The Turrets

Architect Bruce Price (1845-1903) designed The Turrets around the same time he was creating the Chateau Frontenac hotel in Quebec City and an elite collection of homes in Tuxedo Park, New York. (The latter, with their open interior spaces and frequent use of local materials, strongly influenced Frank Lloyd Wright.) In all, Price designed seven buildings in Bar Harbor, of which only The Turrets remains. It has been called “perhaps the climax of the informal seaside house of the nineteenth century.”

On the day before Christmas, 1974, it became the first building in Bar Harbor to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Ironically, that year The Turrets, then as now on the campus of College of the Atlantic, was in terrible condition and falling apart. A concentrated restoration project from 1975-1982, headed by student Barbara Sassaman (COA class of ’78, then clerk of the works) and professors Roc Caivano (architect and project manager) and Harris Hyman (engineer and project contractor), brought the building back to its former glory, and The Turrets now serves the college as its administrative center.

Bruce Price’s daughter, the etiquette guru Emily Post, lived in one of the homes at Tuxedo Park. Thanks to her influence, the unusual formal dinner wear worn at the community’s first Autumn Ball in 1886 became known as the ‘tuxedo.’