On April 6, 1909, America’s foremost explorer reached the pinnacle of his career when he “nailed the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole” on his seventh arctic expedition. Then, Maine’s own Robert E. Peary returned home to a hero’s welcome and was promoted by Congress to the rank of Rear Admiral. Peary then announced his retirement and withdrew to his beloved Eagle Island in Casco Bay.
Robert Edwin Peary was born in Cresson, Pennsylvania, on May 6, 1856. When his father died three years later, Robert’s mother moved her family to Portland, where young Robert was raised and schooled. After graduating from Portland High School in 1873, Peary moved to Brunswick where he earned an engineering degree from Bowdoin College.
In 1881, after briefly working as a surveyor in Fryeburg, Peary joined the United States Navy and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the engineer corps. Peary’s career as an arctic explorer began five years later when he set sail for Greenland to study the ice caps.
Upon Peary’s retirement in 1909, this American hero and celebrated international figure returned to his Casco Bay “promised land” at South Harpswell and “the only permanent address he ever had.”
Peary had purchased Eagle Island from George W. Curtis of Harpswell, in September of 1881. The rocky 17-acre island sets a few miles off shore, where it rises just 40 feet above Casco Bay.
By 1903, Peary and his wife, Josephine, began building the structures which would become home. Materials for the main house and other structures were “barged in” from Portland and unloaded “between the tides.” Local carpenters and joiners camped on the grounds when work was underway in the warmer months.
Although these buildings would evolve over time, the two-story main house eventually came to have an open porch, a library, dining room, kitchen, living room and bedrooms on the second floor. The home also had the simpler luxuries of an earlier time.
Cool rainwater was collected in a “massive cistern” and drawn to the slate sink by a pitcher pump in the kitchen. Hot water was heated in a tall copper kettle on the “Queen Atlantic woodstove,” while 50-pound blocks of ice — lugged over from Harpswell — kept food cold in the ice box. And, a triple fireplace helped to heat the home, while kerosene lamps provided illumination in the darker hours.
The southern end of the island produced a “picker’s bounty” for raspberry jams made by the family, while vegetables grew in the garden. The “warm morning sun” and fresh, salty, summer breezes made the east side a perfect place for hanging wet laundry out to dry.
The bountiful waters of Casco Bay provided ample seafood and one lobster, by far “too large for the pot,” was brought up
“riding” on Peary’s trap. The 21-pounder was cleaned of its meat and “taxidermied” by the admiral. The behemoth is still displayed in the main house.
The Peary family “toughed-out” many a major summer storm on Eagle Island. “Frequent, violent … thunderstorms” produced loud “claps of thunder” while the flag pole had been “struck and destroyed” many times over the years.
Though retired, Adm. Peary stayed busy writing several books and even penned articles for Harper’s Weekly and Century Magazine, and saw to a great deal of correspondence with past and future presidents, aviators, heads of state, scientists and many of the “great men of his time.”
Local staff lived on the island and saw to the daily needs and chores of the Peary family and their guests. Even the children kept busy on Eagle Island as “teachers from Harpswell” provided summertime activities and instruction.
The Peary family spent most off-season months in their Washington D.C. home, as Eagle Island was not a place to raise a family in winter. In fact, it wasn’t until 1946 that Admiral Peary’s son tried year-round living for “three summers and two winters,” on Eagle Island.
On Feb. 20, 1920, despite over 35 blood transfusions over a 2-year-long battle with “pernicious anemia,” Rear Adm. Robert Edwin Peary died at the age of 63 in Washington and was interred at Arlington’s National Cemetery.
In 1967 the “Peary heirs” bestowed Eagle Island to the State of Maine. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 197 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 2014. Today, the island is operated by the Maine Park Service for residents and seasonal visitors to explore.
While Peary’s exploration of the North Pole became one of the most legendary “and controversial” expeditions in American history, his life and times on Eagle Island are remembered as one of the simpler and more retiring of our Stories From Maine.
Lori-Suzanne Dell is a Brunswick author and historian. She has published four books and runs the “Stories from Maine” Facebook page.