 When I read in Stephen 0. Muskie's graphic account of Campobello Island, "Her air is tangy with the mixing scents of land and sea," it was almost as if one of the Roosevelts were speaking. "Lunch and a trip to Eastport," writes Eleanor in 1933, and continues, "with the engine breaking down as usual, and the rain in our faces for a time... We came back in to tea before the fire. No telephone. Absolute peace. It is a joy."
"Campobello was next to Hyde Park in Father's affections," wrote his eldest son James in the engaging memoir Affectionately, F.D.R., "It was his second home." And FDR himself, twelve years after his Campobello neighbors had discreetly engineered the transference of his polio-stricken body on a stretcher down the hill to a boat and then onto a train at Eastport, said on his return in 1933 aboard the Amberjack II at the end of the first "hundred days" of his presidency, "I was figuring this morning on the passage of time and I remembered that I was brought here because I was teething forty-nine years ago, I have been coming for many months almost every year until twelve years ago, when there [was] a gap.
Governor Francis Neptune
of the Passamaquoddy Tribe
Meets with FDR at Campobello in 1920
Franklin's mother and father, Sara and James, first visited Campobello in 1883, the year after Franklin was born, and immediately came under the enchantment of the "beloved island," as they called it. They bought several acres and ordered a house to be built for them. It was completed in 1886 and the Roosevelts soon were accepted as "permanent" summer residents. A few select families from the eastern seaboard summered on the island whose waters, despite their hazards, provided splendid anchorages for boats. James Roosevelt's first Half Moon sank on the way back to the Hudson and was followed by a second Half Moon, a 60-foot, two-masted schooner.
For the elderly James, the island's very tranquillity and seclusion gave it its attraction, but for the young Franklin it was the place where he learned to handle a boat in perilous waters, to fish and to swim, to lead "paper chases" along the cliffs and expeditions off the shores of Nova Scotia in search of pirates' buried loot. By the late 1 890s he was organizing the summer residents' golf tournaments, the new sport. And in 1903 when he was courting Eleanor, he brought her and her maid to the island as his guests.
"I saw then," wrote Mrs. Hartman Kuhn, the Roosevelts' next-door neighbor at Campobello, "how he looked at you," and so she stipulated in her will that Sara could purchase the house for Eleanor and Franklin. It was a large one with thirty-four rooms, large and small, but after Eleanor's marriage it was the first house she felt was her own, and she loved furnishing it to her taste.
It had no electricity, was lit by kerosene lamps, and for decades there was no telephone, but that was part of its attraction for the two of them. Franklin entered politics in 1910 and Campobello became the one place where he could be with his family and the outside world was unable to get at him. As for Eleanor when she had Captain Franklin Calder take her up to St. Andrews in New Brunswick, in the "chig-chug," as the children called the motor launch, contentment echoed in every syllable as she wrote a friend, "The sun is out, and the fog is rolling out to sea, and I'm sitting in the bottom of the boat, sniffing salt air and now and then looking over the water to my green islands and gray rocky shores."
FDR and Eleanor Sit on the Steps Outside Their Campobello Home
with Their Children, His Mother Between Them, and "Chief" in 1920
Between March, 1905, when Eleanor and Franklin married and March, 1916, when the youngest of six children, John, was born (one had died a few months after birth), Campo was the one place the children had "Pa" to themselves, and he and they loved it. There he taught all the children (but not Eleanor) to handle a boat, even in treacherous straits and narrows, took on the role of the nimble-footed hare and danced elusively ahead of them on strenuous paper chases," picnicked and hiked and filled them with the lore of the place. It was no wonder that his son James described as "homesickness" his father's feelings for the island in the twelve years that his paralyzed limbs kept him from the annual trek to it.
FDR at Campobello with
His Son, Elliott, in 1911
The Roosevelts were like an army on the march when each year the household set out for Campobello. There was a nurse for each of the small children, three to five other domestics, mountains of trunks, valises, and hat boxes. They took a train to Boston, rested at old-fashioned Hotel Touraine during the day, took the sleeper to Ayers Junction in Maine, transferred to a wheezy train for the ride to Eastport, then went onto the motor launch for the last lap to Campo. "I know one Eleanor Roosevelt," wrote a friend, "who has four children [John would be born later that year] and moves them all six times a year and does everything else besides."
Another feminist footnote: in 1935 when Eleanor took Emma Bugbee of the New York Herald Tribune with her to Campobello, she went on a sail with Captain Calder. Eleanor took the tiller from the Captain and explained to Emma, "I never get a chance to sail the boat myself. There are always many men around... One has always to let the man do the sailing."
Left to Right: John, Franklin, Jr., FDR, and James Sailing on the Sewanna
During Their Cruise from Rockport, Maine to Campobello, July 14-28, 1936
Franklin was the demon yachtsman. During the Woodrow Wilson administration when he was assistant secretary of the Navy, he sometimes turned up at Campobello aboard a destroyer. Although it was against naval regulations, he persuaded the captain to let him take the helm and piloted the ship at full speed ahead through fog-bound waters. The Bay of Fundy's tides and currents were bred into his bones. One of his pet dreams was to harness Passamaquoddy's precipitous tides for purposes of electric power. It was never realized, but perhaps the idea for the Rural Electrification Administration had its origin in those "eye-straining" nights by Campo's kerosene lamps.
The house was not much used in the thirties, but in 1941 and 1942 the president and Mrs. Roosevelt were delighted to have the International Student Service, on whose board Mrs. Roosevelt served, use it for its summer Student Leadership Institutes. A high moment at the Institute was the dance at Welshpool where Mrs. Roosevelt and an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police led the company out onto the floor.
Ownership of the house was transferred to Elliott after the president's death. Eleanor spent most of the 1947 summer there in order to work on the second volume of her autobiography, This I Remember. Elliott later sold the house to the Hammer family who felt privileged to vacate it to allow Mrs. Roosevelt to use it. On such trips she stopped at Castine, Maine, to visit Bishop Will Scarlett, who had retired there, and his neighbor Molly Dewson, the fabled director of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, not to mention a stop at Perry's Nuthouse in order to do some early Christmas shopping.
In the summer of 1962 she roused herself from her final illness to come to Campobello as President Kennedy's representative for the dedication of the FDR Memorial Bridge that linked the island with the mainland. Her friends David Uurewitsch and his wife flew up with her and the author's wife Trude drove down with her. She scarcely was able to get to her feet, and Trude wrote of her last day on Campobello, "For the first time that morning she walked up and down in front of the Campo house, 'so that I can manage the steps of the Scarlett house,' she said... We drove down the Maine coast to do once more the things she always loved to do." A few weeks later she died.
"After speeches he came home and I think [he was] happy," she had written of Franklin's return to Campobello in 1933. She had the same happiness to be on the island. "[A] bit foggy," she wrote a friend. She was "settling down again into this quietest of places and loving it."
FDR Greets, "My Old Friends at Campobello," on June 29, 1933
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