Located in Hancock County on Mount Desert Island along Maine’s Down East coast, Bar Harbor has been widely known as a tourist destination since the mid-1870s. Founded in 1796 as the village of Eden, Massachusetts, it became part of Maine when that state came into being in 1820, and took its current name — which comes from the sand and gravel bar that connects the town to Bar Island in Frenchman Bay — in 1918.

The character of the town was changed by the most dramatic event in its modern history, the Fire of 1947.

Today its character can be glimpsed by the fact that the number of hotel and motel and bed & breakfast rooms in town (some 5,000) roughly equals Bar Harbor’s year-round population (5,434 by the 2017 census).

The best-known person born in Bar Harbor is former N.Y. governor and U.S. vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, whose parents moved into a summer rental cottage (now torn down) along the Shore Path only a few days before his arrival on July 8, 1908.