Mira Monte Inn

The Hotel

Mira Monte Inn occupies the 69 Mount Desert Street parcel a single block from the Bar Harbor town green, in the original 1864 summer cottage built by Orlando Ash, son of Captain Benjamin Ash, then a prominent figure in the resort-era founding of Bar Harbor. The Italianate-Victorian house was named 'Mira Monte', the Italian for 'behold the mountains', a reference to the southern view across the village toward the granite domes of the Acadia range. The original Greek portico and the four-column south-elevation porch remain the property's most photographed exterior feature.

The cottage received its most prominent guest in 1884, when it became the summer campaign home of James G. Blaine, the United States Secretary of State and the Republican presidential nominee of that year. Blaine's campaign team worked from the south-elevation parlour and ran the candidate's correspondence from the dining room. In 1890 the eminent Philadelphia physician and naturalist Henry C. Chapman, curator of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, acquired the property as a permanent summer residence; the Chapman family held the house until the mid-twentieth century.

The 1947 Bar Harbor fire, the catastrophic October fire that razed two-thirds of the village and most of the surviving 'cottage colony' of the Gilded Age, stopped its advance half a block south of Mira Monte. The fire's failure to reach the property is the reason Mira Monte is one of the only Eden-era summer estates still in continuous operation as a building. Bar Harbor native Marian Burns acquired the then-decaying house in 1980 and opened it as a bed-and-breakfast, restoring the period detailing and converting the family quarters to nineteen guest rooms across the main house and the converted carriage barn.

Today's inventory holds nineteen rooms, every one with period furnishings, working gas fireplaces in the principal-floor categories, and the lace, plaster, and heart-pine detailing that the Burns restoration preserved. Full hot breakfast runs daily in the formal dining room (the same room Blaine used in 1884). The property is a five-minute walk from every village restaurant, a six-minute walk from the West Street waterfront, and a four-mile drive from the Acadia gate. For travellers prioritising authentic 1864 provenance, presidential-campaign history, and bed-and-breakfast service of the most personal kind, Mira Monte is the village's heritage address.

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