Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar

Jul 21, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Coastal Kayaking Tours and Acadia Bike.

---

BAR HARBOR—Before anyone picked up the oversized ceremonial scissors Sunday, before applause echoed through the new timber-framed addition and before visitors wandered its sunlit rooms, there was a story people kept telling.

Not about architecture.

Not even about books.

Instead, speaker after speaker described a century-long chain of neighbors handing the Jesup Memorial Library to the next generation, each leaving it a little stronger than they found it.

Former board chair Ron Beard called it a relay race.

The finish line, at least for this leg, arrived Sunday as the library officially opened its new Thomas Lord Wing after years of planning, fundraising, and construction.

“George Dorr, along with Bill Horner’s great-grandfather Luere Deasy and others had the foresight to build a public library for Bar Harbor,” Beard explained. “After Mr. Dorr purchased the lot here on Mount Desert Street, they engaged Maria Dewitt Jesup in its design and construction and funding, honoring her husband, Morris. These leaders and benefactors created a facility that has served our community well, for over a century.”

Now others have jumped in, taken the baton, and continue a mission that has evolved with the library, with the community, and the country.

“The Jesup Library’s mission is to nourish minds, enhance lives, and build community,” Library Director Megan Brooks told those gathered. “This moment of celebration in honor of our library’s expansion is the result of hundreds of people believing in and sharing this vision.”

Children who had not yet been born when planning for the addition began wandered through rooms their grandparents and great-grandparents helped fund.

The crowd filled spaces that, only a few years ago, existed only in architects’ renderings and fundraising brochures.

In a town where residents often worry about what might be lost as the future unfolds, the Jesup Memorial Library showed once again on Sunday that there is something beautiful and solid very much here holding court at one corner of Mount Desert and School Streets, and it is something very much loved and very much growing.

“The Jesup Memorial Library of today and tomorrow thrives as a result of its place at the heart of our community,” said Ron Beard.

Beard described the project as “a long relay race,” with generations of volunteers, staff, and donors carrying the effort forward.

“This opening of this wonderful expansion was a long time coming,” Beard said. “It was a chapter in a story that tells of many, many people working together, investing in our community.”

Beard said today’s library serves a much broader purpose than lending books.

“In our lifetimes, the community began to see the Jesup as a place to expand conversations,” he said. “These are essential building blocks in a democracy.”

Both Beard and Board Chair Mollie Cashwell praised the board and staff and all the players who brought the new wing into reality.

The library serves a diverse community and as it does, Cashwell said, it creates webs that connect people together.

“Webs of knowledge, webs of story, webs of relationships,” Cashwell said.

The library helps the island to grow and have opportunity.

“We’re here to write new and better stories for ourselves and our community,” she said.

The resources of the library and its staff enable that to happen.

According to Beard, more than 650 donors contributed to the capital campaign that funded the project, along with federal grants supporting the use of New England mass timber in the construction. He noted that no local tax dollars were used to build the expansion, although annual municipal funding continues to support library operations.

“Library director Ruth Eveland and the board of directors took the first steps for an expanded library. They engaged architects, tested the waters for a campaign, secured early gifts from Emily Maren, the Walsh family, and Bill Horner. Together they articulated a vision for the facility, old and new, that we celebrate today,” Beard said.

They were joined by local businesses creating drives, by children hosting lemonade stands, by appeal letters and volunteers and individual after indivdual making choices to donate, to volunteer, to spread the word, and all those individual actions led to a collective win: a library addition that will hold childrens’ books, research archives, gathering spaces, and more.

The new addition bears the name of Thomas Lord, whose philanthropy helped make the project possible.

Speaking on behalf of the Lord family, granddaughter Rena Zurn Fulweiler said her grandfather believed in supporting education, research, and community.

“But credit for this new, and gorgeous community resource belongs to those who have loved the old Jesup as it is, and who have dreamed about what it could become, and who have worked to fulfill that dream,” Fulweiler said.

The ceremony concluded with a ribbon cutting after the reading of a century-old tribute to libraries by Luere B. Deasy, one of the Jesup’s founders, who described libraries as “the best and most perfect public gift.”

Bill Horner continued to quote his great-grandfather.

Deasy said, “All the discoveries and inventions of the past, all the pictures that artists and poets have painted, all the principles that patriots have fought for, all the truths that martyrs have died for are ours without money and without price.

“All this is true because of books. It is books that bring to and lay at the feet of each new century all the worth while wealth of past centuries. Books are the title deeds, the testaments under and by virtue of which a generation has and holds and enjoys the priceless treasures which in all ages of the past the exploring mind has brought from the cave of knowledge.”

---

LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Jesup expansion webpage

---

Photos: Shaun Farrar/Bar Harbor Story

---

HELP SUPPORT THE BAR HARBOR STORY

When we started The Bar Harbor Story, we didn’t know if anyone would read it. But you showed up. You shared. You sent tips. Now—over 400,000 views every month later—it’s clear: people here care about their community and each other.

We’ve kept everything free because news should never be out of reach, but every one of our stories takes time to write, and your support keeps The Bar Harbor Story going.

If you value our work, please consider a paid subscription, a founding membership, or a sponsorship.

It truly helps us cover one more meeting, tell one more story, shine one more light.

Even $5 a month makes a difference. Click here to become a one-time supporter now.

Thank you so much for being here.

Founding member information can be found here.

Have questions about sponsorships? Just send Shaun an email at sfarrar86@gmail.com, he’d love to hear from you.