Find out more about where to stay and what to see in Rockport.

This wooden bench under an apple tree in tiny Mary Lea Park, tucked next to the opera house, is a fine place to begin to figure out how one Maine town—with the help of God or man or both—got it so right. Here you can make out where the Atlantic Ocean gentles into the wide, island-studded waters of Penobscot Bay, then rushes into the deep embrace of Rockport Harbor. You can marvel at how Rockport knew to keep its neighbors close, with one arm slung over Camden to the north and the other over Rockland to the south, yet somehow had the good sense to lie low, well beneath the frenzied Route 1 that courses through the living heart of Midcoast Maine. Luckily for Rockport, the cute and touristy took the highway, leaving houses, mostly 19th century, many Greek Revival, in a state of domestic bliss on quiet, shady streets that roll down to the sea. Elegantly understated houses (as well as the former Rockport United Methodist Church, now a private home) overlook Rockport's harbor. Once an indus trial hub, the Midcoast Maine town has retooled itself as a center of music and culture.

Approaching Rockport from the water on a gracefully low-slung lobster boat, passing Beauchamp Point and the elegant, foursquare lighthouse, you chug into the very definition of a safe harbor: its deep mouth and sheltering banks offer protection from rough weather. Sliding by lovely white houses, neat docks with their fine Maine-built Hinckley boats, past lobstering rigs and important yachts, you're stunned by the quiet. Not here the macho roar of cigarette boats or angry buzz of Jet Skis.

This waterside bench in Mary Lea Park is also a fine place to reflect on Rockport's history. In Colonial times the land surrounding the park may (or may not) have been lost in a Boston card game by one Lucy Flucker Knox, wife of General Henry Knox, for whom the entire county is named. When asked for confirmation, local historian Barbara Dyer remarks dryly, as if gossiping about a neighbor: "Well, Lucy Knox did like a game of cards." Whether Robert Thorndike did or did not win the substantial acreage, then known as Goose River, he did, in fact, settle there in 1769 with his six (or seven or eight) children.

In the 1800s Rockport was a place of lime and ice—a noisy, smoky industrial town where great hunks of limestone from local quarries were brought to fiery kilns at the harbor's head. They were broken down under extreme heat and ground into a fine powder, packed in barrels, then shipped to building projects in New York City and Boston, to be used in mortar and plaster. From the nearby Lily Pond, ice so pure they say you could read a Bible through a two-foot chunk was harvested, stored in sawdust in icehouses on the harbor and sent by boat as far south as the Caribbean. One night in 1907 sparks from the lime kilns met the wood-framed icehouses, and just like that, Rockport's industrial identity went up in smoke. What remained was not pretty. Lime sludge from the kilns and industrial waste lined the harbor.

Which is where Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who, in 1924, founded Philadelphia's influential Curtis Institute of Music, enters the picture. The daughter of longtime Rockport summer resident Cyrus H.K. Curtis, publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, and the wife of Edward Bok, editor of her father's Ladies' Home Journal, Mary Bok believed that she needed to keep her institute going year-round. And so, in the early 1930s, she enticed the faculty she'd recruited from Europe to come up and teach summer classes in Rockport. "Mrs. Bok owned all the houses around the harbor—she let her faculty and friends move in rent free," explains Irene Wolf from the comfortable living room of one such house, on Beauchamp Point. "My mother, Lea Luboshutz, was a violinist, a Russian émigré living in Paris, when Mrs. Bok lured her to teach at Curtis. We would come for the summer and find that Mrs. Bok had doubled the size of the garage or added a deck onto the house." Bok went further than that: to recontour the roads around the east harbor, she hired Olmsted Brothers, Frederick Law Olmsted's firm, whose designs had a way of bestowing upon a place the very essence of what it wanted to be all along (take Central Park, for instance).

"She was the most elegantly turned out lady, with her handmade blouses," recalls Wolf. "She changed the town's identity; a fishing village became a music colony." Now Mary Lea Park makes sense: that Mary, that Lea, that park—established as a memorial in 1966 by Wolf's family.

