Before the fire

A view of Bar Harbor, Maine in the early years of the twentieth century, when it was already a popular tourist destination, especially for the wealthy. This image was probably captured from one of the islands in Frenchman Bay. Much of this terrain was altered in 1947, when a wildfire wiped out much of the forest cover on Mt. Desert Island, along with a large number of hotels and private homes in and around Bar Harbor.

The recipient of this card was William B. Chase, music critic for the Evening Sun, and it was mailed to his office in New York City on August 14, 1906; Chase later moved on to the New York Times. At a party for his seventy-first birthday, in 1943, he was serenaded by a composition written in his honor by the composer Nikolai Lopatnikoff, entitled "Arietta on the Name C-H-A-S-E." Chase's father, Austin C. Chase, was a farmer, piano manufacturer, postmaster of Syracuse, real estate developer, and lieutenant-colonel in the National Guard; the Encyclopedia of Biography of New York notes that among his many other accomplishments in 1882 he became president of the Chilled Plow Company, "when that institution was in very straightened circumstances and its affairs in a very unsatisfactory condition," and quickly put it to rights.

The unidentified sender of the card was staying a few miles away in Seal Harbor at the Seaside Inn, which escaped the 1947 fire but was later torn down.