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Lucerne Inn: The Heart of Dedham’s History
The lone pine at Shelter Island in Phillips Lake is an historic,
distinctive, still-standing image.
PHOTO COURTESY OF LUCERNE-IN-MAINE VILLAGE CORP. |
With a modern-day
look as a place to enjoy dinner or an overnight, the Lucerne Inn is
the reason why many people come to Dedham.
The Route 1A
landmark has the appealing combination of a golf course, carefully
cultivated grounds and a great view of Phillips Lake.
But its history
suggests it is more than just an elegant inn where weddings and
meetings take place. It’s the history of one of Maine’s last
villages, Lucerne-in-Maine.
On the map, if you
imagine Dedham as a donut, the donut hole is the village of
Lucerne-in-Maine.
The inn and the
5,000 acres around it were going to be one of America’s first
planned communities in the 1920s. While that grand scheme never
panned out, the legacy is the village of Lucerne, a municipality
created by the Maine Legislature in 1927.
When the great
dream went down due to financial trouble in the 1930s, the municipal
portion of the Lucerne-in-Maine Village Corp. survived, while the
community association folded.
Today, the
Lucerne-in-Maine Village Corp. doesn’t collect taxes (those are paid
to Dedham, and passed back to Lucerne). But it has its own Board of
Overseers, a budget, warrant and village meeting. This year, while
the town of Dedham meets on Saturday, June 22, the village of
Lucerne won’t meet until Saturday, Aug. 10.
Clearly an
aberration in a state where local government is mostly towns, the
village survived some residents’ suggestion for dissolution about
eight years ago.
What property
owners in Lucerne like so much is that they can live—and
vote—elsewhere, but have a summer place at Phillips Lake and vote on
Lucerne budgets and issues.
Lucerne-in-Maine’s
roots go back to the 1920s, when the Lucerne-in-Maine Village Corp.
started as a developer’s dream.
The promotional
pitch pointed out Lucerne-in-Maine as “conceded by prominent
writers, artists and others to be one of the most beautiful spots in
America.”
There actually had
been an inn on the land for more than 100 years before New Yorker
Harold Saddlemire set his sights on it.
Dedham’s first
family, the Phillips, had come to the area after the War of 1812,
when land was given for payment of services to the country during
that war.
The Phillips built
what was called the Lake House, which operated as a stagecoach stop
between Bangor and Ellsworth. The railroad coming through in the
1890s enabled many more to make the trip to Dedham for recreational
respites from as far off as Boston and New York.
In 1925, Saddlemire
got the idea of buying the Lake House and all the available
surrounding land. Given the terrain (hills and lakes) that reminded
one of a “Little Switzerland” in either summer or winter, he called
the place Lucerne-in-Maine after Lucerne, Switzerland.
But the anticipated
tens of thousands of sales never happened, and the dream collapsed. |
