Peter Dow Bachelder

Peter Dow Bachelder is a Maine native and a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono. Following a brief stint with the U.S. Weather Bureau, he devoted his professional career to service within Maine's tourism industry. He spent 30 years as Director of Information Services at the Maine Publicity Bureau-in Portland and in Hallowell. For much of his life, Bachelder has savored an intense fondness for the state of Maine. Growing up in Cape Elizabeth, he developed an early fascination for the...See more

Peter Dow Bachelder is a Maine native and a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono. Following a brief stint with the U.S. Weather Bureau, he devoted his professional career to service within Maine's tourism industry. He spent 30 years as Director of Information Services at the Maine Publicity Bureau-in Portland and in Hallowell. For much of his life, Bachelder has savored an intense fondness for the state of Maine. Growing up in Cape Elizabeth, he developed an early fascination for the ocean, which soon fostered his desire to learn more about the state's unique maritime heritage. For several years, he wrote a column about shipwrecks and lighthouses that appeared in The Portland Evening Express. During the course of his work in tourism, Bachelder traveled more than two million miles within the state, visiting and coming to know virtually all the grandeur its nooks and corners present. This decades long grand tour has afforded him a vast body of knowledge from which to draw, in connection with his extensive writings on various Maine-related topics. To this end, he wrote a book called The Great Steel Pier, an illustrated history of the Old Orchard Ocean Pier-the long-standing attraction that helped draw millions of enthusiastic visitors to this popular southern Maine beachfront community during the early and middle years of the twentieth century. A more recent work, Steam to the Summit, recounts the little known tale of the Green Mountain Railway, an 1880s cog railroad that for eight seasons operated from the shore of Eagle Lake to the summit of today's Cadillac Mountain at Bar Harbor.Bachelder resides in Ellsworth and has spent the last nine years doing extensive research for A Century of Service to Maine's Leisure Travel Industry: A Centennial History of the Maine Publicity Bureau/Maine Tourism Association. A companion volume, Maine Tourism: The Origins, Growth, and Development of the Pine Tree State's Foremost Industry, is currently in the final stages of production and is slated for publication prior to the end of 2022. See less