Rain forced many ceremonies indoors across parts of Mount Desert Island, but communities still gathered to honor fallen service members and their families.

Carrie Jones

May 25, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Paradis Ace Hardware.

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MOUNT DESERT ISLAND—Back in 1957, Bar Harbor had a parade, sponsored by the George Edwin Kirk Post of the American Legion that marched down Cottage Street to Main Street and to the pier and back up Main Street to Mount Desert Street and back to the Legion.

Last year, the memorial day ceremony began at 10 a.m., Monday, on the Village Green. Matt Horton, a Bar Harbor Fire Department lieutenant, read a poem by Jai Higgins, veteran and retired firefighter. Before Lt. Horton did, he placed the dog tags of one of his close relatives around his neck.

Nearby, someone broke into tears.

This year, storm clouds let down the rain, which necessitated some quick thinking changes at multiple Mount Desert Island events meant to commemorate Memorial Day.

In Southwest Harbor and Tremont, the ceremony was moved inside the Pemetic Elementary School. In Mount Desert, the ceremony and cookout was moved into the Neighborhood House. In Bar Harbor, the Chamber of Commerce put up a small tent to help keep some of the attendees dry.

“I want to give a big kudos to Jonathan Robles and Kamahl Walker who rallied with me,” Bar Harbor Chamber Director Everal Eaton said. “We know how important this event is to the community and despite the rain and the speakers not working, we pushed through to make this year’s event happen. Special thanks to the Town of Bar Harbor, the Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Police Department, the Bar Harbor Fire Department, Queen Anne’s Flower Shop, George Edwin Kirk American Legion Post 25, and the US Army Band (for) their support in each year’s event. Last and most importantly, thank you to every service member who fought and died for this country. We all owe you an extreme gratitude for the freedoms and rights we are able to enjoy today.”

Reverend Tracy Shaffer, deacon of the Episcopal Churches of Mount Desert Island gave the invocation. The U.S. Army Band played both the National Anthem and Taps. Post Commander Paul Marristany spoke about the history of Kirk. This weekend the Legion Post put flags throughout the Ledgelawn Cemetery for Memorial Day.

Bar Harbor’s keynote speaker, Mario Marquez currently serves as the Executive Director of Government Affairs for The American Legion National Headquarters.

Marquez thanked Town Manager James Smith, who were both training in 29 Palms desert in California, during the 9-11 attacks.

“They struck the Pentagon,” he said, “and the last in a field in Pennsylvania.”

They were deployed for ten months. They went to Kosovo, on missions throughout Africa and the Middle East and unexpectedly opening combat operations in Iraq in 2003.

“We came home 10 months later on Memorial Day, 2003,” Marquez said.

Friendships formed through military service, he said, last a lifetime.

“I am honored to stand here with James today,” he said.

He also spoke to people that they’d lost in those 10 months.

Young men and women carry the weight of war upon their shoulders.

He saw loss, he said, including the loss of his best friend, on his own birthday, due to an improvised explosive device. Another good friend died 13 days later, after a suicide bomber rammed the vehicle he was in with fellow Marines. A third friend that he leaned heavily on during the deployment was also killed.

Memorial Day, he said, is a day to remember the people lost.

“They gave everything,” he said, “for all of us.”

Mario retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a Sergeant Major after more than 31 years, where he served in multiple positions across expeditionary, ground combat, aviation, and logistics organizations. He spoke to the need to remember that freedoms in America matter, that the sacrifices of soldiers and their families need to be remembered by younger generations.

“Memorial Day belongs to every American family,” he said.

In May 1919, Veterans of World War I named the post after Captain George Edwin Kirk.

Kirk, according to the Bangor Daily Commercial, was “a Bar Harbor boy, who died of pneumonia in a field hospital in France on November 20, 1918, and who rose from a second lieutenant to a captain by devotion to duty and extraordinary ability.”

He was involved in heavy fighting during the war in spring and summer of 1918.

The naming was unanimous.

That same year, all men in the service or not, were asked to go to the athletic field at 1:30 on a Friday afternoon. Soldiers were to wear their uniforms. They then marched up Main, over Cottage, up High Street, and down Mount Desert Street to the cemetery where “wreaths will be placed, a salute fired, and tape sounded,” the Bangor paper reported.

Marristany spoke this Memorial Day of Captain Kirk and his memory.

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Mount Desert

The American Legion Lurvey-Wright Post #103 usually organizes the ceremonies and parade. This year, the Veterans Memorial ceremony was followed by a cook-out and book sale. That book sale at the Northeast Harbor Library will continue tomorrow.

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Southwest Harbor and Tremont

In Southwest Harbor, the ceremony is usually sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary Eugene M. Norwood Post #69. This year, it moved inside the Pemetic Elementary School because of the weather. The Common Good provided food after the ceremony.

As the Tremont Fire Department said in its Facebook post, “Memorial Day isn’t just about cookouts, parades and kicking off the start of summer for our small coastal community.

“It’s a reminder of the ultimate sacrifice.

“Today, we remember those who didn’t make it home from the battlefield, and we honor our fallen brothers and sisters in the fire service who gave their lives protecting their communities. WE HONOR. WE REMEMBER. WE WILL NEVER FORGET.”

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A Quick History.

All the way back in 1868, a young girl wrote a New York official a note. In it, she asked for the city official to place a garland on the grave of an unknown Confederate soldier. Her own father, she said, was buried all the way in Georgia. She wanted, she hoped, she prayed that “some other little girl” would do the same for her own dad’s grave.

Three years before that, in 1865, 10,000 Black Americans who had once been enslaved came to Charleston, South Carolina. There, they honored all the Union soldiers who died and fought so that they could be free.

Sewall Chan in an article for the New York Times wrote, “David W. Blight, a historian at Yale, has a different account. He traces the holiday to a series of commemorations that freed black Americans held in the spring of 1865, after Union soldiers, including members of the 21st United States Colored Infantry, liberated the port city of Charleston, S.C.”

Memorial Day began as a way to honor the dead not as a three-day weekend that celebrated summer, but as a date for remembering and mourning, a date to celebrate freedom and also a date for little girls to implore government officials to do something kind.

According to a NYT article by Livia Albeck-Ripka, “The holiday grew out of the Civil War, as Americans — Northern, Southern, Black and white — struggled to honor the staggering numbers of dead soldiers, at least 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time. Several places lay claim to being the birthplace of Memorial Day. One of the earliest accounts comes from Boalsburg, Pa., where, in October 1864, three women are said to have placed flowers and wreaths on the graves of men who had died serving the Union during the Civil War.”

The Civil War dead were almost everywhere, in towns and cities across the United States. The observances were called Decoration Day and had an official start in 1868 when Gen. John A. Logan wanted a day to honor those who had died in the war. As there were more and more conflicts and wars there were more dead. Eventually, the day became for those who died serving the country, not just those who died in the Civil War.

Mr. Logan wrote that the day should be “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”

That tradition continues in small ways and large, on sunny years and ones where there are downpours.

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*Some pieces of this story originally appeared in 2024 and 2025.

We have more photos on our Facebook page, here. Unless otherwise specified, all photos: Carrie Jones/Bar Harbor Story.

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