HERON ISLAND MEMORIES by MILDRED BUTLER ENGDAHL 1902-1922

(excerpted by Sylvia Engdahl from a private memoir)

Notes:
1. Mildred Butler Engdahl(1897-1987) was the daughter of Sarah Butler, who was the manager of the Madockawando Hotel at the time of these memories.
2. This document was contributed by Mildred Butler Engdahl's daughter, Sylvia Engdahl, who has also constructed a web page memorial to her mother.
3. Sylvia Engdahl has also contributed some of her grandmother's pictures, including one of the interior of the hotel.
4. Sylvia Engdahl says, 'during the 20s my grandmother sometimes did not go [to the Island], and she rented the cottage to others. She moved to California in 1928, and sold it in 1928 or 1929 for about $1100 to 'two ladies who had often rented it,' which ... must have been the Stevenson sisters.'

The year I was five [1902] we went to a place where one of Mother's girlhood friends and her family owned a summer cottage; a little island near Boothbay Harbor, Maine, called Heron Island. We had a small cottage next to the Kaulbacks' called “The Barnacle.” All the cottages were named. This was the first of over twenty summers that we spent at Heron Island, a heavenly place for children and one that my younger brother Charlie and I loved more than any place on earth.

The next summer my father leased the small hotel on the island, the Madockawando Lodge. He hired a staff and left my mother [Sarah Butler] to manage it while he went west again. She ran the hotel for three summers. After that we had a cottage of our own built on the west shore. It was the only house we ever owned and we loved it. I think my sister christened it “Ledgemere,” a good name if I remember it accurately. It was built on a huge rock so that the east side of the house was on level ground and the west side projected over a lower story in which were a kitchen and dining room. Under the wide veranda beside the kitchen was a tank to catch rain water and another beside the sleeping porch.

The summer of 1905 was our fourth at Heron Island and our last at the hotel. We went down very early before Mother's 'help' had arrived, and people from one of the cottages who wished to take their meals at the hotel persuaded Mother to serve them. I was enlisted as a waitress at the age of eight, but I think I only brought in the dishes for breakfast. What I remember chiefly was that Mr. Snow gave me a tip of fifty cents at the end of the week and I was overcome by so much wealth!

Each summer the Shakers arrived, gray-clad ladies with bonnets who belonged to a religious order and who brought things to sell to the summer people. What I enjoyed most was the candied orange and lemon peel. I always bought some and I don't think I have ever had any since! The ever-present Aunt Lill used to amuse me sometimes when her work as housekeeper was over, and I remember once on a rainy evening she took me to her room in the annex and toasted marshmallows for me over a candle flame.

It was during that last summer that we were running the hotel that I slipped on the boardwalk that joined the hotel and annex and fell through a broken board into a hornet's nest. And another accident at that time occurred when I leaned out of a large window in the kitchen, dislodged the stick that was supporting it, and the heavy window came down on my shoulders, driving my chin into the sill and sending two front teeth through my lower lip.

I remember the little room in which I slept in the hotel, which had a long corridor with rooms on each side. Mine overlooked the ocean and at the time I am thinking of, I was alone in the corridor, but that must have been early in the season. I read The Wizard of Oz over three or four times when I was eight and though I loved most of it, I had a nightmare in that little room which I have never forgotten. I thought the winged monkeys were flying over the water between us and Ocean Point and were coming to get me. I could see them very clearly and can recall, even now, that dream and my fright.

Those summers at Heron Island were the happiest summers of my life, particularly between the ages of five and thirteen. (It didn't offer me much as a teenager, but by then, spending the summers there was a way of life and I wouldn't have known how to change it.) After we moved to St. Louis, we just lived for June to come. As soon as school was out and we had had a month of hot weather, we took the train; usually at midnight, for it was cooler then (not cool, but cooler!) We would get on the Pullman, in which all the berths would be made up. While we were still in the station it would be suffocating inside the Pullman curtains, but we would get undressed and wait longingly for the train to move. As soon as it left the station we would press our noses to the fine screen at the bottom of the window and when we rolled out on the Eades Bridge we would get the suggestion of a breeze. We were off! To Maine and cool weather!

It took three nights and two days to get to Boston. Then we crossed from the South Station to the wharves and took the night boat for Portland. A few times we went late enough in the season to take the boat to Bath, but early in June the boats did not run from Bath to Heron Island. From Portland there was an old boat called the Enterprise which went up the coast as far as Pemaquid (or Rockland?) and stopped at Heron. It was possible to go to Damariscotta by train and take the mail boat from there; but we usually went by way of Portland. Probably it was cheaper, and in those days we did everything the cheapest way. I was usually sick; not always on the night boat which was a big one and in which I could lie down in a berth, but always on the Enterprise. I can see myself, huddled on a bench on a deck covered with coats and steamer rugs (to go down into the stuffy cabin was murder!) sick as a dog. Sometimes I managed it to the rail, but I think Mother had some kind of receptacle for me. She was never seasick in her life and Charlie grew up a good sailor from babyhood, but I never got into a boat; except later, a small power boat; that I was not sick. The old Enterprise had been a freight boat and it rolled from side to side even in fair weather, even when alongside a wharf.

