Acadia, the national park the public bought

Acadia is the only national park in the eastern United States assembled almost
entirely from donated private land. There was no federal survey that set it
aside, and no vast public domain to carve it out of. A group of people who
summered on Mount Desert Island bought the land, piece by piece, and gave it
away.

How it happened

By the late nineteenth century Mount Desert Island was a summer destination for
wealthy families from Boston, New York and Philadelphia. It was also being
logged, and the portable sawmill had just made it possible to do that anywhere.

In 1901 a group led by George B. Dorr and Harvard's president Charles
Eliot formed a trust to hold land on the island for public use. Dorr spent the
next four decades acquiring parcels — often with his own money, frequently at a
loss — and pressing the federal government to take them. It became a national
monument in 1916 and a national park in 1919, the first east of the
Mississippi.

The carriage roads

The most distinctive thing in the park was also a gift, and a contrarian one.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. disliked the motor car and wanted somewhere to
drive a horse and carriage. Between 1913 and 1940 he financed and directed the
construction of 45 miles of broken-stone carriage road, with seventeen stone
bridges, none of which carries a motor vehicle.

They are engineered to an unusual standard — graded for horses, drained to
survive Maine winters, aligned to open views deliberately rather than by
accident. They are now the reason a great deal of Acadia is accessible to
people who cannot manage a mountain trail, which was not the intent but is the
effect.

The numbers

Acadia takes about four million visits a year, which puts it in the ten
most-visited national parks in the country, on a fraction of the land. It has
27 miles of historic motor road, 158 miles of hiking trail, and the 45 miles of
carriage road.

Cadillac Mountain, at 1,530 feet, is the highest point on the North Atlantic
seaboard of the United States — and for part of the year the first place in the
country to see the sunrise, which is why the summit road needs a reservation.

Why the crowding is the interesting problem

A park of this size taking four million visits has a problem the big western
parks do not. The solution here has been reservations for the busiest places
and a free island-wide shuttle, funded in part by the fuel industry, which
carries a substantial share of visitors and keeps their cars parked.

Whether that model works is one of the live questions in American park
management, and Acadia is where it is being tested hardest.

Getting there

From Boston, I-95 north to Augusta, then east. The island is connected by
bridge; most visitors base themselves in Bar Harbor.