads, three 600-700' peaks abutting the north side of the farm, and trails south toward Seal Harbor. From the Day Mountain summit the trail descended south to the county road (Route 3) with access to the Caves and Tilting Rock, two popular hiking destinations, and continued to Sea Cliff Drive (Cooksey Dr.) at the coast.


Signpost - 1994
David Goodrich

 

A 1972 path map introduced a different trail descending from the north side of Day Mountain's summit. This is the north section of the present Day Mountain Trail and connects directly to the Triad-Day Mountain Bridge. The 1972 map also suggested the formal demise of the Dane Trail by its notable exclusion; subsequent maps also do not show it. Yet, in 1994 a post with a wooden sign stating "Wildwood Farm" and "Dane Trail" was still at the summit entrance to the erstwhile Dane Trail. By 1999 the sign had disappeared from the post and by 2011 the post itself had vanished.*5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wildwood Farm - unknown date
Seal Harbor Library

Postscript: In 1948 Helen Dane, a widow from the death of Ernest in 1942, donated Wildwood Farm to the U.S. Government. The structures, save the barn, were demolished by the Park in 1958. The barn is still a prominent feature of Wildwood Stables. In December 1983, via a land swap between David and Margaret (Peggy) Rockefeller and the U.S. Government, Day Mountain became a part of Acadia NP.

 

Wildwood Stables - 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Footnotes:

1  GPS coordinates of Dane Trail carriage road entrance: N44° 18.740'  W068° 14.122'

2  William Edwin Hadlock was a Lieutenant Colonel with the 28th Maine Infantry Regiment during the Civil War and an entrepreneurial and prosperous resident of Islesford on nearby Little Cranberry Island.

3  Cooksey, an 1873 English immigrant to New York City where he made his fortune in the grain market, bought and developed tracts of land around Seal Harbor. He built Glengariff in 1891-92 and Sea Cliff Drive in1895, later renamed Cooksey Drive. Due to his wife's ill health, he moved his family to California in 1900 into a new home at Stanford University. His memorial plaque is on Cooksey Drive at N44° 17.462'  W068° 14.099'.

4  Among other yachts built by the Bath Iron Works was J. P. Morgan, Jr.’s 343-foot Corsair IV in 1930.

5  Special thanks to David Goodrich, who provided the 1994-2011 status of the Dane Trail summit signpost.

Great Head, Sand Beach and J. P. Morgan

Four miles south of the village green in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island, ME, lie Great Head and Sand Beach, two magnificent gems of Acadia National Park. It is still being told and written they were a wedding gift of John Pierpont Morgan to his daughter, Louisa. Alas, that is not the case; but he did buy it for her.

Great Head is a massive granite prominence, which at 144 feet in elevation, stands as the highest cliff on America's Atlantic coast. On its west side, at the head of Newport Cove, is Sand Beach, a 1000 foot-wide shoreline of generally finely pulverized shells. Together they constitute one of the country's most beautiful seashore spots.



Great Head and Sand Beach as seen from The Beehive
















Morgan and MDI: The earliest J. P. Morgan would have been in Maine was likely in 1854, when he and his cousin tried to complete a trip through New England. They ran low on funds in New Hampshire and had to make their way to Portland, ME, where they caught a steamer to Boston. Morgan married Frances ("Fanny") Tracy in 1865.*1  It has been written they honeymooned in Bar Harbor, but that too is not the case. They honeymooned abroad; it was her first trip to Europe. Morgan did vacation in Maine in 1875, when he and Fanny visited Bar Harbor and stayed at the newly extended Rodick hotel, then Bar Harbor's largest. During this trip Fanny showed him Great Head and Sand Beach, places she loved and had first visited in 1855 with her father, Charles Tracy. Tracy recorded this trip in his diary.*2


J.P. Morgan - 1881

Frances Morgan - 1902

Morgan made later trips to MDI. He enjoyed steaming from New York to Bar Harbor aboard his yacht, Corsair, and would take her around to Northeast Harbor to attend church services and listen to his friend, Bishop William Doane, preach. In 1897, as the 16th commodore of the New York Yacht Club, Morgan organized the first-ever cup event from NYC to Bar Harbor. The 185-mile race, starting at Vineyard Haven on Martha's Vineyard and ending at a buoy off Baker Island Light, consisted of 16 schooners and 6 sloops.*3  Twenty-three steam yachts, including Morgan's 241-foot Corsair II, witnessed it.*4

The wedding gift: Morgan's daughter, Louisa, married Herbert Satterlee in 1900 at St. George's Church in Manhattan. A capacity crowd of 1,500 guests attended and 2500 were invited to the following reception at Morgan's Manhattan home. His wedding gift to Louisa was a diamond tiara and necklace.

In 1908 Morgan asked his business associate, Thomas Joyce, to buy Great Head and Sand Beach. Joyce completed the purchase for $50,000 in June 1910, following legal settlement of one of Maine's biggest land title cases between the owners' heirs and the trustees of the Bingham estate. Land titles on the island extended back to the original Bingham owners and the dispute concerned how this title had been recorded. Two months later Joyce conveyed the property to Louisa. In his Morgan-authorized biography, Herbert Satterlee states, "He [Morgan] loved the place and was very much pleased that he had at last been able to get it."*5

The donation: Louisa died in 1946 and left her estate to Herbert. He took his own life the next year and his estate went into trust. Three months after his death, the devastating MDI Fire of 1947 swept over Great Head and Sand Beach, destroying most of the Satterlee homestead and scarring the landscape. Daughter Eleanor purchased the property from the executors of her father's will for $22,000 in March 1949. Two months later she donated it to the United States of America for Acadia National Park. There is a memorial on the west side of Sand Beach at the top of the steps to the beach.*6  It explains:

SATTERLEE FIELD

SATTERLEE FIELD OF APPROXIMATELY

100 ACRES WAS DONATED IN 1949 BY

ELEANOR MORGAN SATTERLEE

TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

IN MEMORY OF HER MOTHER,

LOUISA P. SATTERLEE,

AS PART OF

ACADIA NATIONAL PARK

 

*Footnotes:

1  Frances was Morgan's second wife. In 1861 he had married Amelia Sturges, who was ill with tuberculosis. She died the next year.
2  The Tracy Log Book - a Month in Summer, (ed. by Anne Mazlish). Bar Harbor, ME: Acadia Publishing Co., 1997.
3  The History of the New York Yacht Club, (pub. by the NYYC). 1975.
4  Bar Harbor Record, August 11, 1897.
5  Herbert L. Satterlee, J. Pierpont Morgan, an Intimate Portrait. New York: The MacMillan Co., 1939, p. 523. Photos of J. Pierpont and Frances are from this book.
6  Satterlee memorial GPS coordinates: N44° 19.765'  W068° 11.028'