David J Witham

David J. Witham died of complications from Parkinson’s disease on Saturday November 25 2017 at his home in Boston. The multimillionaire hotelier was 77. A Massachusetts native, Witham was a savvy and hardworking businessman whose ownership of nine Bar Harbor hotels added class and grace to Mount Desert Island. Witham’s decades-long clash with fellow multimillionaire hotel entrepreneur Thomas J. Walsh defined for many the intensely competitive and sometimes seamy underside of the island’s tourist industry. And while aspects of that rivalry might have been overblown — at least according to Witham’s son, 54-year-old David C. Witham — the ambition that fueled it was real. The total assessed value of Walsh’s Bar Harbor hotel properties, more than 750 rooms combined, was more than $47 million in 2010. Witham owned about 750 rooms total with a cumulative assessed value of $34.5 million that year.