Bear Island

The name traces to January 1772, when the surveyor James Hersey led a party of six men and several Pennacook guides across the frozen channel from Meredith Neck. Near the narrow portage route known as the Carry, where canoes were once hauled between opposite shores, the group's dogs reportedly flushed several bears from cover. They called the place Big Bear Island, later shortened to Bear Island, and it was formally annexed to Meredith in 1799. The account comes from Hersey's own later recollections and an early Boston Globe retelling, so it is best treated as a traditional origin story rather than a verified record.

Settlement came early and stayed small. Robert Bryant is identified as the first settler, with a house on the northern ridge around 1770, before he left to serve in the Revolution. Other families followed, farming rocky ground, keeping livestock, and crossing by boat in summer and over ice roads in winter. At its peak the island supported roughly fourteen families and a school with seventeen pupils. The farms are long gone, but their stone walls still run through the woods.

The figure who looms largest is Dorothy "Dolly" Nichols, born around 1777, who came to the island with her husband about 1814 and started a ferry to Meredith Neck. It was valued especially for moving livestock, which few island boats could handle. Left largely on her own, she simply kept going: fishing, tending a garden, selling provisions, taking in travelers caught out in storms, rowing supplies across in summer and hauling them over the ice in winter. When the steamboat Lady of the Lake began passing her cabin in 1849, journalists aboard wrote her up and Aunt Dolly became a regional celebrity. She died in 1857. Dolly's Point and the Dolly Islands still carry her name.

Two twentieth-century arrivals shaped what the island is now. In 1898 Ellery Channing Mansfield built an observation tower on one of the high points; the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire bought the property in 1926, and between May and July of 1927 workers enclosed the tower and attached a stone sanctuary under the direction of the Rev. Kenneth Ripley Forbes. The whole job cost about $4,000, much of it donated by islanders, and St. John's-on-the-Lake was built from the start to welcome summer people of every denomination. Then in the early 1970s, when word got out that developers were looking at a large tract of the northern interior, island property owners formed the Bear Island Conservation Association. That is the reason the wooded middle of the island still looks roughly as it did a century ago.

Bear Island is boat access only. There is no bridge and no causeway, and the mainland side of island life happens on Meredith Neck, with Shep Brown's Boat Basin off Meredith Neck Road the usual public launch. Owners keep a boat plus a slip, mooring, or dock on the Meredith side and somewhere to leave a car, and as on every island out here that mainland arrangement is the part worth sorting out before you buy rather than after. In winter, crossing depends entirely on ice conditions.

This is not an off-grid proposition. Bear Island took the lake's first submarine electric-power cable and its first armored underwater telephone cable, so power and communications came here before they reached most of the other islands. What any individual camp actually has still needs checking property by property, which we walk buyers through.

Mail comes by water. The Sophie C, the oldest floating post office in the United States, stops at the island through the season, and the mail dock is a social occasion as much as a delivery: passengers, ice cream, refreshments, and the island tradition of children leaping off the pilings into her wake as she pulls away. She runs public mail-boat cruises out of Weirs Beach and Wolfeboro, which is the one way to see the island without knowing somebody who owns there.

Otherwise the island is private, with no public beach or landing, and the conserved interior and its trails belong to the island community rather than the public. St. John's-on-the-Lake is the exception people come ashore for, still holding weddings, baptisms, memorial services and Sunday worship, and reckoned to be the largest enclosed public gathering space on any Winnipesaukee island.