Nothing is more remarkable in the history of American summering than
the number of new resorts which are discovered and taken possession
of by "the city people" every year, the rapid increase in the means
of transportation both to the mountains and the sea, and the steady
encroachments of the cottager on the boarder in all the more
desirable resorts. The growth of the American watering-place,
indeed, now seems to be as much regulated by law as the growth of
asparagus or strawberries, and is almost as easy to foretell. The
place is usually first discovered by artists in search of sketches,
or by a family of small means in search of pure air, and milk fresh
from the cow, and liberty--not to say license--in the matter of
dress. Its development then begins by some neighboring farmer's
agreeing to take them to board--a thing he has never done before,
and does now unwillingly, and he is very uncertain what to charge
for it. But at a venture he fixes what seems to him an enormous
sum--say $5 to $7 a week for each adult. His ideas about food for
city people are, however, very vague. The only thing about their
tastes of which he feels certain is that what they seek in the
country is, above all things, change, and that they accordingly do
not desire what they get at home. Accordingly he furnishes them with
a complete set of novelties in the matter of food and drink,
forgetting, however, that they might have got them at home if they
pleased. The tea and coffee and bread differ from what they are used
to at home simply in being worse. He is, too, at the seaside, very
apt to put them on an exclusively fish diet, in the belief that it
is only people who live by the sea who get fish, and that city
people, weary of meat, must be longing for fish. The boarders, this
first summer, having persuaded him to take them, are of course too
modest to remonstrate, or even to hint, and go on to the end eating
what is set before them, and pretending to be thankful, and try to
keep up their failing strength by being a great deal in the open
air, and admiring the scenery. After they leave, he is apt to be
astonished by the amount of cash he finds himself possessed of,
probably more than he ever handled before at one time, except when
he mortgaged his farm, and comes to the conclusion that taking
summer boarders is an excellent thing, and worth cultivating.
In the next stage he seeks them, and perhaps is emboldened by the
advice of somebody to advertise the place, and try to get hold of
some editors or ministers whose names he can use as references, and
who will talk it up. He soon secures one or two of each, and they
then tell him that his house is frequented by intellectual or
"cultured" people; and he becomes more elated and more enterprising,
enlarges the dining-room, adds on a wing, relieves his wife of the
cooking by hiring a woman in the nearest town, and gives more
meat and stronger coffee, and, little by little, grows into a
hotel-keeper, with an office and a register. His neighbors, startled
by his success, follow his example, it may be only _longo
intervallo_, and soon the place becomes a regular "resort," with
girls and boys in white flannel, lawn-tennis (which succeeds
croquet), a livery-stable, stages, an ice-cream store with a
soda-water fountain, a new church, and with strange names taken out
of books for the neighboring hills and lanes and brooks.
This stage may last for years--in some places it has been known to
last thirty or forty without any change, beyond the opening of new
hotels--and it becomes marked by crowds of people, who go back every
year in the character of old boarders, get the best rooms, and are
on familiar terms of friendship with the proprietor and the older
waiter-girls.
But it may be brought to a close, and is now being brought to a
close in scores of American watering-places, by the appearance of
the cottager, who has become to the boarder what the red squirrel is
to the gray, a ruthless invader and exterminator. The first cottager
is almost always a boarder, so that there is no means of discovering
his approach and resisting his advances. In nine cases out of ten he
is a simple guest at the farm-house or the hotel, without any
discoverable airs or pretensions, on whom the scenery has made such
an impression that he quietly buys a lot with a fine view. The next
year he builds a cottage on it, and gradually, and it may be at
first imperceptibly, separates himself in feeling and in standards
from his fellow-boarders. The year after he is in the cottage, and
the mischief is done. The change has come. Caste has been
established, with all its attendant evils. The community, once so
simple and homogeneous, is now divided into two classes, one of
which looks down on the other. More cottages are built, with trim
lawns and private lawn-tennis grounds, with "shandy-gaff" and
"tennis-cup" concealed on tables in tents. Then the dog-cart
with the groom in buckskin and boots, the Irish red setter, the
saddle-horse with the banged tail, the phaeton with the two ponies,
the young men in knickerbockers carrying imported racquets, the
girls with the banged hair, the club, ostensibly for newspaper
reading, but really for secret gin-fizzes and soda-cocktails, make
their appearance, with numerous other monarchical excrescences. The
original farmer, whose pristine board was the beginning of all this,
has probably by this time sold enough land to the cottagers to
enable him to give up taking boarders and keeping a hotel, and is
able to stay in bed like a gentleman most of the winter,
and sit on a bench in his shirt-sleeves all summer.
