Otter Creek’s history with Acadia National Park is at least partially a story of disappearing fish houses, changing access, and a community still trying to hold onto its waterfront.

Carrie Jones

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Geddy’s.

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OTTER CREEK—Back in June, some of the people of Otter Creek scrambled down to the water and cleaned a shingled fish house, precariously perched, and the rocky shore all around it.

There is only one fish house left there on a tiny piece of land surrounded by Acadia National Park and water.

Once there were more than twenty, an army of little places clustered along the cove, places where fishermen kept their traps, lines, and gear and made ready for the water.

The fish houses are mostly gone now, all except one. So is much—if not all—of the fishing. The landing is gone. The waterfront has been narrowed and hemmed in. And the one old fish house that remains sits below the Park Loop Road, down a steep bank, as if it has been quietly left there to remember for everyone.

So they cleaned and worked and hauled, greeting each other with hearty hellos and sometimes a hug as one person after another clambered down the hill.

They sorted a bit through items inside. They touched the shingles for balance as they navigated around the structure. They kept the place standing. They hauled out garbage that had swept to the rocks—boulders really—that tumbled to the shore. The quick work of a knife cut old rope. Traps were untangled, garbage hauled out by water because it was too hard to get it back up the hill.

And in doing so, they keep telling the story of what happened to Otter Creek and they keep trying to preserve what’s left down there in the cove.

Acadia National Park’s relationship with Otter Creek is a story that’s been going on for almost 100 years.

Durlin Lunt told part of that story in September, in a talk about a village that was once a prosperous farming and fishing community and about the changes that came with the creation and expansion of Acadia National Park.

Otter Creek is still a community, but fishing and farming? Not so much.

Lunt is quick to say that his telling of the story is not about him being against the park. He loves Acadia. His family is part of its history. His uncle was an Acadia ranger after World War II, and Lunt calls the National Park System one of America’s best ideas.

But Otter Creek, he said, is another part of that bigger story.

And that story begins with a village that had something the park could not preserve simply by preserving the land: a way of life on the water.

“It’s really what you call a secret that’s been in plain view for over ninety years,” Lunt said during his talk at the Jesup Memorial Library.

The talk was organized by the Mount Desert Island Historical Society and Lunt wrote a story in the society’s annual magazine Chebacco. Authors who write for the magazine often have opportunities to speak at local libraries throughout the year.

Lunt stressed that he has a deep family history with the National Park Service.

Documentarian Ken Burns said that National Parks were America’s best idea, Lunt quoted, and Lunt said he fully agrees with Burns.

“I think the National Park System is one of America’s best ideas, and I think Acadia (National) Park is one of the crown jewels of that whole story,” Lunt said. His grandfather had a 200-acre dairy farm on Clark’s Cove in Town Hill. “It’s a wonderful feature to have here on Mount Desert Island.”

He greatly respects the park.

“One of my uncles, Vernon Lunt, was a ranger at Acadia after World War II and then he served for a while as the superintendent of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg,” Lunt said. “And so, I’ve got some park in my history.”

That said, Lunt has made it a bit of a mission to tell others about the saga of Otter Creek and the impact the park made on that village.

Back in the 1890s, the island looked different than it does now, even before the park began. Southwest Harbor didn’t even exist as a town then, not until 1905.

“Otter Creek was a very successful farming and fishing village with a population, a very stable population, and quite a prosperous population. And so that has changed dramatically,” Lunt said.

“The fish houses were the stable of the fishing industry on Otter Creek,” Lunt explained.

It’s where people who worked on the water would keep their gear, lines, and traps. They’d store what they needed to maintain their small boats. They’d do their work along both the eastern and western shores.

At one point in the 1940s and 1950s, Lunt believes there were probably more than twenty of those houses.

“There is only one now,” he said.

That one was built by Steve Smith in the 1970s. According to a 1978 Ellsworth American article by John R Wiggins, Smith was told to tear it down by then Park Superintendent Keith Miller.

Smith refused. He made a petition and went to the Mount Desert Selectboard. He kept fighting. He’s been fighting for decades.

A line in that 1978 petition read, “We the undersigned recognize that the residents of Otter Creek have always had and should continue to have reasonable access to the shore of Otter Creek for means of earning a gainful living from the sea.”

He hasn’t stopped wanting that. Lunt wants it, too.

During the time of the park’s development, you could see the fish houses from the water and the land, Lunt explained.

“Which is one reason why they’re no longer here,” Lunt explained, “because after the acquisition by the park, they were deemed to not be something that would be compatible with the vision of Johnny Rockefeller Jr.”

The fish houses were manmade. The park was more focused on showing the natural beauty of the terrain not fish houses or mansions.