Wolf, who turned ninety last winter, looks with sparkling eyes around her living room. "The faculty that taught here were all performers. Oh, the music that echoed through this house!" She sighs. "What I worry about now is the new people, people of great wealth and no connection to the community. They've planted hedges that screen out all views of the water. They've gone against an unspoken ethic of the place." Rockport's traditions, you realize, are not the result of accident. The town's identity has been shaped deliberately, its values carefully tended. And once people share that mind-set, most of them do what they can to stay here, kill themselves to come back, feel they owe a debt to its very uniqueness.

Sometimes third-generation-Rockporter Richard Frankel feels he's rubber-banding between Manhattan and Maine, stretching to complete his work as a creative director and video producer (for Sting and others) in the city, then snapping back into his real world—his Rockport house, the environmental issues he champions and the hot Pop!Tech Conference he helps direct in nearby Camden every October. On a golden Saturday last fall Frankel married his sweetheart, a girl "from away"—meaning not a Mainer. From very "away," Nadia Ackerman is an Australian singer-songwriter. Their wedding dinner took place in a tent set among the voluptuous vegetable gardens at Primo, Melissa Kelly and Price Kushner's Rockland restaurant of national renown. Kelly dedicated an entire greenhouse to zucchini to ensure enough of the blossoms (to be stuffed with ricotta and delicately fried) that the couple longed for.

Rockport is a place to which children—and their children's children—return. It's a place that looks and feels like home to Nano Chatfield, who spent summers here at Aldermere Farm with the grandparents who raised her and now summers with her big blended family in a generous cottage on Beauchamp Point, surrounded by cousins, cousins, cousins. Her grandfather Albert Hayden Chatfield Jr. was from a Cincinnati family who'd owned land in Rockport since the late 1800s. He moved here for good in the 1950s, raising Scottish beef cattle called Belted Galloways on his 136-acre farm right in town. "He truly loved the land," Chatfield says. "It was his soul's place." You sense it's her soul's place as well.

Liv Rockefeller, too, grew up overlooking Penobscot Bay. She recalls how her mother (a Norwegian once married to the Kon-Tiki explorer Thor Heyerdahl and then to Liv's father, James "Pebble" Rockefeller) would throw on a coat made of wolf skins and cross-country ski with her daughter down Bald Mountain to the school-bus stop. Liv still has the coat, and the memories. She and her husband, Ken Shure, renovated an 1870 harbor-view Victorian in the village and lived there with their children for twelve years. Then one New Year's Day two years ago, Liv roused the family for a hike up Bald Mountain. "It felt like reclaiming my childhood," she recalls of their time on the summit. Before long, the family found a rangy contemporary house on the mountaintop and moved there.

The Bay Chamber Concerts, perhaps Rockport's most enduring tradition, began in 1961, when Irene Wolf's sons, Tom and Andrew, were fifteen and seventeen. A flutist and a pianist, respectively, they decided they wanted to perform. As Tom Wolf, now sixty-three, describes it: "We were kids. But we were determined. I couldn't even drive yet, so my dad drove me to Mary Bok's house. She was like a queen, with her chauffeured Rolls. I told her our idea, and she said, 'That's very nice; how can I help?' So I thought of the highest number I could imagine—she wrote me a check for $1,000."

"You have to understand," he continues, "since the thirties, Rockport has had a thriving population of boat builders, fishermen and farmers. Many Curtis musicians stayed and got along well with the locals. But it took the Bay Chamber Concerts to really knit the summer residents into the community. Everybody loved the concerts—they brought people together." Tom, now CEO of Cambridge, Massachusetts–based WolfBrown, a national arts-development consultancy, is still the artistic and executive director. On soft summer nights the whole town gathers to hear the Vermeer or St. Lawrence string quartets, or any number of other world-class musicians. Folks take boxed suppers to those benches in Mary Lea Park. And Mary and Lea are smiling.