During your trip to Baker Island, you will most definitely learn something about the history of the Gilley family, either from a park ranger or from informational signs posted on the island. Charles Eliot, President of Harvard and part-time resident of Northeast Harbor, wrote a book, first published in 1899, entitled “John Gilley - One of the Forgotten Millions.” Eliot opens his book with the following sentence: “To be absolutely forgotten in a few years is the common fate of mankind.” Continuing this theme, Eliot adds “With the rarest exceptions, the death of each human individual is followed in a short time by complete oblivion, so far as living human memories are concerned. … Not one human being in ten million is really long remembered.” By the look of the worn, sun-bleached tombstones on Baker Island, many bearing scarcely legible inscriptions referring to a member of the Gilley family, Eliot appears to be correct in his premise, but his book is helping to keep alive the memory of a few Gilley family members.

In 1812, William and Hannah Gilley moved their family of three children to Baker Island, where they were the sole inhabitants. The couple eventually had twelve children, John being the tenth child and youngest son. William Gilley became the first keeper of the Baker Island Lighthouse in 1828, a post he held for over twenty years. Following his parents’ example, John settled on nearby Sutton Island, where he raised a family and lived a comfortable life through his resourcefulness as a farmer, fisherman, and landowner.

Eliot concludes his book on John Gilley by noting that John’s life was not one of “distinction, fame or long remembrance; but it does contain the material and present the scene for a normal human development through mingled joy and sorrow, labor and rest, adversity and success, and through the tender loves of childhood, maturity, and age. We cannot but believe that it is just for countless quiet, simple lives like this that God made and upholds this earth.”