A = Acadia
Blogging from A to Z launches…
[Update: If you’re planning a 2021 summer trip, Acadia will be open! Check this National Park Service page for the latest information you will need to know before going.]
When compiling the list for this A to Z blogging challenge, some letters had so many great options. The overall theme is This Maine Life. To launch the series, I selected a word that comes to mind when those away from Maine think of our state.
Acadia National Park is arguably Maine’s best known gem. In 2019, around 3.4 million people visited. That number is more than double the state’s entire population.
Mainers have long held a complicated viewpoint when it comes to tourism. On the one hand, we have an economy that depends on visitors, but the average Mainer has a tendency to dread the seasonal crowds and associated complications of congestion. And, yet, we have to acknowledge that it was due to the efforts of summer vacationers from another century that Acadia was preserved as public land which we continue to enjoy. If you’re unfamiliar with this fascinating story of how the region was preserved, Ken Burns did a masterful job telling it in his series on the national parks. The entire collection is well worth your time, but the feature on Acadia is in episode three [at both the 40 minutes and 1 hour 37 minute markers].
Here are a few tidbits that you may — or may not — know about Acadia National Park:
1) When established as a national park, it was named Lafayette National Park. The change to Acadia didn’t take place until 10 years later. The reasoning for the revision was described in the following report to Congress in January 1929 by the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys:
“The change of the name from Lafayette National Park to Acadia National Park has been suggested in accordance with the desire and policy to employ names only descriptive of the region or associated with it in the popular mind from earliest times. It is established the the name “Acadia” is of native origin, coming from an Indian word apparently describing the region and in use among the early fishermen and traders from across the sea in the accounts brought back to Europe by them before recorded exploration of it first began by French or English.”
2) Lafayette, aka Acadia, was voted into the national park system on February 26, 1919 — the same day as the Grand Canyon National Park. Former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote the following recommendation regarding the Maine site he personally visited and loved:
“I have watched with keen interest the work that has led to the creation of this park. Under right development it will give a healthy playground to multitudes of hard-working men and women who need such a playground. Moreover, it constitutes a wild life sanctuary under national guardianship at a spot where such a sanctuary is greatly needed.”
3) Cadillac Mountain within Acadia is the highest point on the east coast of the United States. It, too, was renamed. Previously it was known as Green Mountain.
4) One of the notable features of the park is the carriage roads. The construction of them was financed and overseen by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The process took 27 years and resulted in 57 miles of roads. Along the way, 16 bridges were built — all from local stone.
5) If you watch the series by Ken Burns, you might wonder about the current location of the extravagant summer “cottages” built by the wealthy in the region’s pre-park days, especially if you have visited in the past and didn’t see them. In 1947, known locally as “The Year Maine Burned,” over 10,000 acres of the park were destroyed by fire, including those cottages.
Never seen Acadia for yourself? Here is a sneak peek (turn up your volume):
This post is part of my A to Z Challenge Series with the overall theme, “This Maine Life.” I am covering a Maine-related topic with a different letter of the alphabet every day except Sundays throughout the month of April 2020.
