Acadia National Park

Once the playground of America's richest families in the late 1800s, Acadia first became a national park in 1919. It is consistently one of the ten most popular national parks in the United States in terms of annual visits.

Landscape

Acadia is located a little more than halfway up the coast of Maine, next to the town of Bar Harbor. It is 264 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts, and 50 miles from Bangor, Maine and the nearest major highway, Interstate 95.

Acadia's more than 47,000 acres include cliffs on the coast of Maine, a fjord, dozens of inland lakes and ponds, towering trees and 26 mountains, including the granite dome of Cadillac Mountain—at 1,530 feet the highest point on the Eastern US coastline. One would have to go as far south as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to the peak of Corcovado to find a higher point on the Atlantic coastline. Acadia's mountains were once much higher, but have been worn down to smooth domes by ice and erosion.

The park is divided into three separate sections: Mount Desert Island, Isle au Haut and Schoodic Point. The best known area of the park, 108-square-mile, 30,000-acre Mount Desert Island is the third largest island off the east coast of the US, behind Long Island and Martha's Vineyard. The Somes Sound fjord reaches five miles into the island, with rocky bluffs on one side and palatial summer homes on the other. A bridge connects the island to the mainland.

The 2,728-acre Isle au Haut lies down the coast to the southwest of Mount Desert Island. It is accessible only by boat from the town of Stonington. Across Frenchman Bay, Schoodic Point rises 400 feet above the Atlantic at the tip of the Schoodic Peninsula. It accounts for 2,266 acres of the park.

The park boasts over 150 miles of hiking and biking trails, a 27-mile-long Park Loop auto road and 45 miles of carriage roads. In addition to pine, spruce and fir trees, Acadia's forests are home to paper birch, sugar maple and quaking aspens.

Acadia's weather is moderated by the ocean, but the winter months can still be harsh. Average July highs are 77 degrees Fahrenheit, with lows of 57. Average January highs are 32 with lows of 14. Rain can come during any month, ice storms often hit during the winter months and fog is common during the summer. The ever-present moisture makes for an abundance of biting insects during the spring, leaving the best weather for the busy tourist season, between July and September. The park is less crowded during winter, when higher elevations can experience air temperatures below zero with dangerous wind chills. Average annual snowfall in the park is 60 inches.

People and Wildlife

Mount Desert Island's year-round population is about 10,000, but it is estimated that the park area receives around 3.5 million visitors per year. Many tourists stay in the town of Bar Harbor, which swells from a population of only around 5,000 permanent residents to include thousands more in its quaint hotels and bed-and-breakfast inns during peak season.

Other residents of the area include over 273 species of birds, including bald eagles, osprey, loons and a few Peregrine falcons. The Mount Desert Island intertidal zone ecosystem is known for its rich biodiversity. Boating excursions are a popular way to get close to harbor seals, whales, porpoises and puffins that frolic just off the coast. The park gains color during the spring and summer from more than 500 types of wildflowers, including arctic species, and in the fall from the forest's changing leaves.

In addition to its regular Acadia staff, the National Park Service (NPS) employs about 150 additional seasonal rangers, trail maintenance teams, and science observers in the peak season. The College of the Atlantic is located in Bar Harbor and offers degrees related to ecology and the environment.

Landmarks

The Park Loop road runs along the eastern edge of Mount Desert Island, just south of Bar Harbor, and offers access to many of the park's most notable sites. Clustered near the beginning of the road are Sieur de Monts Spring; a memorial to George Dorr, who was instrumental in the park's founding; the Nature Center, which offers field guides; and Abbe Museum, dedicated to Native American culture once found in the area.

The road then runs along Great Head, a towering bluff on the Atlantic, before dropping down to the misnamed Sand Beach, made up mainly of crushed shells. Thunder Hole, just south of the beach, is a chasm cut by centuries of pounding waves. When the tide is right, the waves slapping against the chasm can sound like thunder. The forest runs right up to the edge of a 100-foot drop to the sea at Otter Cliffs.

Going back to the north, the loop road passes by Jordan Pond and Eagle Lake, two of the largest and deepest of the dozens of lakes and ponds in the park, both over ten acres in size and ranging to depths of more than 100 feet. Other large ponds include Aunt Betty Pond and Bubble Pond. There are two Long Ponds in the park, one on Desert Isle and one on Isle au Haut.

