Catalog entry

The Camden Mountains, also called the Camden Hills, are located just northeast of the town of Camden. The range includes Mount Megunticook, upon whose shoulders Mount Battie sits, Cameron Mountain, and Bald Rock Mountain. They stand high above West Penobscot Bay between Camden and Lincolnville, looking east toward Mount Desert and the rising sun. The Wabenaki, loosely defined as the "people of the dawn," greeted their maritime world, "the dawn land," from the Camden Hills, and other high points, including Mount Wallamatogus in Penobscot (460 feet), Awan-adjo  (at Bluehill), Caterpillar Hill in Sedgwick (with its panoramic sweep which stretches from the Camden Hills to Mount Desert and far out into Penobscot Bay), and atop Cadillac Mountain, Mount Desert. It is from the same peaks that artists and pilgrims alike still climb to view Penobscot Bay.

Mad-kam-ig-os'-sek, "big high land," is the Wabenaki word for Camden, and Meg-un-ti-cook, "big mountain harbor," the name for the harbor, is now used for Mount Megunticook. The inner harbor, quiet and safe, would have been the ideal place for a large, oceangoing canoe to lay up when the sea was rough. Capt. John Smith visited this place in 1614, during the Beaver Wars, and noted that the high mountains were used as a refuge from the Mik'maq of the Maritimes who fought the Wabenaki of Penobscot Bay to maintain their place as middlemen in the fur trade. These raiders would travel along the Downeast coast in their shallops. Mount Battie, of many spellings, was noted as Mount Betty in documents dating from 1757. It is a European corruption of a word borrowed from another place, the Madambettox Hills of Rockland. 

-Mark Honey

References:

Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy, "Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast," University of Maine Studies, 2nd Series, #55, November 1941, reprinted 1960 by the University of Maine Press. DeLorme's Atlas. Frank G Speck's "Penobscot Man," University Of Pennsylvania Press, 1940.

Curtis Island is located a short distance from Camden Harbor in Penobscot Bay. The island was known as Negro Island, from Revolutionary times to the 1930s, and in the early part of the nineteenth century as Mark Island. Abraham Ogier, in a deposition submitted in 1832, claimed that he had pastured hogs on the island and planted potatoes as early as 1773, and that he was driven off by the British in 1779. His grandson Lewis pastured sheep here for 40 years. The island was sold to the US government for a light station for $400 in 1835, and the Negro Island Light was established by an appropriation of $4500 in 1836. M.K.M. Bowers was the light keeper when Lane portrayed the island at dawn. The island was renamed Curtis Island in 1934 after Cyrus H.K. Curtis, publisher of the "Saturday Evening Post," a longtime summer resident and benefactor of Camden.

– Mark Honey

Reference:

McLane, Charles B, and McLane, Carol Evarts, "Islands of the Mid-Maine Coast," Penobscot Bay, Volume 1, Revised Edition, Tilbury House, Publishers, Gardiner, Maine, and the Island Institute, Rockland, Maine, page 124.

The Curtis Island Light is located on the seven-acre Curtis Island, a short distance off the coastline of Camden, Maine in the Penobscot Bay. The island was formerly known as Negro Island because the African-American cook of early settler, James Richards, admired the island greatly, but was later named Curtis Island in memory of Camden summertime resident, Cyrus H. K. Curtis. The original lighthouse was built in 1835 by contractor George Gault. Fifteen years later, an inspection report from 1850 stated that the lighthouse needed "immediate attention" and in 1855 the lighthouse was given a wooden outer sheath and new shingling in an attempt to stop the leaks. Lane painted the Curtis Island Light on at least two separate occasions, in 1852 and 1855, during his trips to the Maine coast.

This is information has been shared with the Lane project by Jeremy D'Entremont. More information can be found on his website, www.newenglandlighthouses.net and in his book The Lighthouse Handbook of New England. 

Joseph Story Hooper accompanied Lane and Stevens on their 1855 boating expedition in Maine. He traveled as an assistant and companion with Lane from Gloucester to Rockland, Maine, where Stevens met them with a boat. According to an inscription on Bear Island from Western Side of N. East Harbour, 1855 (inv. 136) a painting was made from that drawing, and presented to Hooper, who by then had moved to Dubuque, Iowa. In 1855, Hooper had recently moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts from Manchester, Mass, Massachusetts with his wife, Julia Ann Foster, who was the sister of Florence Foster, and a cousin of Stevens's wife, Caroline Foster. (1)

Hooper was born in 1827 in Manchester, Massachusetts. His parents were Joseph Hooper, Jr. (1786–1860) and Lucy Story Hooper (who died in 1827 shortly after the birth of Joseph Story Hooper, her sixth child).    