But of course I survived, and when we rounded Ocean Point from Boothbay Harbor and Heron Island come into view, I remember how Charlie and I used to shout with excitement. At last! A whole summer at the island!

Heron Island was indeed a paradise to the children who went there year after year. There was no real beach and the ocean was icy cold but there were other features which we prized more highly. Large, cream-colored cliffs, broken occasionally by black or gray ones, surrounded the entire island. Most of them were smooth and we scampered all over them day after day in our sneakers. I don't remember anyone falling on the rocks and no one ever fell into the water. I don't believe my mother ever worried about us; but I know that, as a mother, I should have worried a lot. However, all the children learned, very young, not to go too near the surf and not to walk on the slippery seaweed which, at low tide, covered the rocks.

On the east and south shores, the cliffs were level with the trees. 'Cliffs' is hardly the word for them, for it brings to mind towering rocky promontories of the Pacific Coast or the coast of Cornwall. In Maine the rocky shores with their fifteen-to-twenty foot cliffs slope gently, and the surf at high tide is only a few feet away from the dense fir forest. The north shore of Heron Island had a long reef and a small cove with some very coarse sand; a patch not more than fifteen feet wide, at the edge of which was a black rock about ten feet long and four feet above the sand. It was known, quite naturally, as the Black Rock and it was there, when the sand was covered by high tide, that we did what swimming we could. None of the children my age knew how to swim and none of the older people would brave the cold water.

When I was about ten years old, a man came to stay at the island who was a great swimmer and he swam the mile from Heron to the mainland at Christmas Cove, despite the cold. He also proceeded to teach us children to swim. However, all he did was to hold us a moment in a swimming position and say, 'Now swim!' I remember I was somewhat scared of him and tried to do as he said. To my surprise I swam a few strokes without going under, and though it was many years before I learned any proper stroke, I was never afraid from that moment, and kept trying.

The west shore, where our cottage was located, had a series of steep cliffs; none more than fifteen feet high; and beneath them a rocky and stony beach, with some reefs which were half-covered at high tide. We thought it the prettiest side of the island. We made our way down to the beach by little paths between the cliffs and sometimes down the side of a cliff itself by following a crack. There were hollowed out ledges here and there which we used for seats and I have spent many an afternoon in one of those seats which I claimed for my particular own, reading or, as I got older, writing letters, never seeming to mind the hardness of the rocks.

On Sundays, half the islanders, both old and young, went to the south shore, from which you could look out to open sea, to sit on the rocks. The ladies and young girls wore white shirt-waists and white piqué skirts; long, of course. We always dressed up for Sunday and usually attended a service at the Casino in the morning, led by one of the two or three ministers who spent their summers at the island. I remember that casino very well. It was used for card parties during the week, for a dance on Saturday night, and was hastily converted, after the dance, to a church; a pulpit on the stage and rows of chairs arranged facing it. There was a particular fragrance to that casino composed partly of the wood of which it was constructed and the wax used on the floor for the dances. The Casino was also the library and had four or five shelves of books, donated by the islanders themselves. Anyone could take out a book by writing down his name and the date in a little book, hung on a hook there with a pencil attached.

Heron Island was only a mile long and half a mile wide, lying between two peninsulas, its northern point toward the mainland at Christmas Cove, its southern end pointing out to sea. It was covered with spruce and fir trees interspersed by a very few hardwoods. There were at that time only four areas you could call clearings; one at the north end where the wharf was, and the store, and a well; a second, the largest, up the hill where the only road led from north shore to south shore. Five or six cottages and the hotel stood in this grassy area with its wild flowers, tall grasses and sumac trees, and there was a tennis court and a croquet ground there. The third was across the road from the Casino, where there was also a well, and bushes of all kinds grew there. Gooseberries and raspberries ripened in July, enough so that occasionally we could pick enough for a very small dessert. The fourth clearing was very small. It was on the west shore path quite near the south shore. Raspberry bushes grew there, too, and a reedy sort of grass. It was really a hollow and after a rain was wet and soggy. Charlie and the boys called it 'the swamp' and hunted all sorts of imaginary animals there.