Unlike most national parks where federally owned lands were repurposed, Lunt said, Acadia became a national park by donations of private and municipal land. It’s defined as an urban park because it’s surrounded by towns.

“That’s a huge difference. A lot of people come to Acadia and they’re expecting one entrance,” he said. “They’re very surprised to hear that the park is all around them.”

That means that the park has to integrate with the surrounding communities, which can be a challenge he said, because, it asks the question: what is the balance between human activity and nature.

It’s a friction and a balance that is often adjusted.

Lunt mentioned George Ledyard Stebbins, an evolutionary botanist whose philosophy about the park’s beginning, which he was big part of, was that lands being used by people for their own activities shouldn’t be disturbed.

According to Lunt, Stebbins believed “that the park should never encroach close enough to interfere, particularly with the village and the cultural life of Otter Creek.”

In the 1990s, his granddaughter, Anne Stebbins Funderburke, wrote a letter on behalf of the Otter Creek Aid Society to the park’s superintendent that said when the large pieces of land were purchased, “they made certain that they did not impinge on arable lands, which were needed by the inhabitants to maintain themselves and their families. Similarly, they did not shut off access to the waterfront so as to allow the fishermen among those inhabitants to continue their livelihood.”

In Otter Creek, with its one remaining fish house, access is not so easy. The steep incline from the Park Loop Road sometimes requires a rope to head down to the western shore. Those sturdier of step can get down a wee bit more easily, but not much so.

Funderburke continues, writing that restricting year-round access is ignoring fishermen’s rights as well as Otter Creek residents and lists removing the safety handrails to the fishing dock in the village, not allowing vehicular egress through the park’s Blackwoods Campground, and lack of fresh water access as issues.

It was after Rockefeller Jr.’s death in 1959 that waterfront lands were annexed to the park, Lunt said.

But it was in 1936 that at the Mount Desert Town Meeting, voters approved the extinguishing of a right of way to the public landing at Otter Creek.

“If you can imagine, it is quite an unusual step for a town to give up its access to one of its harbors,” he said.

The selectboard of Mount Desert had advanced that article because Rockefeller Jr. was well-respected and had done a lot of good in the community, Lunt said. The town’s warrant committee (which makes recommendations for the town warrant articles) had unanimously voted that the article be indefinitely postponed.

A couple of weeks later, it resoundingly passed at the town meeting. Lunt, who was until recently Mount Desert’s town manager, said that’s a red flag. He’d never seen anything unanimously opposed by a warrant committee then quickly pass so easily on the floor of a town meeting.

He believes that the Great Depression and the hard times it brought played a part. Many of the Mount Desert residents were employed by Rockefeller. People knew that Rockefeller would appreciate it if the article passed.

Town meeting was also an open vote on the article, he said. People hear who says aye and who says nay, see who raises their hands.

In 1986, some limited access returned. Boundary legislation shored up the park’s boundaries. An advisory commission was eventually created and meant to give town’s some input into park administration though towns can only nominate representation. The actual choices are made by the Secretary of the Interior.

But still the causeway in Otter Creek seals off the entrance to Otter Creek, though there are three small aqueducts.

The causeway replaced trestle bridges and there had even been drawbridges, though those were vulnerable to storms, Lunt said.

“Here’s something I think today would be almost impossible for people to understand is that the idea of that causeway was that Johnny Rockefeller Jr. wanted to acquire the land where those fish houses were, and his idea was to tear down the fish houses and to turn Otter Creek into a swimming pool, basically,” Lunt said. “So, the reason, apparently that he wanted to turn that into a swimming pool was that Seal Harbor Beach was getting way too crowded and he did not like looking down from the Eerie, down, and seeing this crowded beach and a lot of his friends thought that there were just too many people there.”

With the causeway, the area could be sealed more at low tide. The sun would warm the flats. The area would be a warm-water pool. People would swim there instead of Seal Harbor Beach. In a 1950 letter from Rockefeller to Newton Drury, Rockefeller states that the efforts to get the swimming pool needed to be stepped up.

“Unfortunately,” Lunt said of the causeway, “it also pretty much destroyed the fishing industry in that cove. Right now, there’s very few clams. There’s no fish or anything. It’s very difficult. Only a small boat can navigate through those archways.”

In November 2023, EA Engineering, Science, and Technology assessed whether or not the causeway in Otter Creek has “impacted hydrologic conditions within the cove, potentially leading to a decrease in biodiversity from historic levels.”

“Park staff and local community of Otter Creek have noted that biodiversity in Otter Cove within Acadia National Park appears to have declined over the past 100 years,” the firm wrote.

The causeway and bridge was meant to make the basin it created “warm enough for swimming,” the report states. However, the stop-logs that were meant to contain the water within the inner cove were never inserted.