At the time of his marriage to Julia Ann Foster  in 1849 (in Manchester), Joseph S. Story was a “cabinet maker.” Julia Ann Foster (Gloucester, 1828–1912) was a daughter of Capt. Thomas Jefferson Foster (1801–65) and Julia Ann Babson Foster. Other children in the family were: Elizabeth (b. 1837, never married), Mary Eliza (b. 1830, never married) and Florence (b. 1839, never married).  

Joseph S. Hooper and Julia Ann Foster moved to Dubuque, Iowa sometime between 1856 and 1860; the 1860 Federal Census shows Joseph in Dubuque working as a “merchant.”  In the 1870 Census, he was described as a “furniture maker.”  Together, Joseph and Julia had six children, born between 1852 and 1865 (including twins).    

Julia Ann Foster Hooper outlived her husband by some thirty-five years. They are both buried in Dubuque.

– Martha Oaks

(1) Sarah Dunlap and Stephanie Buck, Fitz Henry Lane: Family and Friends. (Gloucester, MA: Church & Mason Publishing; in association with the Cape Ann Historical Museum, 2007), 118.

Joseph Lowe Stevens, Jr. (1823–1908) was Lane's closest friend and traveling companion. He was also executor of Lane's estate, and a tireless promoter of Lane's work. He was a supporter of abolition and animal welfare, and an active member of the Gloucester Lyceum. It was the Stevens family who encouraged Lane to make a print of Castine and who published and promoted it there Castine, from Hospital Island, 1855 (inv. 448). Joseph first worked as a dry goods salesman and in later life “engaged in the wholesale dry-goods and woollen trade on Summer St. Boston, travelling daily to and fro” on the train. (1)

Joseph's father, Dr. Joseph Lowe Stevens, Sr., was born in Andover, Massachusetts, and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He married Dorothy Little of Castine, Maine, where the couple settled, and where Joseph Jr. was born in 1823. In the spring of 1840, at the age of seventeen, Joseph, Jr. left Maine and moved to Gloucester to work in his uncle’s Samuel Stevens' dry goods store and to live with his grandfather, Zachariah Stevens. Seven years later, Joseph, Jr. married his second cousin, Caroline Stevens Foster. The couple eventually had five children, one of whom died very young.

Like most of the educated population of the town, Joseph joined the Gloucester Lyceum shortly after arriving in town; the signature of John J. Piper appears next in the membership book; and the next after him was Fitz Henry Lane. (2) Joseph remained involved with the Gloucester Lyceum and Library for most of his life, acting as director for many years, and was the superintendent at the time it became incorporated as the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library.

Joseph also helped his father work on a history of Castine, and he was sufficiently concerned about the welfare of animals to serve on the boards of three animal-aid societies. He became the secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the New England Humane Education Society, and treasurer of the Band of Mercy. (3) Joseph was committed to more than animal welfare; he involved himself in the Free Soil movement and the slavery debate, to the extent that he left Gloucester for Kansas in 1855 “to see for himself what was going on,” returning about two years later. (4)

Joseph L. Stevens, Jr. first became friends with Lane after the artist had returned from Boston and had set up a studio on Elm Stree. That same year, Joseph invited Lane to accompany him to Castine. It was the first of many such trips to the Maine coast, where Lane sketched and painted and visited with Joseph’s parents.

When Lane fell out with his brother-in-law, Joseph Stevens came to the rescue by purchasing the contested stone house from Lane and evicting the troublesome in-laws. He was also at Lane’s side when he died and was named as one of two executors in Lane’s will. In addition, he inherited two-thirds of the residual property of the estate.

Joseph’s wife Caroline died in 1886, and Joseph left Gloucester nine years later to marry Charlotte M. Todd of Milton. He remained there until his own death. He is buried in Oak Grove cemetery alongside Caroline and their infant son. Lane is also buried in their family plot.

– Stephanie Buck

(1) Joseph L. Stevens Jr., letter written as Superintendent of the Sawyer Free Library, for the 1876 Women’s Time Capsule. Gloucester Archives, CC195 and AS300.

(2) Gloucester Lyceum Records, vol. 1, 1830–1852.

(3) The New England Humane Education Society is not to be confused with the coastal lifesaving institution which was then known as the Massachusetts Humane Society. The Band of Mercy was associated with the Massachusetts SPCA.

(4) F. A. Sharf, "Fitz Hugh Lane: Visits to the Maine Coast, 1848–1855," Essex Institute Historical Collection 98, no. 2 (April 1962): 112.