On our last afternoon on Mount Desert Island, we visited La Rochelle Mansion and Museum and walked around the campus of the College of the Atlantic.
La Rochelle
La Rochelle is a waterfront mansion built in 1903 in the Georgian Revival architectural style for George Sullivan Bowdoin, a great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton. He was also a J.P. Morgan Bank partner and Treasurer. The mansion is named after the Bowdoin (Baudouin)’s ancestral home in La Rochelle, a seaport in the southwest region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France. The family would travel to Bar Harbor from New York to stay in La Rochelle with their servants and guests in the summertime.
Our favorite thing about La Rochelle is its seaside location and harbor view from the large veranda.
College of the Atlantic
This is a private liberal arts college which offers only two interdisciplinary humanities degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Human Ecology and Master of Philosophy in Human Ecology. It has only 355 undergraduate students.
What we enjoyed the most there is its seaside garden. We talked to the person we saw tending to the garden to find out the names of some spectacular plants there and found out that she was an undergraduate student from Laos. She came to the College from a boarding school in Germany.
Thank you for reading! We hope you have peace and joy.
David and Lam 