Explore Hulls Cove on Mount Desert Island, Maine - Visit Acadia

Hulls Cove

In the Town of Bar Harbor, a few miles before you reach the the downtown area, you come upon a small cove of Frenchman Bay named for Captain Samuel Hull, a sea captain from Connecticut who settled here in the 1780s. Hull was the chief citizen of the cove, and the meeting on April 4, 1796 that created Bar Harbor, in those days called the Town of Eden, was held at his house.

Just up the hill to the south of the village — a post office, general store, a few places to eat or stay, a few businesses, plus the cove — you’ll find Acadia National Park’s Visitor Center.

The old Hulls Cove schoolhouse, on the hill to the north, has been restored and today is used as a community center, dance hall, and place for wedding receptions and other celebrations.

The best-known residents of Hulls Cove are dead. Marie Therese de Gregoire, granddaughter of the explorer Cadillac, was granted the eastern half of Mount Desert Island by the Massachusetts stage legislature in 1787. She and her husband Barthelemy, plus their three children, settled in Hulls Cove in 1788 but, in the words of a 1905 history, “The de Gregoires were evidently not suited to a pioneer life and did not prosper.” He died in 1810, she died in 1811, and they are buried in the small village cemetery.