Eliza Homans

Eliza Homans

Courtesy National Park Service/Acadia National Park

Quick Facts

Significance:

First land donor to the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations

Place of Birth:

Dover, New Hampshire

Date of Birth:

1832

Place of Death:

Bar Harbor, Maine

Date of Death:

1914

Place of Burial:

Cambridge, MA

Cemetery Name:

Mount Auburn Cemetery

Eliza Lee Homans (born Lothrop) was born in 1832 in Dover, New Hampshire to Mary and Samuel K. Lothrop. She spent her childhood in Boston and married Charles Dudley Homans in 1856. They lived together in Boston, but spent summers from the 1870s and onward at their cottage near Schooner Head Overlook, just a few miles from Bar Harbor. Eliza's brother also had property on Mount Desert Island, which had been purchased jointly with the father of George Dorr and later become part of Old Farm estate.

After Eliza's husband Charles died in 1886, she continued to travel, manage properties across New England, and found a ladies' social club with her sister. In the following two decades, both of her children died within a year of each other and she found solace in her connection to Mount Desert Island.

Now a longtime summer resident of Bar Harbor, Eliza Homans owned approximately 140 acres of land which included the Bowl, the Beehive, and the south side of Champlain Mountain. The Beehive rises 500 ft above the ocean on the southeastern edge of Mount Desert Island, and the Bowl is a small pond just in front of it. Homans decided this land, with its tremendous natural features, could not truly be "owned" and needed to be shared.

In May 1908, she sent a deed to Charles W. Eliot, president of the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations (HCTPR). She opted for the land transfer, but not her name, to be publicized. This was the first land donation to HCTPR, starting the momentum for subsequent land donations and purchases to what would later become Acadia National Park. Homans' friendships with other conservationists like Charles W. Eliot and family connections to the island may have influenced her decision to donate her land. Her land transfer did have reservations, including the right to shoot, fish, boat and keep a boathouse on the Bowl. The Beehive Mountain Aqueduct Company.was also permitted to continue using the pond as a public water supply.

Eliza Homans died in 1914 in Bar Harbor, Maine and was buried with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Between 1915 and 1916, Homans Path was constructed in her name as part of a trail network at and around Sieur de Monts. It is a steep trail consisting of granite steps, tight passages, and overhangs, where hikers can continue onto the summit of Dorr Mountain via other connector trails.