From the Casino to the south shore the center path was in complete shade. Many kinds of moss grew under the trees and some of the firs and spruces were so old that they leaned sideways. There was a lot of gray Spanish moss hanging from the trees which was pretty, but it eventually killed them. This still, center portion of the island where you could not even hear the sea was entrancing to a city child. My friend Helen Kaulback and I used to play 'house' in the different enclosures we called 'cubby holes.' They were usually surrounded by the young green fir balsams which sprang up everywhere among the taller trees, and we would sit down on the moss which was our carpet and furnish our 'cubbies' with furniture made of twigs, dead branches and the like. In the early summer these woods were carpeted with bunchberries; a four-petaled plant of the dogwood family only four or five inches tall, whose white petals fell off to make place for a bunch of red berries by late August. We tried eating them but they didn't have much taste. There were also toadstools of various sizes and shapes, some weirdly red or purple. We looked on them as decorations to our cubby holes but because our parents had warned us not to touch them, we left them severely alone. In the deepest shade grew the ghostly white 'Indian Pipes.'

 Another of our favorite pastimes was sailing little 'pretend' boats in the tide pools on the rooks. The boats were flat pieces of driftwood on which we put snails for passengers. They were plentiful just below the tide mark and either round and black, or white or yellow with pointed shells. Sometimes an accommodating adult would whittle our driftwood into a pointed prow. There was one large pool at the north shore where we played, on a reef that was nearly covered at high tide, and we had to be careful to go there only when the tide was low. Another, my favorite, was on the west shore just below our cottage, in the smooth buff-colored rocks that were never under water and were merely splashed by high surf. The pool had little harbors and coves and we sailed the boats from one to another, taking on and embarking our 'passengers.'

Sometimes Helen and I played croquet on the one court on the island. It actually belonged to the first resident of the island, a Mr. Gunn, and was private property, but he let the children use it. Since it had never been made into a proper lawn it was pretty bumpy and the days I remember best were when we were about eight or nine; by then croquet had more or less gone out of fashion and we had the court to ourselves.

[The summer of 1912] at Heron Island, I had good time. There were several young people at the hotel; a girl named Adrienne, who Mother thought was too sophisticated for me, and two young men. I didn't care much for them, but we went about together for the two weeks they were there; once to Boothbay Harbor and to all the Casino dances. A family named Manning, who owned a cottage, had a guest who I thought was much more fascinating. His name was Ed Loring and he seemed like a movie star to me. Romily Humphries had turned into quite a dashing young man (about sixteen) but I had a crush on Ed Loring, who was about nineteen, and I don't think he spoke six words to me all summer.

Heron Island was still serviced by fairly large steamboats from Bath; two a day; and a smaller steamboat from Damariscotta which brought the mail twice a day. These boats had been coming to the island every summer since I was a small child and going down to meet them was part of the life on the island. Since each boat made two stops, each going to Pemaquid or Christmas Cove, as was the case with the mail boat, and one returning, it meant that a boat stopped at the island eight times a day. And three times a week the Enterprise came from Portland. In my childhood, the whole population came to the wharf at most stops of these boats and gave their particular 'cheers'; adults as well as children. How unsophisticated we all were! Heron Island's cheer was:

H; -E; -R-O-N; ; ; Heron!

Or sometimes:

One two three four

Who are we for?

Heron Island, Rah, rah, rah!

A larger island in Boothbay Harbor had this 'yell:'

S-Q-U-I-R-R-E-L

Squirrel Island, Well well well!

These were evidently copied from college cheers, and the enthusiasm with which they were delivered showed that the islanders felt the same spirit for their chosen summer home as was felt for the college of one's choice. It is hard to believe that grown people did this seriously or did not think up not-so-nice things to shout, but it was all very decorous. Of course, everyone did not run down to the wharf to greet every boat. The children usually did, but the grown-ups came noon and evening when the mail boat arrived and waited around on the porch of the store while the mail was being sorted. They appeared whenever any guest was arriving, of course, and I think the especially large groups gathered when a group of guests was leaving. The send-off was then very vociferous.

We were there because we wanted to be, but mail from friends was very important. I remember how I used to sit on the counter to watch our box; it was glass on the outside, and since everyone knew his number he could watch letters, if any, being thrown in; and if there was no mail for any of the family, I walked up the hill quite disappointed. Particularly the summer after my graduation from high school [1914], I wrote a lot of letters and received many, I am sure.

But I began to be lonely that summer at Heron. There was nothing to do but read and write letters. If it rained, we had to stay in all day. I remember sitting on the window seat which stretched the length of our living room, watching the lighthouses start blinking in the evening.

There were at that time no young people my age on the island except a childhood friend, Olive Bachelder, occasionally; the Humphrey boys; and the Damon boys, and I did not see much of them. The only places we went were to Boothbay Harbor once or twice, and sometimes to South Bristol on the mail boat. Once Helen Kaulback and I went on the mail boat to East Boothbay, walked the Indian Trail to Boothbay Harbor, and took the second boat home. It was a near thing; we had to walk fast and I think we nearly missed it. What would we have done overnight with no money? But someone would have taken us in. Everybody knew Heron Island.