Very soon the boarder, unable to put up with the growing haughtiness
of the cottager, and with exclusion from his entertainments,
withdraws silently and unobtrusively from the scenes he once enjoyed
so much, to seek out another unsophisticated farmer, and begin once
more, probably when well on in life, with hope and strength abated,
the heavy work of opening up another watering-place and developing
its resources. The silent suffering there is in this process, which
may be witnessed to-day in hundreds of the most beautiful spots in
America, probably none know but those who have gone through it. In
fact, the dislodgment along our coast and in our mountains of the
boarder by the cottager is to-day the great summer tragedy of
American life. Winter has tragedies of its own, which may be worse;
but summer has nothing like it, nothing which imposes such a strain
on character and so severely tests early training. The worst of
it--the pity of it, we might say--is that this is not the expulsion
of the inferior by the superior race, which is going on in so many
parts of the world, and which Darwin is teaching us to look upon
with equanimity. The boarder is often, if not generally, the
cottager's superior in culture, in acquirements, and in variety of
social experience. He does not board because he likes the food, but
simply because it enables him to live in the midst of beautiful
scenery. He eats the farmer's poor fare contentedly, because he
finds it is sufficient to maintain his sense of natural beauty and
the clearness of all his moral perceptions unimpaired, and to brace
his nerves for the great battle with evil which he has been carrying
on in the city, and to which he means to return after a fortnight or
a month or six weeks, as the case may be. We fear, in fact, that
very few indeed of our summer cottages contain half so much noble
endeavor and power of self-sacrifice as the boarding-houses they are
displacing.
The progress made by the cottager in driving the boarder away from
some of the most attractive places, both in the hills and on the
seaboard, is very steady. Among these Bar Harbor occupies a leading
position. It was, for fully fifteen years after its discovery,
frequented exclusively by a very high order of boarders, and
probably has been the scene of more plain living and high thinking
than any other summer spot on the seacoast. It was, in fact,
remarkable at one time for an almost unhealthy intellectual
stimulation through an exclusively fish diet. But the purity of the
air and the grandeur of the scenery brought a yearly increasing tide
of visitors from about 1860 onward. These visitors were, until about
five years ago, almost exclusively boarders, and the development of
the place as a summer resort was prodigious. The little houses of
the original half farmers, half fishermen, who welcomed, or rather
did not welcome, the first explorers, grew rapidly into little
boarding-houses, then into big boarding-houses, then into hotels
with registers. Then the hotels grew larger and larger, and the
callings of the steamer more frequent, until the place became famous
and crowded.
All this while, however, the hold of the boarder on it remained
unshaken. He was monarch of all he surveyed. No one on the island,
except the landlords, held his head higher. There was one
distinction between boarders, but it was not one to wound anybody's
self-love: some were "mealers," or persons eating in the hotel where
they lodged; and others were "haul-mealers," or persons who were
collected and brought to their food in wagons. But this
classification produced no heart-burning. The mealer loved and
respected the haul-mealer, or wished him in Jericho, and the
haul-mealer in like manner the mealer, on general grounds, like
other persons with whom he came in contact, without any reference to
his place of abode. All were covered by the grand old name of
boarder, and that was enough. A happier, easier, freer, and more
curiously dressed summer community than Bar Harbor in those early
days was not to be found on our coast.
We do not know exactly when the cottager first made his appearance
on those rugged shores, but it is certain that his approaches were
more insidious than they have ever been anywhere. He did not
proclaim himself all at once. The first cottages were very plain
structures, which he cunningly spoke of as "shanties," or "log
huts," in which he simply lodged, and went to the hotels or
neighboring farm-houses for his food in the simple and unpretending
character of a haul-mealer. For a good while, therefore, he excited
neither suspicion nor alarm, and the hotel-keepers welcomed him
heartily, and all went on smoothly. Gradually, however, he threw off
all disguise, bought land at high prices, and began unblushingly to
erect "marine villas" on it, with everything that the name implies.
He has now got possession of all the desirable sites from the Ovens
down to the Great Head, and has surrounded himself with all the
luxuries, just as at Newport. The consequence is, although the sea
and sky and the mountains and the rocks retain all their charm, the
boarder is no longer happy. He finds himself relegated to a
secondary position. He is abashed when on foot or in his humble
buckboard he meets the haughty cottager in his dog-cart or victoria.
He has neither dog nor horse, while the cottager has both. He was
once proud of staying at Rodick's or Lyman's; now he begins to be
ashamed of it. He finds that the cottagers, who are the permanent
residents, have a society of their own, in which he is either not
welcome or is a mere outsider. He finds that the very name of
boarder, which he once wore like a lily, has become a term of
inferiority. Worse than all, he finds himself confounded with a
still lower class, known at Bar Harbor as "the tourist"--elsewhere
called the excursionist--who comes by the hundred on the steamers in
linen dusters, and is compelled by force of circumstances to "do"
Mount Desert in twenty-four hours, and therefore enters on his task
without shame or scruple, roams over the cottager's lawn, stares
into his windows, breaks his fences, and sometimes asks him for a
free lunch. The boarder, of course, looks down on this man, but when
both are on the road or on the piazza of the hotel how are they to
be distinguished? They are not, and cannot be.