Eventually, some of the people of Otter Creek wanted to challenge the town vote if they couldn’t get access to the fish houses. According to Lunt, Rockefeller offered to buy those fish houses and then let them have access to those houses forever, even after his death. It was a handshake deal, Lunt said, and during the Depression. They agreed.

“The problem was that those promises were never recorded in the deeds of the fish houses,” Lunt said.

That means there is no proof of the promise.

The fish house is a reminder of what Otter Creek’s working waterfront once was. Lunt stresses that it is still a community—perhaps one of the strongest and most year-round on the island, but it’s not a fishing community any longer.

Fishing boats once moored in the cove. Mussels were trawled for. Clams dug. Quarries pulled pink granite from the earth here and it was set on schooners before it headed across the world.

Now it is a village surrounded by a national park. Tall coniferous trees have taken over the farm fields along one part of Grover Ave, a network of local trails is not on the Instagram hot list.

“They’ve been picking away at us,” Smith told the Island Institute’s Jack Sullivan in June 2025 of the park, “stealing one piece after another for over 100 years. They’ve almost taken our waterfront, but they won’t as long as I’m alive.”

In the 1970s Smith looked at all the deeds between the park and the people who owned the fish houses. Just about 50 years ago, he tried to repair a remaining fish house. The park wasn’t happy about that, he’s said. So, there was just about ¼ of an acre that wasn’t deeded to the park somehow. He found that out in all his research and in the 1970s, he built a fish house there. The park wasn’t keen on that either, and legal battles began.

Smith calls the Causeway the “Wall of Death,” because of its impact to the ecosystem, restricting tidal flushing.

“The park also encroached upon another critical piece of waterfront, the Otter Creek boat launch, close to the mouth of the harbor, which had been used by fishermen for over a hundred years. In 1983, the park blocked access with boulders. But in part due to his advocacy, the barriers were ordered to be removed from the boat launch road, and Smith finally obtained a deed for his 484-square-foot parcel on which the last Otter Creek fish house stands,” Sullivan wrote.

Norman Walls, an Otter Creek man, Lunt said, remembered the fish houses were torn down at night.

“The fishermen were out of luck. That was gone. The (boat) landing was gone. The fish houses were gone,” Lunt said. “The whole idea of being able to fish out of Otter Creek was pretty much over by 1959, 1960, when he died.”

Now, the Otter Creek Aid Society, Stevie Smith, Lunt, and others are still trying to chip away and get access to the waterfront returned.

Lunt has advocated for the park to give a small bit of land to create a turnaround area at Otter Creek’s small and steep boat landing (not near the fish house). Currently vehicles have to back in or back out. According to that boundary legislation, that requires a land swap.

The park has created two documents about the history of Otter Creek and its fish houses.

“It’s been challenging for everyone,” Acadia National Park’s Management Assistant John Kelly has previously said. Much of it has to do with the rights and ownership of different lands. The park itself is made up of hundreds of parcels and land transfers.

Kelly had said, “The Otter Creek Aid Society does have two legal parcels.”

This was confirmed by court appointed land surveyors according to Kelly.

The right-of-way for the landing was granted back in 1993, Kelly said. Rights to the park’s land, he also explained, can’t be given without a process and involvement from Congress.

“The reason we exist is to protect and preserve the land,” Public Affairs Officer for Acadia National Park and Saint Croix Island International Historic Site Amanda Pollock had said in 2024. “We are always trying to be good neighbors and partners to the towns of MDI.”

The causeway itself is a designated historic landmark, Kelly has said and even though it’s over a natural resource, the park is obligated to protect both. The park had a tidal flow analysis done because of that need to protect the resource. The causeway was built, he said, to be part of the Park Loop Road.

For Mount Desert’s Village of Otter Creek to get enough land for a turnaround at its boat launch, they would most likely have to swap land that the town owns with the park. The amount needed is the size of half a NBA basketball court.

That doesn’t sit well with some residents of Otter Creek who feel like the park took enough land away—and access away—in the 1930s.

Some want to protect or get better access to the one fish house that remains, which is owned by the Otter Creek Aid Society.

The Town of Mount Desert Selectboard passed a resolution to say that it wanted to see what it could do to restore some viability to Otter Creek’s working waterfront. However, only an Act of Congress can override or amend the boundary legislation.

Lunt said Maine’s current legislators are not “terribly excited about that.”

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All photos, other than captioned photos, maps, and newspaper articles: Carrie Jones/Shaun Farrar/BHS

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Acadia Advisory Commission

Mount Desert Island Historical Society

Otter Creek Aid Society

The Waterfront of Otter Creek, a Community History

Traditional Uses of Fish Houses on Mount Desert Island and in Otter Cove

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