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Circa 1901. "The Louisburg, Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Island, Maine." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company. View full size.
I lived in Bar Harbor from 1993-1998 and used to love to research the history. There are still a lot of ruins in the woods around Bar Harbor where mansions and hotels burned down in the fire of 1947. The Louisburg sat on Atlantic Ave and was torn down before the fire of '47 in 1939 and divided into house lots. It was originally the Atlantic House built in 1873 and when that burned they built a new Atlantic House which was purchased in 1887 by Miss M.L. Balch and named the Louisburg after Louisburg Square in Boston.
From "Lost Bar Harbor":
"Miss Balch added a tennis court and a music room where the Louisburg Orchestra, 'composed of eminent artists,'gave concerts morning and evening. After Miss Balch's death, the hotel was leased, in 1911 to J.A. Sherrad and for two years to L.C. Prior, proprietor of the Lenox Hotel in Boston. In 1916 the Misses Healey of Saratoga Springs ran it. It became the Lorraine when purchased by the Layfayette Hotel Corporation in 1921, and it managed, incredibly, to stay afloat until 1939, when it was leveled and the property was divided into house lots."
Here is roughly where it stood on Atlantic Ave. in Bar Harbor. I used to live with a girlfriend right down the street in 1994. Such a beautiful place.
And here's the state-of-the-art, colorized, "penny postcard" version. The Louisburg (formerly Atlantic House) stood on the south side of Atlantic Avenue, a couple blocks southeast of Bar Harbor's village green. It survived longer than most of the grand hotels of the era, until its demolition in 1939.
Plenty of photos of rich industrialists mansions, sorry cottages in this publication.
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