The Harbor Lane-Eden Street Historic District is a compact 20 acre neighborhood that contains one of the last concentrations of architect designed historic summer cottages in Bar Harbor, Maine. Between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression, Bar Harbor was one of the most popular seasonal destinations for elite society from the Mid-Atlantic through the Great Lakes. During this time families with well known names, including Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Kent, Pulitzer, McCormack, and Ford, built seasonal mansions or "cottages" in the local vernacular - on Mount Desert Island, of which at least 259 were constructed in Bar Harbor alone. Initially, the cottages were designed by local or Maine-based architects, including John E. Clark and Fred L. Savage, and reflected the prevailing taste for Queen Anne and Shingle Style coastal architecture. However, beginning in the later 1880s and lasting through the first Wold War I the owners increasingly called upon the services of nationally or regionally known architects from Boston and New York, and the cottages they designed reflected most of the late 19th and early 20th century Revival and American styles. While a large number of these cottages were destroyed in the fire of October 1947, the Harbor Lane - Eden Street Historic district retains nine major cottages, as well as outbuildings and secondary structures, from ten estates that were constructed between 1879 and 1936, in their original neighborhood setting. As such, these resources serve to reflect both the stylistic trends of the community and its physical development as well. The Harbor Lane-Eden Street Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places at the local level of significance for its association with the growth of Bar Harbor as a resort town in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The listing also reflects the manner in which the historic cottages embody the stylistic trends in American architecture during this same period. The district contains the work of several noted architects and architectural firms and also demonstrates the extent to which the work of these firms often overlapped or influenced each other.