Now everyone on the island has his own boat and keeps a car on the mainland and unless the fog prevents, can take trips up and down the length of the Maine coast and into Canada. But there were only two or three who had motor boats then, and I didn't get invited to go out in one.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, my Uncle Ed came to the island for a week. Mother wanted to give him a good time and we rented a small open motor boat for several days. Charlie and I did the navigating, for we knew every rock and buoy in the vicinity, and Uncle Ed ran the motor, which was an inboard one (I never heard of an outboard motor in those days). But Uncle Ed was deaf and didn't always hear our directions, and once we backed up on a reef instead of going ahead. Aunt Lill and her sister, who were in the stern, screamed and demanded to be put ashore. We had the most fun that week! I always wanted a boat, but except for that one time, I never got out on the water on my own. I used to sit on the wharf and yearn!

We did have people visit us. The Swapps came every summer for years. Mother's relatives, my aunts and cousins, came often. Of course, I should certainly have had friends of my own visit me if they hadn't all been in St. Louis, much too far away. Mother was glad to have guests. She did a lot of cooking during those summers. I remember chocolate cakes made in what we called 'dripping pans.' They were large enough to take a double recipe. We had a wood stove in the kitchen and also a kerosene stove which worked very well. Mother was a good cook, and everyone ate heartily at Heron Island. I think she had provisions sent from S.S. Pierce in Boston where my father had a charge account, though she had to buy fresh things from Boothbay Harbor. Of course she was used to getting provisions for the island since she had been manager of the hotel for three years.

All our drinking water had to be carried from the center well near the Casino. Charlie carried it as soon as he was old enough, but I often brought a pail half full. We had two red fiber pails which must have held at least five gallons each. And we had a shelf under the house against the cliff over which the house was built, where the water kept cool. A door out of the dining room led to it. There was also a screened pantry opening out of the dining room onto the ledge. So we really didn't need ice. There was an ice-house where blocks of ice packed with sawdust were put in during the winter, but that supply was only for the hotel. I have forgotten in which year the hotel burned down; I think it was while I was in college; but after that there was no ice.

It was rumored that the hotel was set afire in order to collect the insurance. It burned on a still night in October when no one was on the island, and both the main hotel and the annex burned to the ground, though the fire did not spread and no houses or trees were burned. The hotel hadn't made money for years; never, since Mother had been running it; and the man who had leased it was in debt. But I think he collected insurance, though it looked to some as if the fire had been set on purpose.

Editor's note: this is not true... the Hotel burned on September 6, 1917 when there were still guests and cottages were still occupied. Listen to Sarah and Harold Elley's first hand account of the fire.

The only time friends of mine came to Heron was the year after my sophomore year in college, when Edna Hills, Olive Bachelder and I went down early in June before there was anyone else on the island. It was quite an adventure. We three took the train from Boston to Damariscotta and, in addition to our suitcases, we shipped a wooden box containing all the provisions we would need for a week. We went down on the mail boat to Christmas Cove and Frank Jordan took us in his motor boat to the island; it was the second week in June and the boats weren't stopping at Heron yet. We were going to be on the island for a week absolutely alone. Frank and a couple of other men would come over every day to air out the cottages and do what repairing was necessary. It was their job as caretakers to see that everything was ready when the owners arrived for the summer. I knew Heron Island so well that I did not feel afraid to stay there alone. After all, there were no animals larger than field mice and no one would be likely to try to land on the island at night.

We had a marvelous time. But though we felt perfectly safe, our imaginations played tricks at times. One evening we were on the wharf watching the twilight come down and one of us thought she heard the noise of oars. It was a very calm, peaceful night. We took off running up the hill and all the way to our cottage, which was quite a run, and I could never run as fast as most girls so I got left behind. I remember how scared I was, and over nothing!

Then one night we had a thunderstorm. It was a frightening thing even when there was plenty of company, for lightning often struck somewhere on the island, though it had though it never had near our cottage. We huddled together and cringed till it was over. All in all, we were glad when the first summer people arrived; a Dr. Roberts and her friend from Wellesley. We all had a shore picnic before other people arrived.

In 1916, women wore bathing dresses over a tight-fitting black stretched undergarment called an 'Annette Kellerman' after the famous swimmer; and, of course, long black stockings. Because of the rocks we also wore sneakers. I remember how, when we were alone on the island, we three took off our dresses, leaving us in the black underwear, and then took off our stockings! That was the ultimate in abandonment! How shocked we would have been at the sight of a bikini then!

My days at Heron Island were about the same during both my high school and college years. I can't say I was unhappy, for I loved the place and I didn't know what I was missing. As I look back on it, it seems a great waste; those college years were when I should have been making social contacts. But Mother didn't have money to do anything else but go to Heron, and it never occurred to me to go away alone during the summer.