Cadillac, Kinney and Fish Sticks 
On the Cadillac Mountain summit in Acadia National Park there is a kiosk at the start of the North Ridge Trail. On it is a small plaque which states simply: "This trail head sign was donated in honor of E. Robert Kinney by his children on the occasion of his 80th birthday."*1

Kinney plaque

Plaque location on Cadillac summit

E. (Earl) Robert Kinney was born in Burnham, ME on April 12, 1917 to Harry E. and Ethel V. Kinney and grew up in nearby Pittsfield.  He earned a scholarship to Bates College in Lewiston, ME and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1939 with a major in education and a minor in economics.  He went on to attend Harvard University, but left for Bar Harbor, ME to pursue an intriguing interest.

E. Robert Kinney*

An entrepreneur in spirit, he noticed that lobstermen were tossing away the crabs they caught in their traps and saw an opportunity. With a $300 loan from a Bangor, ME bank he began buying the crabs for a penny apiece and canning the crab meat. He conducted his canning business in Bangor, where he established the North Atlantic Packing Company. In 1943 he relocated the company to West Street in Bar Harbor in the Nickerson, Spratt and Greeley Grain Company building he had purchased. There he employed 18 women to can mussels. By 1945 the company's products had expanded to clams, flaked cod and haddock, chowder mix, blueberry jam and sweet orange marmalade. That year the company received a contract from the U.S. Army for 1.5 million pounds of canned orange marmalade. It completed the contract in less than five months by producing 25 tons daily, using 75 employees in two shifts to process navel oranges shipped from California. The marmalade was delivered in 8-lb. camouflaged tins.*2  Fire destroyed the three-storey building in 1950, but Kinney rebuilt. The company ultimately employed 300 and grossed $2 million annually.

In 1953, after selling the business, he joined the Gorton's of Gloucester seafood company and became its president in 1958. While at Gorton's he extended its seafood line into frozen fish sticks, which became a very popular meal in American homes.  Here's a 1982 Gorton's fish sticks commercial:

In 1968 General Mills Inc. bought Gorton's and brought Kinney on board at its headquarters in Minneapolis, MN. In 1973 he became the company's president and four years later its CEO. He retired in 1982.

Kinney became a resident of downtown Bar Harbor in the 1940s about the time he started the North Atlantic Packing Co. there. Later he resided in Hulls Cove, a Bar Harbor village.

A keen businessman, Kinney was also a philanthropist and corporate advisor. In 1973 he conveyed to the College of the Atlantic the Bar Harbor land and buildings it had occupied since its founding four years earlier.*3 He was associated with Bar Harbor's Friends of Acadia, an independent support organization to Acadia National Park; a director at the Jackson Laboratory, a mammalian genetics research institution in Bar Harbor; a trustee of the Maine Sea Coast Mission in Bar Harbor, an organization that provides spiritual, health and youth development programs in Maine coastal communities; and a trustee of the Wendell Gilley Museum, a community center in nearby Southwest Harbor that celebrates the life and work of a pioneer in the field of decorative bird carving.*4  He was a member of the prestigious Pot and Kettle Club in Hulls Cove as well. In 2008 Bates College awarded Kinney, a trustee for 27 years, its highest honor, the Benjamin Elijah Mays Medal, for his distinguished service to the college and the community.

E. Robert Kinney died in Arizona on May 2, 2013 at the age of 96.

Note: I wish to thank Nina Gormley and Anna Ryan for their contributions to this article.

*Kinney photo courtesy of Bates College.

* Footnotes:

1 GPS coordinates of Cadillac summit plaque: N44° 21.185'  W068° 13.514'

2 Bar Harbor Times, July 12, 1945, pp. 1 and 8.

3 Hancock County, Maine, Registry of Deeds: Book 1175/Page 480 et al.

4 Here's a tribute to Mr. Kinney by David Shaw, Chairman Emeritus of the Jackson Laboratory’s Board of Governing Trustees and Corporation.

Rudolph Brunnow and the Myths about Him

Rudolph E. Brunnow

Appointed by the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association in 1913 as chairman of its path committee, a position he held until his death, Rudolph Brunnow built Acadia National Park's signature hiking trail, the Precipice Trail, on the east face of Champlain Mountain, as well as the challenging Orange and Black Path and the exciting Beehive Trail.*1

On the Precipice Trail

Despite Brunnow's achievements that have drawn hikers to the Park from far and wide, local storytellers appear determined to tell visitors three myths about the man, i.e., he was a German, he built his oceanfront home for his fiancé who perished on the Titanic, and he died from an accident on the Precipice. None is true.

