🔒Not far from downtown Bar Harbor, Town Hill attracts small businesses

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A mini-boom in small-business activity is taking place in Town Hill, a small village that's part of the busy tourist town of Bar Harbor, but is located on its outermost fringe.

At The Travelin' Lobster, a 12-foot by 24-foot lobster shack takeout that just opened on Route 102, Town Hill's main thoroughfare, owner Kelly Corson is taking an order from a Florida couple for a mid-afternoon lobster dinner and a lobster roll.

Corson picks out a live specimen from a saltwater tank and hands it to her father, Hank Tibbetts, who's watching over several large pots of steaming water on the back deck. Corson's husband and the shack's co-owner, Phil Corson, is checking in to see how business is going before heading back to his fishing boat. Earlier in the day, he'd been hauling the lobsters that now sit in the tank, ready for customers.

“Some of the things I've heard from customers, as they pass, is they enjoy getting away to a more quiet, laid-back eatery with minimal crowds,” Kelly Corson says. “We like this spot because there's not a whole lot here.”

With the peak of the tourist season still to come, she is already seeing plenty of activity.

“People are coming by and saying, 'You're doing a great job,'” Kelly says. “Town Hill has really got some great offerings now.”

Route 102 is the main drag leading through Town Hill to what's known as the quiet side of Mount Desert Island. MDI's east side comprises much of Acadia National Park, as well as Bar Harbor — packed with lodgings, eateries and other tourist ventures. The quieter western side has less-visited portions of Acadia, the towns of Southwest Harbor and Tremont and several villages, including Town Hill. Primarily low-density residential or undeveloped, Town Hill's portion of Route 102 offers a strip of small service, commercial and retail businesses that include Town Hill Market, Atlantic Brewery, a sandwich shop and catering company called Mother's Kitchen and EBS Hardware. Other businesses established in recent years include the Bar Harbor Jam Co. and Bar Harbor Bait.

Corson of The Travelin' Lobster says the businesses look out for one another. She sells baked goods from the nearby Mount Dessert Bakery, operated by Robyn Clark. It was important to the Corsons to get their financing from the Camden National Bank branch that's in Town Hill.

“We want to build local relationships,” she says. “And they were fantastic to work with.”

A different demographic

Frost Farms, which opened in April, sells garden supplies on a site carved out of a wooded area. Owner Melissa “Frosty” Frost is a Maine Maritime Academy graduate who worked for a decade for a landscaper around Southwest Harbor. Frost always aimed to own a small business, liked landscaping, bought an acre last September, cleared out a raggedy woods, landscaped, renovated the existing barn, put up two greenhouses, grew half her stock from a feeder greenhouse she rented and located suppliers in Maine and New England for the rest.

Frost says she's seeing somewhat of a different demographic here, compared with Southwest Harbor, where the landscaping business she worked for is a destination in an out-of-the-way area. In Town Hill, Route 102 is a well-trafficked road.

“Because of the different locale and the main drag, we have a lot of traffic here,” Frost says. “This is more of a drive-by location and a lot of people are stopping in.”

Town Hill is proving attractive for small business largely because of property that's available, less expensive and not as storefront-oriented as commercial property in Bar Harbor, says Martha Searchfield, executive director of the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce.

“There's not a lot of available, open spaces left in Bar Harbor,” Searchfield says. “And a lot of it has to do with the type of businesses the area is attracting. Town Hill has a lot of room to grow businesses, along with fostering new and unique businesses. If a business owner is not looking to have a storefront, but more looking to have a space that is easily accessible, like having picnic tables and having space for people to be able to come and go — Town Hill is the perfect spot to lay roots and grow a business.”

A perfect example, she says, is Town Hill Takeaway, a dumpling and ramen take-out restaurant that is better suited to the Town Hill than downtown Bar Harbor, which “may not lend itself for easy in-and-out visits.”

Searchfield says she thinks at least some of area's activity has been spurred by social media.

“Business models have changed as the digital landscape has changed,” Searchfield says. “I don't think people are thinking, 'I'm going to open a storefront.' I think start-up businesses are thinking more along the lines of, 'I'll get the word out on social media and then build the business out of my home.' This approach cuts down on overhead, which is extremely important when starting a new business. Social media has changed how quickly you can get word out about a new business. People can know in a heartbeat, through Facebook, that blueberry pies are coming out of the oven. I think that helps small businesses grow their followings faster.”

More space, less expensive

Available commercial space is an increasing rarity on MDI, says David Woodside, who has had his company — Acadia Corp., which owns a number of shops in Bar Harbor — in Town Hill since 2003, when the company outgrew its former 5,000-square-foot warehouse elsewhere on MDI. In Town Hill, he found an existing and larger warehouse for sale, with room to add on.

“We started looking around at other possible spaces, and it's not an easy thing to find,” says Woodside. “The only place that was anywhere near affordable was Town Hill. Anything closer to [downtown] Bar Harbor, the price was double or more because it had more commercial value as retail space.”

Having observed the establishment of a number of small businesses in Town Hill over the years, Woodside credits the village's strategic location as a draw.

“I think people are seeing it's a decent retail location,” Woodside says. “If vehicular traffic works for your kind of a business, then there is a tremendous amount of traffic through here.” That includes resident and tourist traffic getting onto the island and crossing the island. “I think it will probably always be a mix of service-oriented businesses and some retail, because if you want to be on the island, it's one of the few commercially zoned areas that has space left.”

At Mount Dessert Bakery, Clark, who is also a paralegal, started small, making perhaps 10 pies per week and selling them at a local campground. Over time, she acquired small accounts and two years ago joined a farmer's market in Town Hill. She now bakes six days a week, sells pies and baked goods at the farmers market and a variety of baked goods to commercial and private clients. She also does one day of retail.

Town Hill is just big enough and central enough to make a small business work in a setting more relaxed than Bar Harbor, Clark says.

“Businesses are able to make it because you've got to go through Town Hill to get to Southwest Harbor or Northeast Harbor,” she says. “And it's a nice clientele, more laid back than the hustle and bustle of downtown Bar Harbor.”

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