The Train to the Top of the East

Now you're climbing through the site of a war, and I'd bet nobody has told you. It was fought on this mountain, and it was fought over who got to charge you for the view. Go back to eighteen eighty-three. If you were stopping in Bar Harbor and wanted the top of Green Mountain, which is Cadillac to you, a fellow named Frank Clergue had it all arranged. A carriage took you out to Eagle Lake. A steamboat called the Wauwinet took you across it. And on the far shore a little steam locomotive pushed you up the mountain on a cog railway. Ninety minutes, town to summit. That steamboat had been dragged overland from a pier in Bar Harbor, painfully slow, just to get her into the lake. Then in eighteen eighty-seven a rival company built a carriage road up the mountain, and a man with a carriage has no need of a railroad. So the railroad men put a gate across the road and charged a fee. That lasted one day. The carriage men came up and tore it down. So one night, the story goes, the railroad men went out in the dark with sticks of dynamite, and they blew up the road. There's one more I can't swear to at all. They tell of a Gentleman Bandit on that summit road in those days. He held up the buckboards, took the money and jewelry from the men, and never touched the ladies. Then he vanished into the woods with five thousand dollars on his head. The war? Nobody won. The railway ran its last season around eighteen ninety. The two locomotives sat for five years, and then they were sold off to the cog railway on Mount Washington, where they went on working for more than a hundred years under a string of new names. What's left up there is iron pins set in the granite, and one lone rail, and that's all I'll tell you, because it isn't marked and it's better left alone. The Wauwinet is at the bottom of Eagle Lake. There are three stories about how she got there. She was stripped and sunk, or she was scuttled off the wharf, or the ice crushed her at anchor. Take your pick. Any way you tell it, there's a steamboat lying under Bar Harbor's drinking water, waiting on a carriage that isn't coming.