Rudolph Ernest Brunnow (1859-1917) was born in Ann Arbor, MI, the only child of a German father and American mother. His father, Franz Friedrich Ernst Brunnow (1821-1891), left Berlin to become a professor of astronomy and the director of the observatory at the University of Michigan in 1854 and in 1857 married Rebecca Lloyd Tappan (1836-1893), the daughter of the president of the University of Michigan.

Educated in Europe, Rudolph taught at the University of Heidelberg between 1889 and 1904. In 1894 he married Marguerite Beckwith (1872-1907) in Lenox, MA and they went to live in Europe. After her death in Bonn, Germany, in 1907 he was left with five young children. He moved back to the United States to have his children educated as Americans and accepted a position at Princeton University, becoming a full professor of Semitic philology in 1908.

First summering in Bar Harbor with his children in 1909, he bought property along Schooner Head Road in 1910 and the next year started construction of the cottage he named Meadow Brook after the stream that flows nearby. He occupied it in 1914, having stayed at nearby Hare Forest cottage off Schooner Head Road between 1912 and July 1914 apparently to oversee its construction. His cottage, renamed High Seas by a subsequent owner, survived the fire of 1947 and is now owned by the Jackson Laboratory.

Meadow Brook

A Bar Harbor newspaper's obituary of Brunnow is the apparent origin of the fiancé myth and the German-by-birth claim. It stated he had a fiancé for whom he had built Meadow Brook and who had perished on the Titanic in 1912.*2  There is no evidence to corroborate the newspaper's fiancé claim. It is interesting to note the reported birth in Germany was apologetically corrected the next week by the newspaper to reflect his birth in Ann Arbor and U.S. citizenry.*3  It did not mention its fiancé claim.

Brunnow died of pneumonia in Bar Harbor on April 14, 1917. His children went to live with his mother-in-law, Margaretta F. Beckwith, in Philipstown, NY. He is buried in Princeton Cemetery in Princeton, NJ, next to his oldest son, Eric, who had died the year before from infantile paralysis while a freshman at Princeton.

Brunnow's grave

Brunnow's death was not the result of an accident on the Precipice. His brother-in-law, Edward P. Beckwith, however, had a serious accident on Champlain Mountain on October 28, 1916 while exploring for a new trail off the Orange and Black Path with Brunnow and three of Brunnow's children. Rocks gave way and Beckwith fell 20 feet. After a 4-hour rescue he was taken to the Bar Harbor hospital where it was determined he had injured his hip.*4  This is likely the accident our storytellers have confused in their tale of Brunnow's death.

Brunnow shines brightly in the trails history of Acadia NP. It serves no good purpose to perpetuate these myths.

* Footnotes:

1 Bar Harbor Record, April 9, 1913, p.5.

2 Bar Harbor Times, April 21, 1917, p.1.

3 Bar Harbor Times, April 28, 1917, p.3.

4 Bar Harbor Record, November 4, 1916, p.1.

The Dole Trail 

The Dole Trail was an historic trail in Southwest Harbor on Maine's Mount Desert Island. It provided seaborne access to hiking destinations on the west side of MDI, including Fernald Point, which was the site of the 1613 European settlement by French Jesuit missionaries, Flying Mountain, Beech Mountain, Echo Lake and Long Pond.*1

1916 map (green arrow shows Dole Trail)

When the old trail was built or by whom is not known. It was first mentioned as the Dole Trail in the 1915 A Path Guide of Mount Desert Island, Maine, with its start at Dole Landing on Connor Cove and end at Somesville Road opposite Beech Hill Road.*2 The earliest map to show the 0.8 mile Dole Trail was the 1916 Map Of Mount Desert Island, compiled by Bates, Rand and Jacques.*3 On the 1926 Path Map of the Western Part of Mount Desert Island, the starting point in Connor Cove was specified as the "Dole Slip." The map also showed it linking to a path heading west along the Connor Cove shoreline to the mouth of Norwood Cove at the Southwest Harbor causeway, where it then turned north to Fernald Point Road. The 1928 Walks on Mount Desert Island, Maine, also spoke of the Dole Trail and mentioned the Dole Slip.*4 Possibly the last map to depict the trail was the 1942 U.S. Geological Survey Topographic Map of Acadia National Park and Vicinity. It showed the trail originating at Fernald Point Road, rather than at Connor Cove, and omitted the Connor Cove trail heading west from the Dole Trail to Norwood Cove.

