Today

Southwest Harbor may seem like the “quiet side” of Mount Desert Island in fall, but in summer, its Main Street is full of tourists.

Ken Minier, Southwest Harbor’s town manager for the last 10 years, doesn’t agree with the “Quiet Side” marketing moniker that someone tagged to the town 12 or 15 years ago.

Not-so-quiet is more like it, he says of the Mount Desert Island community.

“I have always said this is the busiest little town I have ever been in,” Minier maintains. “You go from one item to another. It’s a working town, but it doesn’t close down in winter the way Bar Harbor does.”

It does, however, spring to life in summer in its own way. The population, a year-round 1,966, nearly triples in summer.

The visitors aren’t the souvenir and night-life seekers drawn to the Bar Harbor side of the island. Rather, they do their thing by day, enjoying hiking, biking and kayaking.

Contrasting with the active visitors, Southwest Harbor’s year-round population is slowly aging. A good percentage of the residents are retired.

Given the rate that older couples without children have moved into Southwest Harbor, Minier personally was surprised that the town failed to top 2,000 at the last census count. Population has stayed incredibly steady—there were 1,952 residents in the 1990 census, 14 fewer than today.

Twenty years ago, according to Minier, Southwest Harbor could well have passed for the heart of the “quiet side” of Mount Desert Island.

But that image has mostly fallen away as Southwest Harbor bustles and changes with the years. Yet the three distinctions noted in the town’s emblem have stayed steady: vacationing, industry and fishing.

There is a fourth, too, within its design (which is found on the door to the town office): the year 1905.

Curiously, while many of Hancock County’s towns have rallied ‘round their sesquicentennial or even bicentennial celebrations in the last dozen or more years, Southwest Harbor hasn’t even reached its first 100 years.

That will happen in 2005, marking the day in 1905 when the town broke away from Tremont. The late, local bookmark in history (though Southwest Harbor was settled in the mid-1700s) is a footnote to Mount Desert Island politics.

Today, people know Southwest Harbor for its boatyards and working waterfront.

And, now, too, in a not-so-quiet way, the pink flamingos that sprout around town each June. Harbor House, the community center for the town’s youth, makes an annual fundraiser out of the sale of pink flamingos, as part of the Quiet Side Festival.

That’s been going for about 10 years. Or, as the town manager says, just long enough to contribute to the town’s new-found bustle and business.