Rockefeller's Carriage Roads
Near Bar Harbor, Maine
John D. Rockefeller Jr. first visited Mount Desert Island in nineteen oh eight. The automobile had recently arrived on the island, and there was a fight underway between the summer residents who wanted to keep it out and the year-round residents who saw it as economic progress. The summer colony lost that argument. Rockefeller's response was to build something automobiles could not use.
Starting in nineteen thirteen, he began constructing a network of crushed granite carriage roads through the interior of the island, at his own expense, with no cost to the public, no involvement from the federal government, and no guarantee that the land they crossed would remain accessible. He was extraordinarily particular about the work. He fought with the National Park Service repeatedly over grades, surfaces, drainage, and the placement of the seventeen stone bridges that carry the roads over stream crossings. On the grades he was immovable: the roads needed to be gentle enough for a horse-drawn carriage but interesting enough to reward the journey. He wanted people to move through the landscape slowly.
He worked on the roads from nineteen thirteen until nineteen forty, twenty-seven years and forty-five miles of surface, all of it paid for privately. He did not ask for naming rights. The roads are marked on park maps as the Carriage Roads. Most visitors who bike or walk them do not know who paid for them.
The stone bridges are the most distinctive element, each one different in design, each one fitted to its particular stream crossing. Rockefeller reviewed the plans for every bridge himself. He sent them back when they were not right.
The roads remain car-free today by park policy, and they are among the most heavily used trails in Acadia. Rockefeller's conviction that great scenery should be experienced at a pace slower than an engine's turned out to be correct in a way he could not have fully anticipated: the roads he built for horses are now used by cyclists and hikers who have no memory of horses at all.
