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Acadia Creation Myth

Acadia was Federalized for political protection against a local revolt, not a gift

Erich Veyhl
August 3, 2022

The common account of Acadia National Park we have heard over and over — so many times that it has become rote mantra — is that Acadia was a gift from the Rockefellers, no one there has lost his private land, and without the National Park Service there would be no Cadillac Mountain on the ocean. We are expected to be thankful, with hushed adulation. And this, we are told, justifies expanding National Park Service control elsewhere in Maine. Free money will fall from the sky amidst scenic splendor and no one will be hurt. Utopia will come to Earth.

Those who believe any of that from the incessant repetition of the Acadia myth may be forgiven for some confusion, but none of it is true.

Acadia was not created from a gift. The National Park Service at Acadia as a Federal agency (and its founders and pressure group lobbyists) has been just as arrogant in bullying and displacing people as other areas it controls. The National Park Serive did not create the mountain view at the ocean, will not recreate it anywhere else, and does not cause money to flow from the air. The National Park Service is a Federal bureaucracy that is allowed to take over areas, often with spectacular scenery and sometime less (and sometimes turkeys), but these areas are what they already were, except that local people no longer have the rights they once did.

But let us focus here on the Acadia Creation Myth promoted as a founding Gift.

Acquisition

The early land aquired for what is now Acadia was accumulated from multiple owners by the first land trust in Maine, the Trustees for Reservations. Chartered in 1903 as a tax–free corporation, it was organized by the “Rusticators” on Mt. Desert Island — wealthy summer mansion owners, many by inheritance, attracted to the scenery around Bar Harbor and who wanted the views of the land around them preserved in what was already a prosperous area and elite private resort region. It was also home to rural people there for generations, and was an important commercial fishing center.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a member of the Trustees, but not especially prominent in it, having bought his summer mansion later, in 1910 (according to the Robin Winks 1997 biography of his son Laurance).

The history of the founding of Acadia is told in the autobiographical account by George B. Dorr, one of the wealthy, well–connected Rusticators from Boston, who having inherited a textile fortune made his career the running of the Trustees and then as Park Superintendent. Dorr, known as the “Father of Acadia”, published his account in The Story of Acadia National Park, 1942 & 1948, reprinted in one volume by Acadia Publishing Co., 1985.

His account is politically self–serving, as would be expected, but nevertheless reveals quite a bit from the sanctimonious open hubris of that era.

The publisher of Dorr’s book (1985 edition) described it as “a forest of political intrigues, favors called in, land speculation, the rebellion of the ‘locals’, and the unlimited use of reputations, power and money”. Dorr’s campaign took him “into the parlors and dining rooms of America’s elite, through the halls of Congress, and finally right into the Oval Office itself”.

The Rusticators donated land to the Trustees, but Dorr also aggressively pressured others whose land he wanted, engaging in a variety of arm–twisting. When it wasn’t enough he went to his cronies in the state legislature, seeking delegation of state eminent domain power to the Trustees for all of Mount Desert Island. He got part of it, and used it.

A “Gift” to Stop a Revolt

Dorr and the others had no intention of establishing a government park, let alone giving the land around them away to anyone. But the “locals” were revolting, and in 1913 Dorr was tipped off that the legislature was considering revoking the Trustees’ tax–free charter.

Dorr rushed to the state Capitol in Augusta from Boston and successfully lobbied to block the revolt in the legislature. But the Trustees still feared the local backlash. Dorr decided to seek Federal protection for the Rusticators’ interests and spent a year in Washington exploiting personal connections to lobby officials of all kinds, including President Wilson personally.

Wanting to bypass any requirement for Congressional approval, Dorr settled on the strategy of a National Monument to be imposed by Executive Order under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The Antiquities Act had been passed to allow a President to unilaterally preserve the smallest land area feasible to protect ancient artifacts from other government action on land already in Federal ownership, emphasizing Indian ruins and artifacts in the southwest, as “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest”. (16 USC 431-433)

The Trustee’s land at Mt Desert was not in Federal ownership, but Dorr’s plan was to turn over the deeds in order to use the Federal government to manage the land as the well-connected Trustees wanted. In 1916 Dorr turned over the entire approximately 5,000 acres, with President Wilson pressured to proclaim all of it as the Sieur de Monts National Monument, which he did on July 8 despite his own doubts about the legality.

The Interior Dept. proclaimed that the entire tract qualified as geological and historical because the mountain was [like the topography everywhere else] formed by glaciers, and French settlers had once been there [like the rest of the region, and other settlers everywhere], making exactly the whole 5,000 acres happen to qualify while knowing fully well that this proclomation had been neither the motive nor the legal purpose of the Antiquities Act. Dorr subsequently turned back to rhapsodizing about scenery as the “need for more land, much more”.

The new Monument soon became managed by the National Park Service, created as a new agency the next month. Subsequent legislation in 1919 turned the Monument into Lafayette National Park, then expanded under the name Acadia National Park in 1929, for the time being permitting future acquisition only by donation or exchange.

