Cyrus Curtis

In our last post, we introduced Curtis Island. Here it is seen across the Belfast, Maine harbor. Belfast is where we ate the delicious lobster rolls I featured earlier.

We are wrapping up our leaf-peeping tour of New England tour today. I’ll close out the series with photos of the Island and three spectacular trees at Camden Hills State Park. And then add a few more as we travel back to Virginia.

This photo of Curtis Island includes its lighthouse on the far right hand corner.

Close up. I’m not sure what the red plant is. Whatever, its brilliant red matches the roofs. The lighthouse is one of 65 found along the Maine coast. There are so many Maine has become known as the Lighthouse State. In comparison there are approximately 80 along the whole Pacific coast including the states of Washington, Oregon and California.

1851 painting of Curtis Island by marine painter Fitz Henry Lane.

I mentioned in my last blog that Curtis Island was named after the publisher Cyrus Curtis. Did I mention he was wealthy? This is a photo of his boat, er, yacht. Curtis’s summer home was in Camden just south of Belfast where he was Commodore of the Yacht Club from 1909 to 1933. Of course when you build the club, donate it to the town, and dock your 230 foot yacht out front, you should be Commodore.

Curtis was the creator of the Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. Both have interesting stories. Legend has it that when Curtis first published the Ladies Home Journal he gave a copy to his wife, Louisa Knapp, for review. She more or less told him it was crap. His response was “Do you think you can do any better?” Hers, “Yes,” His, “Fine, you do it.” During its day, the Journal became the most widely circulated women’s magazine in the U.S.

The Saturday Evening Post had its beginnings some 80 years before Curtis purchased it in 1897. It traces its beginning back to 1821 when it was printed out of the same shop and using the same print type that Benjamin Franklin had used for the Pennsylvania Gazette. It achieved its highest circulation with 90,000 nationwide subscribers in the 1860s. Curtis pushed this up to the highest circulation of any magazine in the world by the 1920s. His wealth was calculated at $43 billion in today’s dollars. No wonder he could afford the yacht. He actually had three built, all with the name Lyndonia. Two of them would actually do military service. One in WW I and the other in WW II.