Acadia National Park: A Centennial Celebration by Rizzoli International Publications

he tide was rising and the calm waters belied the frenzy of what lay beneath as schools of alewives surged into the mouth of the stream. The spawning run had begun. In a pattern repeated over eons, the alewives- once Maine’s most abundant migratory fish- were returning to the very spot where they were born. Cormorants dove and gulls swooped to feed on the bounty. Harbor seals staged stealth attacks underwater, corralling the alewives at the mouth of the stream. Four ospreys, circling high above, plummeted to snag alewives in their talons. An eagle, rarely seen and perhaps half a mile away, got his cue and launched an assault to steal the osprey’s hard-earned catch. The scene exploded in avian chaos. I didn’t know which way to direct the camera. This primal event once occurred all along the coast of Maine. Now at the head of Somes Sound the fish are assisted by a ladder to overcome a small dam. This dramatic scene, in all its complexity, embodies some of the defining elements of Acadia: its interconnections of land and sea, its dance of predator and prey, its healthy ocean waters and navigable freshwater streams, its looming risk of overfishing and habitat loss. These alewives remind us that Acadia NP, though bounded, is inseparable from the waters that surround it and the human communities within. The web of life casts a wide net. At the same time of year at the other topographical extreme, I sat on St. Sauveur Mountain at the edge of Valley Cove Cliffs, growing sleepy in the late morning sun after hours of vigilance. The sky was a radiant blue, and not a ripple marred the mirror surface of Somes Sound below. On a boat a few days before, I had heard a peregrine falcon’s shrill call somewhere on the cliff face above me. I’d decided to risk my last morning on an unlikely chance encounter with the fastest bird in the world. A bird that travels the entire East Coast but choses to nest on Acadia’s incomparable cliffs, a bird who’s valiant offspring once nested on a Boston skyscraper, a bird, assisted by Acadia’s monitoring and protection program, brought back from

Surf along ledges at Ocean Path

An Immortality of Its Own T

One of the greatest satisfactions in doing any sound work f or an institution, a town, or a city, or for the Nation is that good work done for the public lasts, endures through generations; and the little bit of work that any individual of the passing generation is enabled to do gains through association with such collective activities an immortality of its own. — C H A R L E S W. E L I O T

DAYTON

DUNCAN

he story of every national park, I’ve learned, is just about the opposite of the public’s perception of how a park came into being. Most Americans

now assume that preserving the world’s most astonishing collection of geysers or its grandest canyon was a self-evident act, a simple decision that came down from the top ranks of our government, as routine an exercise as declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday. But the true story is much different. These special places we now call national parks emerged from the bottom, up; never from the top, down. Each one is result of a single person, or small group of people, who fell in love with a particular landscape and then dedicated themselves to its protection, so that other people—people they would never meet, in generations they would never know—might have the same chance to fall in love with it, too. And achieving that goal always required years of struggle and unending vigilance. There was nothing automatic, or easy, about it. Conceived in love and carefully nurtured, cherished and zealously protected against any threat, every national park represents a pact between generations: a gift outright from one generation to the next, an obligation one generation assumes from the previous one and then fulfills when it passes them along—gift and obligation—to the generation that follows. These common threads weave through the history of all of our national parks, binding together what the writer Wallace Stegner called “the best idea we ever had.” But no park exhibits them in greater measure than Acadia National Park. By the late 1800s, Mount Desert Island was in the midst of change. Once a lightly populated and little-known collection of fishing villages on the coast of

Maine, its exquisite landscape of rugged shorelines, imposing but not daunting mountains, crystalline lakes and tranquil forests had been brought to the world’s attention by the renowned painter Thomas Cole and his many imitators. All those beautiful paintings touched off a tourism boom on the island, which in turn drew

Ravens Nest cliff, Schoodic Peninsula

some of the nation’s wealthiest families, who promptly decided to establish summer

on Mount Desert Island, where the family had a “cottage,” he decided something

homes on the best locations, eagerly spending great sums to build elaborate struc-

similar was needed there. Otherwise, Eliot feared, the feverish land speculation

tures they nonetheless called “cottages.”

would ultimately exclude the common people from enjoying what was left of the

All along the upper Atlantic coast, the same trend threatened to lock up the

scenic shoreline.

prime locations. “The future at all our leading seashore places, in truth, belongs to

But then Eliot contracted spinal meningitis and died suddenly at age 38.

the Cottager, and it is really useless to resist him,” one New York editor sadly opined.

His death at such a young age represented a great loss to the field of land-

“He moves on all the ‘choice sites’ . . . with calm and remorselessness [and] his march

scape architecture, but in a strange twist of the generational compact, his passing

along the American coast is nearly as resistless as that of the hordes who [overthrew]

would result in a new step in the evolution of the national park idea. Sifting through

the Roman Empire.”

his son’s papers to prepare a loving biography, Eliot’s grief-stricken father came

Think: Newport, Rhode Island. Think: Martha’s Vineyard. Think: The

across his namesake’s idealistic dreams for Mount Desert and was inspired to make

Hamptons. Mount Desert Island seemed destined to follow the same trajectory. But

the cause his own. In this case, the younger generation had passed on the gift and

something happened that initiated a chain of events which ultimately led to the first

obligation to the older.

national park east of the Mississippi. A young man named Charles Eliot died.

In 1901, the elder Eliot persuaded the island’s most influential leaders

Eliot came from one of New England’s most prominent families—his father,

to establish the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, which would

Charles W. Eliot, was president of Harvard University—and by 1897 he was making a

acquire, by gift or purchase, land considered important for its scenic or historic

name for himself in the fledging field of landscape architecture, working in the firm

value, and then manage it for public use. With that, the younger Eliot’s proposal

of Frederick Law Olmsted, the “father” of the profession. Olmsted, the designer of

took root—and there it could have stayed: a nice “reservation” of a few thousand

New York’s Central Park, had been one of the earliest advocates of what became the

scattered acres exempt from development and open for people’s enjoyment, some-

national park idea when Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias

thing like a metropolitan park without the metropolis. But others, it turned out,

had been set aside by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864 and initially entrusted to

were equally passionate about preserving Mount Desert Island from being overrun

the state of California. As early as 1865, Olmsted had written that it was a “duty” of a

by real estate developers, and their passion would weave with Eliot’s into something

democratic government to preserve “great public grounds for the free enjoyment of

more substantial.

the people” and to enact regulations protecting the “dignity of the scenery.”

Thanks to a generous inheritance from his parents, George Bucknam Dorr,

Following in Olmsted’s footsteps, the younger Eliot had designed a number of

another “cottager” on the island, had never needed to work for a living, preferring

city parks and helped Massachusetts to form the Trustees of Public Reservations, the

to dabble in horticulture, entertain prominent guests at the family’s grand house in

nation’s first organization to “acquire, hold, protect and administer, for the benefit

Bar Harbor, and take long hikes over the island’s mountains and valleys. “I had seen,”

of the public, beautiful and historical places.” Having spent many happy summers

he wrote, “the wreckage of the great natural landscape by the hotel builder and the

The Beaverpond below Champlain Mountain

Vernal pool on summit of Champlain Mountain

Tamaracks and pines on shore of Witch Hole Pond

Fox kit near Seal Harbor

Exposed tree roots on shore of Eagle Lake

Bass Harbor lighthouse