The whole Acadia creation affair, including the misuse of the Antiquities Act and the pressure tactics and eminent domain that had caused the local revolt, was pure insider corruption. Yet the overt buying of government power for the Rusticators’ political interests against local people in revolt has been sanitized and promoted as a great “gift” to the “public” ever since. Those who lost local control and their property that they loved are not considered part of the “public”.

The same “Gift–Monument” maneuver employed by the politically connected to buy government policy and call it a gift subsequently established the controversial National Monument takeovers of 222,000 acres, mostly National Forest but also including 32,000 from Laurance Rockefeller, at Jacksone Hole in Wyoming in 1943, and 87,000 acres at Katahdin in Maine by Roxanne Quimby in 2016. The Monuments were unilaterally decreed by Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama, resp. — both also despite overwhelming local opposition to a new Federal presence for control and expansion.

Provoking emotional rapture over scenic imagery while invoking the “public good”, exploited to irrationally swamp the most basic common sense ethics in seizing private property, is a pervasive trend in National Park politics.

Repeating the Gift of Condemnation on a Grand Scale

Not long after the early Federal actions at Acadia, JD Rockefeller Jr. and other wealthy donors, promoters, and politicians provided another such gift sacrificing people — many many more — to the “public good”. They arranged for and funded direct mass condemnations, again using state eminent domain authority, for the new Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks in the southeast, politically begun with 1920s Federal park enabling legislation.

In the 1930s they removed thousands of rural mountain people — in the name of benefit to urban tourists in the East under the marketing slogan “a day’s drive away” (a slogan still used today in campaigns to establish new National Parks, including in Maine).

Rockefeller money provided the largest portion of the financing, saving the project polically when the others could not raise sufficient funds required for acquisition by the legislation before the National Park Service would take over. (Today the primary source for National Park Service acquisition is direct Federal funding, with Federal eminent domain authoriy, under the 1965 “Land and Water Conservation Fund” turned into a Federal mandate and entitlement in 2020.)

The displaced people had been assured they could stay — while the plans were hidden from them to avoid a public backlash until it was too late (a tactic employed ever since for National Park Service acquisition). These National Parks, too, are still extolled as great gifts. Winks’ biography of Laurance Rockefeller calls it “celebrating and protecting Appalachian landscape and culture”.

For details on the coercive establishment of Shanandoah and Smokey Mountains National parks see:

The National Park Service in 1982 produced a video on Shendandoah sold and shown to millions of park visitors, The Gift, “which perpetrated the idea of the property as a gift and depicted the mountain residents as poor, illiterate, filthy, barefoot hillbillies who raped the land with their industry.” (Eisenfeld, 2014).

The video was revised in 2001 to admit the forced removals, but the revised promotion, still being shown, diminishes the significance and acknowledges no violation of ethics against the helpless residents; it promotes the sacrifices as for a claimed greater good of urban tourists: “And so it is that citizens of this country and the world now have the good fortune to enjoy the blessings and restorative powers of this beautiful place made special by the foresight, dedication and sacrifice of those people who previously passed [sic] this way.”

The National Park Service makes no acknowledgment at all of routine takings at other areas, displacing over 100,000 people nationwide between 1960 and 1980 alone.

Can we say it again? Provoking emotional rapture over scenic imagery while invoking the “public good”, exploited to irrationally swamp the most basic common sense ethics in seizing private property, is a pervasive trend in National Park politics. Only the National Park Service could get away with turning corruption and abuse on a mass scale against rural populations and their property rights into politically self-serving promotion for a century as a great “gift”.

Evolving Boundary Law at Acadia Brings Back Condemnation

JD Rockefeller Jr. and others subsequently transferred much more additional land around them to Acadia control — but there was no gift of their own mansions and grounds. The surrounding preserved land grew in an ever-expanding Federal area at the expense of local ownership, the private economy and the local tax base — it was kept as the donors wanted through Federal control, with others unable to live there.

This included the formal carriage trails built by Rockefeller, who had a long–standing dispute with the town over his desire to exclude the new–fangled automobiles from the luxury wilderness manicured as formal landcaping (recounted by Dorr and by the Winks sympathetic biography of Laurance Rockefeller.)

But the National Park Service at Acadia was at the time prohibited by law from directly buying or condemning property — the wealthy Rusticators did not want their own privately kept prime land taken by eminent domain. The 1929 Acadia law allowed expansion only by donation and exchange anywhere in Hancock and parts of Knox Counties.

The 1929 arrangement at Acadia prohibiting further eminent domain lasted until new legislation (sought since the 1960s) in 1982 and 1986 expanded the park boundaries, allowing for the first time at Acadia Federal condemnation of private property — which does not include the land of the Rockefellers and others with political influence.

The 1980s new legislation was devastating to the new inholders trapped inside acquisition boundaries and who had been told there would be no eminent domain — in typical broken promises of the raw, nasty National Park Washington politics they had no control over, no say in, and no knowledge of until after it passed.

It was a Washington “compromise” between two factions: the towns wanted fixed boundaries to stop the Park from progressively taking over land across two counties through the land “gifts” by those seeking to lower their high taxes; the National Park Service and its lobby wanted more expansion by their “traditional” eminent domain used at other parks. We (begin to) cover the modern Acadia details under its new condemnation powers here.

Last Update: 07/11/24