The park's focal point is the granite dome of Cadillac Mountain. A cutoff road to the summit is near the end of the loop road. Other prominent peaks in the park include Sargent, at 1,373 feet; Dorr, at 1,270 feet; Pemetic, at 1,248 feet and Penobscot, at 1,194 feet. Most of the other mountains, including The Beehive and North Bubble, are below 1,000 feet.

Alternatives to the loop road include various hiking trails and the carriage roads. Built by John D. Rockefeller between 1913 and 1940, the carriage roads were largely hand-made using crushed stone, and pass through some of the most scenic vistas of the park. Following Rockefeller's death in 1960, the roads were mainly used only for hiking or biking, but since 1986 have again heard the clop of hooves as carriage rides depart from Wildwood Stable. The stables offer tours and it is also possible to "vacation with your horse," and ride one's own steed on Rockefeller's roads.

History

The heritage of the region's Native Americans is reflected in the local nomenclature. Pemetic, now given to one of Acadia's mountains, was the Wabanaki Indian name for Mount Desert Island. It is speculated that the Vikings may have been early visitors to the area.

The granite domes of the parks mountains can easily be seen from the sea. When French explorer Samuel de Champlain observed them in 1604, he gave the island its "desert" moniker, for the mountains' outwardly barren appearance. The name "Acadia" is probably a derivation of Greece's Arcadia, as used by explorer Giovanni Verrazano when he sailed past the area in 1524. It later came to be used for the French colonial regions of the Atlantic coast, particularly in Canada.

Champlain claimed the area for France, but English settlers controlled the area to the south. The English eventually won out, settling the area in the late 1700s. The early French influence still lingers in place names, such as Cadillac.

During the 1800s, the area was similar to any other port on the Maine coast, dominated by fishing, farming, lumber and shipbuilding. At the same time a handful of artists, including Thomas Cole and Frederic Church of the Hudson River School, began rendering works of Acadia that dramatized the landscape and popularized the idea of wilderness. Soon tourists, first known as "rusticators" for their willingness to accept crude accommodations, began arriving in the area to experience the scenic grandeur first hand. Local residents caught on to the trend and by the late 1800s, Mount Desert Island was already primarily a tourist area.

Acadia's popularity reached into the upper echelons of the industrial era's new American millionaires. The Rockefeller family came to the island, and along with the Morgans, Fords, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Astors, built luxurious summer homes.

After the Great Depression and World War II, however, many of Acadia's famous residents could no longer afford to keep up their lavish estates. The nail in the coffin came in 1947 when a fire swept over most of the eastern half of the island, burning 170 homes.

Fortunately, the loss to the rich became the public's gain. The most instrumental person in preserving Acadia was George B. Dorr, who began efforts to limit any lumbering in the park in 1901. In an effort similar to that used by the Nature Conservancy and other modern environmental groups, he simply bought land in order to protect it. He set up a trust and worked with local residents to add to its holdings. John D. Rockefeller alone donated 11,000 acres to the park, including the carriage roads that took him more than twenty-five years to build.

Dorr convinced President Woodrow Wilson to designate the area a national park in 1919. Then known as Lafayette National Park, it was the first national park designated east of the Mississippi River. In 1929, the name was changed to Acadia National Park.

Tourism

As with much of Maine, the economy in and around Acadia was based on fishing, farming and lumber before the tourist business took off. Mount Desert Island was once a popular place to gather shellfish. However, by the mid-twentieth century the tourism industry was by far the dominant industry in the area, with the national park serving as the prime draw for visitors. The vast majority of tourists visit from June to September.

While the park does charge an entry fee, Acadia's economic impact is mainly indirect, in the form of visitor expenditures for room and board, restaurants and other goods and services in the area, accounting for approximately 80 percent of all revenue. According to an NPS report, in 2017 over 3.5 million visitors to Acadia spent more than $284,000 in the local economy. The park also sustained 4,163 jobs, making its total annual economic output more than $338,800.

Trivia

• During much of the fall and winter months, the top of Cadillac Mountain is the first place to see the sunrise in the United States.
• Otter Cliffs and other areas of the park have become popular destinations for rock climbers.
• The unevenly spaced granite blocks that serve as guard rails along the carriage trails are known as "Rockefeller's Teeth."
• Many of the park's mountains have been renamed. Cadillac Mountain was once known as Green Mountain. Mount Dorr was once called the Flying Squadron.
• By the early 1900s, most of Desert Island's beaver population had been decimated due to trapping. In the course of his conservation efforts, George Dorr managed to prohibit hunting in Acadia. Some say a pair of beavers he set free in the area in 1920 became the progenitors of all of the park's current flat-tailed rodents.