1942 topo map

Charles F. Dole

The names Dole Trail and Dole Landing/Slip derive from the name of the owner of the property, Charles Fletcher Dole. Born in Brewer, ME in 1845 to Rev. Nathan and Caroline (Fletcher) Dole, he graduated second highest in his class from Harvard in 1868. Afterwards he entered the Andover Theological Seminary, graduating in 1872. For a short while he was a professor of Greek at the University of Vermont. In 1873 he married Frances Drummond. For 40 years, between 1876 and 1916, he was the minister of the First Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood. The 5' 11", hazel-eyed Dole was a prominent author of religious and sociological themes and a pacifist.

In his autobiography Dole recounted his first visit to MDI: "In 1876 we went to Bar Harbor. Those were the days when you made your own trails and climbed over the mountains wherever you wished; you lived the simpler life; you hired a rowboat by the week and took your chances with the winds and the fog in visiting miles of beautiful wooded shores and picturesque islands."*5  Two of the earliest summer residents of Southwest Harbor, he and Frances bought land in 1884 and built The Ledge, their summer home on Fernald Point Road. He described the site as being near a location, "where now the 'rusticators' come in troops to see splendid sunsets, and to look over the "Jesuits' Field" on the old Fernald farm, with its springs of ice-cold water under the shore, each submerged twice a day with the salt tides and presently pure as crystal again."*6

Dole died in Jamaica Plain in 1927 and was cremated at Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston. His ashes are presumed to have been scattered near The Ledge.

Concerning the eponymous trail, Dole posted a notice in 1903 on a barrier across it informing his neighbors their occasional use was at their own risk and constituted no claim to any lawful or permanent right of way over his land.*7 The Dole Trail still exists, but it lies mostly on private property, as also do remnants of the Dole home and slip. Out of respect for the landowners' privacy I have omitted my usual GPS coordinates.

Dole house foundation and ledge

Dole Slip

It is interesting to note the Doles' son, James, moved to the Territory of Hawaii in 1899, a year after its annexation to the U.S. He established the pineapple industry there and a business later named the Dole Pineapple Company. Charles Dole's cousin, Sanford Dole, was the Hawaiian Territory's first governor.

*Footnotes:

1 For more on the historic European settlement please see previous blog posts dated 9/27/2012, 6/8/2013, 10/22/2014, and 1/26/2015.

2 A Path Guide of Mount Desert Island, Maine. Waldron Bates, Edward Rand and Herbert Jacques. 1915. Pp. 37, 40 and 42.

3 The number 10 on this map indicated the Dole Trail, as enumerated in the 1915 Path Guide.

4 Walks on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Harold Peabody and Charles H. Grandgent. 1928. Pp. 89 and 90.

5 My Eighty Years. Charles F. Dole. E.P. Dutton & Co., NY. 1927. P. 284.

6 Ibid., p. 290.

7 Hancock County Registry of Deeds, book 398/page 249.

The Civilian Conservation Corps

At Acadia National Park headquarters off Eagle Lake Road on Mount Desert Island, ME, in front of its visitor center is a small plaque on a rock that states:

CCC memorial-Acadia NP

This plaque was dedicated by Chapter 111 Alumni by former members of the Civilian Conservation Corps in memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the members, who served at this post and other C.C.C. camps in Maine and throughout the United States between the years of 1933 to 1942. Dedicated September 12, 1992

The CCC was established in 1933 by President Roosevelt to provide jobs to unemployed and poverty-stricken men aged 18 to 25 (later changed to 17 to 28) and to conserve the country's natural resources. Almost immediately some 275,000 young men were put to work in forests, parks and public lands across the United States. They were paid $30 monthly for their five-day workweeks during their six-month tours. Of that, $15 was sent home to their dependents, $7 was put into their CCC savings account, and they were paid $8 in cash. They could re-enroll for a maximum term of two years. Promotions and higher pay were possible. They lived in U.S. Army-run camps supervised by the U.S. Forest and National Park Services. Reveille was at 6:00 am and taps at 10:15 pm Monday through Friday for their work projects. Saturday morning was for work in their camps. Leisure occurred on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, when they could, with permission, go home or visit nearby communities. Voluntary religious services were held on Sunday at the camps, but enrollees could attend them in their local communities.

