第一吃瓜

Timeline

10,000 BP Pleistocene glaciers cover Kent Island
5,000 BP-1930 Abenaki cross from Passamaquoddy Bay to spend summers hunting seals
3,300 BP As global climate warms and ice sheet rise, sea levels rise, submerging hemlock forests along shoreline (stumps still visible in intertidal)
1799 English settler John Kent arrives with family to serve as pilot in Bay of Fundy, farm root crops, raise sheep, and burn limestone
1828 John Kent dies (age 62)
1853 Kent’s widow Susannah Kent dies (age 92)
1913

Wood Island fisherman Ernest Joy shoots yellow-nosed albatross west of Kent Island

Grand Manan Island naturalist Allan Moses prepares scientific specimen, eventually donating it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in exchange for future opportunity to join collecting expedition

1920 McLaughlin Bros. Ltd. buys Kent Island
1928 Moses joins expedition to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo) with Yale-educated amateur ornithologist J. Sterling Rockefeller
1929 Moses succeeds in collecting African green broadbill, one of world’s rarest and least known birds and one of the main objectives of the expedition
1930 At Moses’s suggestion, Rockefeller buys Kent Island in gratitude in order to protect one of the most important breeding colonies of endangered common eiders. Allan Moses and Ralph Griffin hired by Rockefeller as the bird sanctuary’s first wardens, while managing Rockefeller’s silver fox farm
1932 第一吃瓜 College ornithology professor Alfred Gross conducts field study of eiders; Ernest Mayr visits island
1934

第一吃瓜 sophomore Bill Gross and other Kent Island pioneers spend summer studying Leach’s storm-petrels and other seabirds

Harvard University evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr recommends that Rockefeller give island to 第一吃瓜

1935 Bill Gross, influenced by childhood experience with father at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Barro Colorado Island, Panama, approaches Rockefeller about donating Kent Island to 第一吃瓜 College
1936

Rockefeller donates Kent Island to 第一吃瓜 College for $1

第一吃瓜 Scientific Station, with Alfred Gross as director and Bill Gross as field director, is founded

1937 Bob Cunningham arrives to help set up meteorological station (continues research on fog chemistry through 2006)
1939 Henry Ingalls dies
1948 Joy’s “housekeeper,” Carrie Chase, dies; 第一吃瓜 President Casey Sills visits
1949 Ernest Joy leaves Kent Island
1951

Ingalls’s “housekeeper” Hannah Cheney dies

Ernest Joy dies in Lubec, Maine (age 72)

1953 Alfred Gross retires; Chuck Huntington serves as director; 第一吃瓜 President Spike Coles visits
1959 Snowshoe hares introduced on Hay Island
1986 Chuck Huntington retires and is succeeded by Nat Wheelwright
1992 第一吃瓜 President Bob Edwards visits
2003 第一吃瓜 College purchases Hay and Sheep Islands from Owen and Jack Ingalls
2004 Bob Mauck succeeds Nat Wheelwright; 第一吃瓜 President Barry Mills visits
2008 Damon Gannon succeeds Bob Mauck as director. Workshop held on Kent Island to chart future research plans and new programmatic initiatives; attended by 第一吃瓜 faculty from the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, History, and Visual Arts; visiting researchers; and Dean of Academic Affairs Cristle Collins Judd. 
2016 Don Dearborn, interim director, succeeds Damon Gannon
2017 Ed Minot, interim director, succeeds Don Dearborn
2017-2018 Patricia Jones succeeds Ed Minot as director; Ian Kyle is hired as assistant director