Charles T. How
Charles T. How (1840–October 8, 1909) was an American lawyer and real-estate developer who helped start Bar Harbor’s mansion-era in the late 1800s. He visited Bar Harbor in 1870, began buying large tracts of land, and became the town’s biggest landowner. By the 1880s, wealthy visitors from East Coast cities built cottages there, including Blair Eyrie, Mizzentop, Stanwood, and The Turrets, so they could stay in Bar Harbor instead of hotels.
How lived in Boston in winter, at the Brunswick Hotel, and moved to Bar Harbor for the rest of the year, arriving in spring to prepare for the season. He stayed at the Belmont Hotel, owned by his brother John and nephew Waldron Bates; his own family stayed at Cleftstone. He chaired the Bar Harbor Society for several years and started the Village Improvement Association. When Bar Harbor’s water supply was tight, he founded the Eden Water Company to compete with the Bar Harbor Water Company, spurring improvements.
He also donated what is believed to be the first parcel of land for the future Acadia National Park, giving Fawn Pond to the Village Improvement Association in 1906. He died in Prangins, Switzerland, on October 8, 1909, at about 68 or 69. The master bedroom at Bar Harbor’s Cleftstone Manor is named after him. Plaques honoring How stand at the Woodbury–Cleftstone Roads intersection and at Fawn Pond. In 1911, Bar Harbor’s summer residents built a memorial for him in Woodbury Park, a four-acre gift to the town in his honor.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 03:41 (CET).