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History of Blue
Hill
Stone marking
original settlement
Old Photo of
Settlement in the Inner Harbor
First
Congregational Church
Rev. Jonathan
Fisher 1768-1847
The house Fisher
built for himself in 1814
Old Photo of
Coastal Schooner at Town Wharf
Cutting Granite (Old Photo)
Old Photo of the Copper and Gold Exchange, a
Boarding House on the Corner of Main and Water
Streets during the Mining Boom
Old
Photo of Excursions from the Blue Hill Inn
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In 1762, Blue Hill’s two founders,
John Roundy and Joseph Wood, sailed up the bay to disembark on
Mill Island, next to the reversing falls. The French and Indian
War was coming to a close. Eastward as well as westward
out-migration was spurred by burgeoning population growth in
southern New England. A recent rash of forest fires in lower New
Hampshire stimulated eastward exploration for timber. The
frontier dangers of harsh winter climate and wild animals
remained. After building log cabins, Roundy and Wood returned to
homes in Massachusetts to spend the first winter but returned
with their families the following year to settle permanently in
Blue Hill.
Soon, other families came and the conditions of the
six-mile-square land grant for township were met: sixty
homes exceeding minimum size, each with five acres of
cleared land, a Protestant church and minister, land for
a local school and another share of land for the use of
Harvard College in Cambridge. Names of early settlers
included Darling, Parker, Osgood, Peters, Holt, Candage,
Day, Hinckley, Horton, Carleton, Friend, Dodge, and
Clough. The original name of the area was Plantation No.
5. By 1778, the township became Bluehill, later spelled
Blue Hill. While the original settlement was at Blue
Hill Falls, the center of the village eventually formed
at the head of the inner harbor, its present location.
The First
Congregational Church was formed in 1772. It was the first to be
organized east of Penobscot Bay. The new meeting house was
situated on the north side of Main Street at the top of Tenney
Hill. John Peters presented a Paul Revere bell and Reuben Dodge
provided the wherewithal to build a tower to accommodate it. The
entire structure burned to the ground in 1842. The present
Congregational Church, half way down the hill on the south side
of Main Street, was built by Thomas Lord in 1843.
In 1805, Reverend Daniel Merrill organized the Baptist
Church. Its building, begun in 1817 and remodeled in 1856 by
Thomas Lord, still stands on Pleasant Street.
In 1794, Reverend
Jonathan Fisher, a graduate of Harvard College and the town’s
first settled minister, began his forty-three year pastorate at
the First Congregational Church. Both Lord and Fisher are
regarded now as local figures of wider historical significance.
Thomas Lord, a builder of many churches and houses in the area,
typifies the American folk tradition in architecture. Reverend
Fisher, an energetic multitasker, produced engravings of
artistic merit, currently on exhibit at the Farnsworth Museum in
Rockland
A village of elm tree shaded streets and Federal style
clapboard houses grew up around the two churches. Mills at
multiple sites on the shore sawed timber from neighboring
hills. Immediately adjacent to nearly every sawmill, a
boatyard appeared. During the first half of the nineteenth
century more than 130 ocean-going sailing vessels were built
in Blue Hill, Blue Hill Falls and East Blue Hill. Most were
schooners and brigs for the coastal trade but some were
full-rigged ships and barks that ventured farther on the
world’s oceans. In this era, the town’s economy was
supported by shipowners, shipbuilders and peripheral
occupations such as fishing, farming, merchants, millers,
craftsmen, and blacksmiths. Cabotage favored coastal trade
but the Civil War closed markets and enabled Confederate
raiders to seize and burn northern merchant vessels.
Moreover, steam-powered vessels with steel hulls were
turning up. The wooden shipbuilding boom in Blue Hill
virtually ended by 1865.
A local author, Mary Ellen Chase, described the post-Civil
War economic slide of coastal towns like Blue Hill in her
novels Mary Peters and Silas Crockett. But a
vein of granite coursing along the northern shore of Blue
Hill Harbor and extending out Wood Point and down the length
of Long Island had been yielding premium building material
for some time. Wharves were built to ship out huge blocks
and columns as well as paving blocks to cities along the
eastern seaboard and beyond. Blue Hill granite quarried by
Darlings, Hinckleys, Chases, Slavens and Collinses were used
to build churches and bridges in New York, public buildings
in Washington and Pittsburgh, streets in New Orleans as well
as many local edifices.
In 1876, copper mines began to open along the shore and
westward along the present Mines Road. Blue Hill Copper
and the Douglass were among the earliest and the
largest mines. Western engineers and workers flooded Blue
Hill. Speculation went wild. A central boarding house was
enlarged; it was named the “Copper and Gold Exchange.” The
mining boom subsided almost as quickly as it started. By
1881, only six of thirty-nine companies continued to
operate.
As the nineteenth century closed, the steamships were no
longer carrying out copper but they were bringing in
“rusticators” or summer vacationers. For those that could
afford it, families fled from the anticipated epidemics of
tuberculosis and poliomyelitis in hot cities to the cool
breezes of coastal Maine. In 1881, Captain Oscar Crockett
opened a steamboat service from the railhead at Rockland to
Blue Hill. A summer colony formed on Parker Point. The Blue
Hill Inn flourished at the top of Tenney Hill. The season
was enlivened by gala events, music recitals and sailing
excursions… still summer happenings at Kneisel Hall and
Kollegewidgwok Yacht Club.
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Old Photo of
Settlement at Blue Hill Falls
(Mill
Island)
Baptist Church
Interior
Thomas M. Lord
1806-1880
The house Lord
built for himself in 1847
Old Photo of
Main Street in Horse and Buggy Days
Old
Photo of Blue Hill Granite Company
Old
Photo of the Douglass Copper Mine
Old
Photo of Steamer “Henry Morrison”
at
Parker Point
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During the twentieth century, railroad connections, then the
automobile, made Blue Hill more accessible. The summer
stream of visitors continued unabated. As well, a growing
segment of people from away became year-round summer folk as
they retired or fled the strain of high energy careers in
crime-ridden cities. The descendants of shipbuilders are now
building imposing homes and servicing large yachts. Both
natives and newcomers have contributed to the town’s
first-rate library, hospital, schools and parks.
The
current, sustained real estate boom is fueled by what R.G.F.
Candage, a Blue Hill bred nineteenth century clipper ship
captain, called “the charm of its situation, its sparkling
bay, its inlets, its shores, its landscapes of hill and dale
and plain…” The challenge is to maintain the beauty and
character of the town in the face of an increasing
population.
N.B Much of the text was derived from Clough, A.:
Head of the Bay, recently reprinted and available for purchase from the Blue
Hill Historical Society
P.O. Box 710, Blue Hill, ME 04614
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