The worst of it all is, however, that the boarder finds that the
cottager has enclosed some of his favorite walks. He can no longer
get to them without trespassing or intruding. He can only look
wistfully from the dusty high-road at the spots on which he probably
once "rocked" with the girl who is now his wife, or chopped logic
with professional or clerical friends, whom "the growth of the
place" has long ago driven to fresh fields and pastures new. There
is something very interesting and touching about these old Mount
Deserters of the first period, between 1860 and 1870, who fled even
before the enlargement of the hotels, and to whom cottages at Bar
Harbor are almost unthinkable. One finds them in undeveloped summer
resorts in out-of-the-way places along the American coast, often on
the Alps or in Norway, or on the Scotch lakes, still tender, and
simple, and unassuming, and cheery, older of course and generally
stouter, but with the memories of the mountains, and the rocks, and
the islands, of the poor food, "which made no difference, because
the air was fine," still as fresh as ever, but without a particle of
bitterness. They wander much, but wander as they may they find no
summer resorts which can have for them the charm of Frenchman's Bay
or Newport Mountain, and no vehicle which touches so many chords in
their hearts as the primeval buckboard, in the days when it could
only be hired as a great favor.
The cottager, too, sets no bounds to his pretensions as to
territory. His policy, apparently the old policy of the conqueror
everywhere, is to let the boarder go up the coast and discover the
most attractive resorts, and allow him to report on them in the
newspapers, write poetry about them, lay the scene of novels and
plays in them, and then pursue him and eradicate him from the soil
as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes a resort far more
beautiful to the eye than the boarder there is no denying. He covers
it with beautiful houses; he converts the scraggy, yellow pastures
into smooth, green lawns; he fills the rock crevices with flowers;
he introduces better food and neater clothing and the latest dodges
in plumbing. But these things are only for the few--in fact, the
very few. An area which supports a hundred happy boarders will only
bring one cottager to perfection. Moreover, it is impossible, no
matter how much the country may flourish, that all Americans who
leave the city in summer should by any effort become cottagers. The
mass of them must always be boarders and remain boarders, and we
would warn the cottagers that it may become dangerous to push them
too hard and too far. Much farther east or north on the coast they
will not go without turning on their persecutors. They will not put
up with the shores of Labrador or Greenland, no matter how hot the
season may be. The survival of the fittest is a great law, and has
worked wonders in the animal world, but it must be remembered that
it has to work in our day in subordination to that greater law of
morality which makes weakness itself a strong tower of defence.
The future at all our leading seashore places, in truth, belongs to
the Cottager, and it is really useless to resist him. His march
along the American coast is nearly as resistless as that of the
hordes who issued from the plains of Scythia to overthrow the Roman
Empire. He moves on all the "choice sites" without haste, with the
calm and remorselessness of the man who knows that the morrow is
his. He has two tremendous forces at his back, against which no
boarder can stand up. One is the growing passion, or fashion, if
any one likes to call it so, of Americans to live in their own
houses, both summer and winter. This is rapidly taking possession
of all classes, from the New England mechanic, who puts up his
shanty or tent on the seashore, to the millionaire who builds his
hundred-thousand dollar villa on his thirty-thousand dollar lot.
Everybody who can seeks to be at home all the year round, let the
home be never so small or humble, and the life in it never so rough.
This is a change in the national manners which nobody can regret,
but it is a change from which the boarder must suffer, and which
must cost him much wandering and many tears. The other is the spread
of the love of the seashore among the vast population of the
Mississippi Valley, whose wealth is becoming great, for whom long
railroad journeys have no terrors, and who are likely now to send
their thousands every year to compete with the "money kings" of the
East for the best villa sites along the coast. And be it remembered
that although our population doubles every twenty-five years, our
rocky Atlantic shore, which is what all most love to seek--the sand
is tame and dreary in comparison--remains a fixed quantity. It only
extends from New York to Eastport, Me., and it only contains a
limited number of building lots. These are now being rapidly bought
up and built on, or hold on speculation, and in some places, where
land only brought ten dollars an acre fifteen years ago, are held at
monstrous prices.
To fight against these tendencies is useless. The wise boarder will
not so do, nor waste his time in bewailing his fate. It is absurd
for him to expect that long stretches of delightful shore will be
left wild and uninhabited and unimproved, for him to walk over for
three or four weeks every summer. Not even the Henry George régime
would oust the cottager, for under it he would simply rent what he
owns; a cottager he would still remain. Finally, the boarder must
remember that though the cottager, like woman, when he is bad is
very bad, when good is delightful. Nothing the American summer has
to show can surpass a cottager, and we rejoice to know that the
number of good cottagers every year grows larger. At his best though
he may be stern in the assertion of his rights of property, there is
no simpler, honester gentleman than he, and the moral earnestness
with the want of which the more austere boarder has been apt to
reproach him, grows very rapidly after he gets his lawn made and his
place in order.