George B. Dorr, Acadia NP’s superintendent, saw the usefulness of the CCC and succeeded in getting its help. Three camps were established in the Park. One was the Eagle Lake Camp, 154th Company, located in Bar Harbor at the current site of Park headquarters. The second was the Great Pond Camp, 158th Company, located in Southwest Harbor near Long Pond (formerly Great Pond). The third was formed from a CCC camp in nearby Ellsworth and set up on the Schoodic Peninsula north of the U.S. Navy’s radio station (now Acadia NP’s Schoodic Education and Research Center). These camp workers completed hundreds of park projects, including helping to construct roads and bridges, clearing brush and fallen trees and planting new shrubs and trees, as well as building the Blackwoods and Seawall campgrounds. They also constructed and repaired trails, among them the Ladder and Perpendicular Trails and the Ocean Path on Mount Desert Island, and the Anvil and Schoodic Head Trails on the Schoodic Peninsula. The two main camps were among the country’s 100 camps that lasted the nine-year duration of the CCC program. The Schoodic Peninsula camp ran from 1934 to 1937.

The demands of WW II brought an end to the CCC in 1942. Over three million individuals across the country had served in the program.

CCC memorial-Oconee SP

 Recently I came across a CCC memorial in Oconee State Park in western South Carolina.*1 It states:

"The promptness with which you seized the opportunity to engage in honest work, the willingness with which you have performed your daily tasks, and the fine spirit you have shown in winning the respect of the communities in which your camps have been located merit the admiration of the entire country. You, and the men who have guided and supervised your efforts, have cause to be proud." President Franklin D. Roosevelt

This monument is dedicated to the honor and memory of over three million members who served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942. And to the members who built South Carolina's State Park System -- Oconee State Park -- Dedicated September 2001

In fact, the CCC built 16 state parks in South Carolina, Oconee SP among them. Twenty-six miles northeast of this memorial in Table Rock State Park is the CCC-built lodge overlooking Pinnacle Lake at the base of 3,157' Table Rock Mountain.*2 Eight miles north is the CCC-constructed Walhalla trout hatchery.*3 Fourteen miles west of the Oconee SP memorial, in the Chattahoochee National Forest of Georgia, is a CCC fish rearing pool.*4 A sign reads: The Civilian Conservation Corps built the trout rearing facility at this site. The tanks held fish to restock trout in local streams which was accomplished by hauling the fish in backpacks.

 

Lodge-Table Rock SP

Walhalla hatchery

Fish pool-Chattahoochee NF

Fish pool-Acadia NP

Fish rearing pools were among CCC undertakings in Acadia NP as well.  The remnants of one can be found at the south end of Long Pond on Cold Brook.*5 It is unmarked and about 200 feet south of the Cold Brook Trail. Just outside the Park boundary, it likely was on the site of the former CCC camp in Southwest Harbor.

It is interesting to note there is an identical CCC memorial to the one pictured in Oconee SP on the state capitol grounds in Augusta, Maine. It was dedicated on April 24, 2001. So far, 62 of these CCC memorial worker statues have been dedicated across the country.*6

The CCC was a remarkable program. Its men and achievements merit our remembrance.

*Footnotes:

1 Oconee SP CCC memorial coordinates: N34° 51' 55.632"  W083° 06' 19.110"

2 CCC-built lodge, Table Rock SP coordinates: N35° 01' 39.839"  W082° 41' 44.340"

3 Walhalla trout hatchery coordinates: N34° 59' 09.827"  W083° 04' 19.036"

4 Fish rearing pool, Chattahoochee NF coordinates: N34° 52' 57.599"  W083° 21' 02.967"

5 Fish rearing pool, Acadia NP coordinates: N44° 17' 56.700"  W068° 21' 02.637"

6 For information about them see http://ccclegacy.org/ccc_worker_statue_program.html