George Dorr and the Making of Acadia
Near Bar Harbor, Maine
There is a spring here, just south of Bar Harbor, where a man carved four words into the rock. The Sweet Waters of Acadia. His name was George Bucknam Dorr, and this quiet place was, in a very real sense, the birthplace of the first national park east of the Mississippi River.
Dorr was born in eighteen fifty three into a wealthy Boston family, and he spent his summers on Mount Desert Island. As the eighteen hundreds ended, he watched the portable sawmill and the real estate boom begin to threaten the mountains and shores he loved. So in nineteen oh one, alongside Harvard's president Charles Eliot, he helped create the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, one of the first land trusts in the country.
Its purpose was simple. Buy the wild land, hold it forever, give it to the people. Dorr became the tireless engine of that mission.
He solicited donations, negotiated with landowners, and when persuasion failed, he spent his own inherited fortune to buy land outright. By nineteen thirteen the trustees held some six thousand acres, and Dorr set his sights on turning them over to the federal government. In nineteen sixteen President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the land the Sieur de Monts National Monument.
Three years later, in nineteen nineteen, Congress elevated it to Lafayette National Park, the first national park east of the Mississippi. In nineteen twenty nine it was renamed Acadia. Dorr served as its first superintendent, famously accepting only a token salary, and he kept spending his own money on the park until there was little left.
He died in nineteen forty four, nearly blind and nearly broke, having given away both his fortune and his life to the mountains around you. The place where he built a spring house and carved those four words is now the Sieur de Monts area, with a nature center and native gardens. Stand here and you are standing at the headwaters, both of a spring and of an idea.
That some landscapes are too beautiful to belong to any one person, and so must belong to everyone.
