George B. Dorr and the Making of Acadia

George Dorr arrived on Mount Desert Island for the first time as a child, brought by his mother in the eighteen seventies when wealthy Bostonians were just discovering the granite coast. He came back every summer for the rest of his life. He was a Boston Brahmin, heir to a textile fortune, and he had no particular occupation except the island. That was not considered unusual in his social world. What was unusual was what he did with it.

Beginning in the eighteen nineties, Dorr started buying land. Not for himself, exactly. He was acquiring parcels to keep them from being subdivided, turning raw coastline into summer cottages, turning summit trails into private property with gates. He worked through a land trust, quiet about his methods, methodical about the acquisitions. By nineteen sixteen he had assembled enough acreage that the federal government agreed to accept it as Sieur de Monts National Monument. President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation on July eighth, nineteen sixteen. The spring at the center of the new monument, the one French missionaries had visited in the sixteen hundreds, is the same spring you can stand beside today.

Dorr was appointed the monument's first superintendent at a salary of one dollar per year. He was not doing it for the money. He had already spent most of the money. For the next twenty-eight years, through the park's redesignation as Lafayette National Park in nineteen nineteen and its final renaming as Acadia in nineteen twenty-nine, Dorr continued acquiring land, continued lobbying Congress, continued fighting off the development interests that wanted pieces of what he was assembling. He died in nineteen forty-four, essentially bankrupt, having spent his entire personal inheritance on land that now belongs to every person who visits it.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. built the carriage roads. The Vanderbilts and Astors built the summer cottages. George Dorr built the park. The visitors' center near the spring where he worked is named for him. Most of the three to four million people who visit Acadia each year do not know his name.