Welcome To Mount Desert Island
Home of Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor, Maine
About This Area
Mount Desert Island in Maine is the second largest island on the eastern coast of the United States. It is shaped a bit like a lobster claw. MDI is home to Acadia National Park, our first national park east of the Mississippi River. Acadia was formed entirely of property donated by private individuals! Most national parks are lands the government set aside for preservation. Here, a small group of folks with a love for this very special place, donated land and began petitions to create a preserve which could be enjoyed by future generations.
Always a special place
Before European explorers ever caught sight of this place, or gave it the counterintuitive appellation, “Mount Desert Island”, it was a summer paradise and meeting place for a group of First Nations tribes, referred to collectively as the Wabanaki, “People of the Dawnland.”
The highest peak on the island, Cadillac Mountain, is one of the first places the light of a new day touches the United States.
Early Tourists
For most of history, after that mile-high glacier moved off this beautiful, rugged island, MDI has been a place people visited rather than settled on year-round. The French were the first we know of to establish a colony here. Not long after, their constant rival, the British, seized control. Eventually founding the first permanent settlement on the island, Somesville, in 1761.
In the mid and late 1800’s landscape artists brought glimpses of our rocky coastline back to galleries in the big cities, inspiring folks around the country to head out for rustic vacations in America’s wilder places. Keep an eye out for pictures of these “Rusticators” when you’re exploring towns around here. Hiking apparel sure has changed a lot!
Rustication and the Guilded Age
Our sleepy island soon found itself a popular stop for famous families like, Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, Pulitzer… who built grand summer homes and hobby farms so they could socialize and enjoy the clean northern air in cofort and luxury.
Not everyone agreed about the best way to develop or enjoy this island. Thankfully, the most influential and involved of these benefactors truly loved this place: something quite apparent in most of the enduring legacy from their era of Gilded Age garden parties and “summer cottages” in the north.
The whole world changes
An end to monopolies, a couple world wars, the great depression, sweeping social change, and finally, a fire which raged for weeks, erased much of that gilded era and the “Millionaire’s Row” that sprang from it. Downtown Bar Harbor mostly survived the fire of 1947. Our forests came back in fierce, beautiful variety.
They changed the original name of our largest town years ago, but this place remains prettier than the paintings, echoing all the same beauty and wonder that inspired a generation to name it after paradise and to do all they could to save the best of it for us to see it as they had.
