Acadia History

Acadia National Park, established in 1919 as the first U.S. national park east of the Mississippi River, encompasses Mount Desert Island, the largest coastal island in Maine. Noting its bare and rocky summit, French explorer Samuel Champlain gave the island its name -- Isles des Monts Desert in 1604. However, the 108-square-mile was hardly deserted: shell heaps show that Native Americans lived here up to 6,000 year before Champlain's arrival. The Wabanaki Indians called the island "Pemetic, or "Range of Mountains." Briefly settled by Jesuit missionaries, and later by a would-be feudal baron from France, the island was claimed by the British after the French and Indian War dissolved France's Acadian territory in New England. However, significant numbers of permanent residents didn't settle here until the early 19th century -- a mix of farmers, fishermen, and shipbuilders. The first tourists arrived in the 1880s, as wealthy East Coast families came seeking relief from the summer heat and the vistas celebrated by painters of the famed Hudson River School. Depression, war and fire eventually blotted most of their grand "summer cottages" from the landscape, but the legacy of this period included the conservation movement led by George Dorr. By 1913, Dorr and a small group of preservationists had acquired 6,000 acres of Mount Desert Island, which was turned over to the federal government for public use. Dorr became the first superintendent of Lafayette National Park -- renamed Acadia in 1929 -- and for the rest of his life worked tirelessly to expand its protected lands, which today total nearly 48,000 acres.