Acadia: First National Park east of the Mississippi

Author of  The Guest Book: A Novel of Acadia,
Caroline D. Grimm look out over the ocean at Sand Beach.

Acadia National Park came into existence when Congress approved An Act to Establish the Lafayette National Park at Mt. Desert Island off the coast of Maine on February 26, 1919. The Sieur de Monts National Monument (park), located on Mt. Desert Island, was first created by presidential proclamation in 1916.

The mountain summits are all bare and rocky…I name it Isles des Monts Desert.

Journal of Samuel Champlain, September 5, 1604.

In 1901, George B. Dorr, a member of the wealthy vacationing class, initiated the effort to conserve the landscape of Acadia. Dorr led other private citizens intent upon preserving the region from lumbering and development interests. He, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Harvard president emeritus Charles W. Eliot purchased and donated the land for the park. When the monument was designated a national park in 1919, Dorr became its first superintendent. The park—expanded and again renamed— became Acadia National Park in 1929, the first national park east of the Mississippi.

Claimed for a time by both France and England, Mt. Desert Island was the site of the first French mission in America, established by Jesuits in 1613. French explorer Samuel de Champlain visited the island in 1604, sixteen years before the Pilgrims established a settlement at Plymouth. The British secured their claim to the island with their victory over the French at Quebec in 1759.

Surf at Great Head, Mt. Desert Island, Me. [ca 1900]. Detroit Publishing Company. Prints & Photographs Division

By the nineteenth century, farming, lumbering, fishing, and shipbuilding had become thriving industries on the island. In the mid-1800s, painters and journalists shared the scenic beauty of the island with outsiders, triggering a flood of well-heeled summer tourists, many of whom built lavish homes there in the 1880s and 1890s.

Along the Shore Path, Bar Harbor, Mt. Desert Island, Me. [ca 1900]. Detroit Publishing Company. Prints & Photographs Division

Learn More

• Mapping the National Parks has a special presentation on Acadia National Park which provides historical information on the park as well as maps from the early seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.
• A search on the keywords Acadia National Park or Mount Desert Island in the Maps collections will yield a variety of maps.
• A search on Acadia National Park or Mount Desert Island in the collection Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey yields thousands of items including photographs, drawings, and data pages of buildings, roads and trails, and landscapes on the island.
• France in America, a collaborative bilingual digital collection between the Library of Congress and the Bibliotheque nationale de France, includes materials on Samuel de Champlain. Peruse the collection for more materials on the colonization of New France and France in America.