ACADIA NATIONAL PARK, Maine — Near the mouth of Frenchman Bay, miles from the mainland, sits a green island surrounded mostly by the open sea.
Tour boats come and go during the summer, but the only year-round residents on this circular island are birds and bugs and perhaps a few other animals that might travel from nearby inhabited islands.
But Baker Island, located off Mount Desert Island, is not a completely wild place. It has a lighthouse tower and an adjacent home that used to house a family charged with keeping the beacon going, two privately owned seasonal cottages and the Gilley homestead, where the Gilley family first established themselves on the island in the early 1800s.
The days of people living year-round on Baker Island may be gone, but they are not forgotten. And Acadia National Park, which owns most of the 162-acre island, is taking steps to help make sure the island’s history and structures survive into the future.
The park does not own the structure that most urgently needs attention, but likely will by the end of the year. The Coast Guard is in the process of finding a new owner for the island’s lighthouse tower, which was built in 1855. The brick tower was preceded by a wooden light tower that was built in 1828, according to park officials.
John Kelly, Acadia’s planner, said Monday that the park is the only entity in line to inherit the lighthouse. The Coast Guard has plans to continue operating the automated solar-powered light regardless of who owns the tower, he said.
The local town and a nonprofit lighthouse preservation group were interested in taking over the tower but have since changed their minds, mainly because of the cost involved, according to Kelly. He said the 43-foot-high brick tower needs more than $800,000 in repairs, mainly to the weathered masonry.
The park would rather not take on such a costly project, Kelly said, but has a responsibility to maintain historic buildings. The lightkeeper’s house and the Gilley homestead on Baker Island are but a few of such structures in Acadia, which include another lighthouse on Bear Island, carriage road gatehouses on MDI and the Carroll Homestead in Southwest Harbor.
The Baker Island lighthouse complex, including the keeper’s house and the tower, already is on the national register, according to park officials.
“The big issue is the outer layer of bricks,” Kelly said of the tower, which is 20 feet in diameter and has a wrought-iron spiral staircase inside that leads to the beacon. “We’re going to need to do something with it fairly soon.”
Other than assuming ownership of the tower, the park also is taking a cultural resources inventory of the island. The purpose of the inventory is to chart the human history of the island so the park can determine whether it needs to preserve not just the buildings, but the surrounding landscape, too.
Kelly said the island used to have fewer trees because the Gilleys kept livestock and farmed on the island from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, but trees have been slowly encroaching upon the fields around the houses for the past several decades. The park is making sure the trees do not advance any farther while it is conducting the inventory, Kelly said.
The park will send an inventory report to the State Historic Preservation Commission, which then is expected to ask the National Register of Historic Places to list the cluster of homes on the island as a historic landmark.
“Together, the collection [of buildings] could be significant,” Kelly said. “They tell an important story about island life in Maine in the 1800s.”
The island essentially has been uninhabited since the 1950s, even though one couple lived in one of the private homes from 1989 to 1991, according to Rebecca Cole-Will, cultural resources program manager for the park. At low tide, Baker Island is accessible from Little Cranberry Island by an exposed rocky bar.
Kelly said the park has received inquiries from individuals and groups who want to lease the lightkeeper’s house. The likely acquisition of the tower and the possibility of opening the lighthouse to the public could affect any eventual decision on such a lease, which likely wouldn’t be made for at least another year, he said.
The island is open to the public now, even if the buildings on it are not, Kelly said. The tower ownership transfer, lease inquiries and the resumption of commercial boat tours to the island in 2007, which had been discontinued for several years, have helped renew the park’s attention to Baker Island, he said. Acadia has owned land on the island since 1967.
“It is certainly getting more attention from the park than it has been,” Kelly said of the remote island.
According to Jim Vekasi, Acadia’s head of maintenance, park work crews have been going out to the island for the past several summers to try to stabilize the park’s buildings.
The houses have been re-roofed, exterior walls painted, and ventilated covers placed on windows and chimneys to make sure no water gets in but air can circulate in and out, he said.
Transporting workers and materials out to the island, which has no dock or pier, has not been easy, Vekasi said. Everything has to be transported by boat and then transferred to shore in a smaller boat and carried to the work sites from the beach.
Vekasi said the buildings have received scant maintenance over the past 30 years or so. The park wants to make sure they are preserved, he said, but currently has no plans to open them to the public or to restore them to their former, lived-in conditions.
“We don’t want to lose those buildings, so we’ve been doing work on them the past couple of years,” Vekasi said. “It was getting to the point where something needed to be done.”
