🇺🇸 United States · New England
Acadia National Park is one of the most beautiful corners of the east coast of the United States: a place where pink granite mountains plunge straight into the Atlantic Ocean, conifer forests fringe crystal-clear lakes and the rocky shore bursts into foam with every wave. Set on the rugged coast of Maine, above all on Mount Desert Island, it is the only national park in New England and one of the best loved and most visited in the country, famous for its sunrises, its scenic drives and its unique blend of mountain and sea.
Acadia has a particular history: much of its landscape was preserved and shaped thanks to the philanthropy of wealthy families who summered in the area in the early 20th century. John D. Rockefeller Jr. financed and designed the famous 'carriage roads', a network of gravel lanes for horse-drawn carriages —no cars— with elegant stone bridges, which today are a paradise for walking, biking or riding. The Park Loop Road, by contrast, takes drivers to the most spectacular spots: the summit of Cadillac Mountain, the first ground in the United States to catch the sun at certain times of year, the roaring Thunder Hole and the serene Jordan Pond.
This guide walks you through Acadia with a practical, warm eye: how to get there and get around (including the free Island Explorer shuttle), which viewpoints, beaches and trails not to miss, how to enjoy the carriage roads by bike, where to watch the sunrise and where to eat a good Maine lobster. Acadia calls for comfortable shoes, the will to get up before dawn for the sunrises and time to let that meeting of forest, granite and ocean surprise you.
Long before the Europeans arrived, the Mount Desert Island region was the territory of the Wabanaki people, especially the Penobscot and other nations of the confederacy, who came seasonally to fish, gather shellfish and hunt, and who called the island by their own names. In 1604, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed through the area and christened the island 'Isle des Monts Déserts' (Island of the Barren Mountains), for its bare granite summits, a name that became 'Mount Desert'. The region was part of the disputed French Acadia, from which the park takes its name. Through the 19th century, the island's beauty drew painters of the Hudson River School and then wealthy summer visitors (the 'rusticators'), who built great summer mansions ('cottages') in Bar Harbor. Worried about protecting the landscape from logging and development, philanthropists such as George B. Dorr (considered the 'father of Acadia'), Charles W. Eliot and John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated land and money. Sieur de Monts National Monument was created in 1916, in 1919 it became Lafayette National Park (the first national park east of the Mississippi) and in 1929 it took the name Acadia National Park. Rockefeller also financed the carriage roads. A huge fire in 1947 swept much of the island, transforming the forest. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of the pine and the lobster: Wabanaki land in the far northeast of the country, of rocky shores dotted with lighthouses, of immense forests and of Acadia National Park, the first east of the Mississippi.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Every morning, the United States wakes up here first. Before New York, before Boston, the sunlight touches the granite summit of Cadillac Mountain, on the coast of Maine. And there is a beautiful coincidence in that: long before a national park existed, the Mount Desert Island region was the territory of the Wabanaki peoples —a confederacy that brings together nations such as the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Mi'kmaq— whose name means, precisely, 'people of the dawn'. The story of Acadia begins with them. The name refers to their location at the far northeastern edge of the continent, where the sun rises first —an image that echoes Cadillac Mountain's present-day fame as one of the first places in the continental United States to catch the light of day.
The Wabanaki came to the island and the coast seasonally, above all in the warm months, to take advantage of the abundance of the sea: they fished, gathered clams and other shellfish, hunted birds and mammals and collected resources along the rocky shore and the bays. The enormous shell middens they left over thousands of years are archaeological evidence of that long presence. For them, the island of bare summits and the granite coast were part of a known and valued landscape.
European colonization brought, as it did across the region, disease, conflict and the progressive loss of land and autonomy. Even so, the Wabanaki peoples did not disappear: they keep their nations, their culture and their presence in Maine today, and Acadia National Park increasingly recognizes that Indigenous heritage as a fundamental part of the story of this place, a reminder that the human relationship with these landscapes began millennia before the European explorers arrived.
The first European whose passage through the island was documented in detail was the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who in September 1604 sailed along these shores as part of the French expeditions in the North Atlantic. Seeing the island, with its bare, treeless granite summits, Champlain christened it 'l'Isle des Monts Déserts': the 'Island of the Barren Mountains'. Today's 'Mount Desert Island' comes from that French name.
The region then fell within the territory the French called Acadia (Acadie), a vast and disputed area of northeastern North America taking in parts of what are now Canada's Maritime provinces and northern New England. That, centuries later, is where the national park's name comes from: Acadia evokes that presence and that French place name. In 1613, French Jesuits tried to establish a mission on the island (Saint-Sauveur), but it was quickly destroyed by an English expedition, a foretaste of the long disputes between France and England over control of the region.
For a long time, Mount Desert Island was frontier land between French and English domains, thinly settled by European colonists and still frequented by the Wabanaki. Only after the British victory in the colonial wars of the 18th century did permanent settlement by English-speaking colonists take hold; they lived by fishing, farming and logging, laying the foundations of the towns that exist today.
In the mid-19th century, Mount Desert Island was 'discovered' by art and tourism. Painters of the Hudson River School, such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, visited the island and put its dramatic landscapes of mountain, forest and sea on canvas. Those paintings, exhibited in the cities, stirred a public fascination with the wild beauty of Maine and drew the first travelers.
Then came the so-called 'rusticators': well-off visitors seeking a simple, rustic contact with nature, staying in farmhouses and modest inns. But as the century wore on, that modest tourism gave way to something far more opulent. The richest families in the United States —Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor, Ford and many others— chose Bar Harbor as an elite summer destination and built enormous, luxurious summer mansions that, with curious modesty, they called 'cottages'. Bar Harbor thus became one of the most exclusive summer resorts in the country, comparable to Newport.
That golden age left a decisive mark on the park's future: those wealthy summer residents, in love with the landscape, were the ones who —seeing the island threatened by industrial logging and the advance of land developers— set in motion the conservation effort that would end up creating the national park. The fortunes and influence of those families were turned, in large part, to protecting the mountains and the coast that had made Mount Desert Island their summer refuge.
In the early 20th century, the threat of industrial logging —especially after the arrival of portable sawmills that could level forests fast— and of real-estate development raised fears that the beauty of Mount Desert Island would be lost forever. A group of summer residents and conservationists decided to act. The key figures were George B. Dorr, a man of means who devoted his life and much of his fortune to buying and donating land for protection —and who is known as the 'father of Acadia'— and Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University, who helped organize the effort through an entity created to receive land donations.
The work of Dorr and Eliot bore institutional fruit. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson declared the Sieur de Monts National Monument, protecting the first donated lands. In 1919, the area was raised to national park status under the name Lafayette National Park, becoming the first national park east of the Mississippi River. Finally, in 1929, the park took the name it carries today: Acadia National Park, in homage to old French Acadia.
John D. Rockefeller Jr., one of the great philanthropists of his time, joined the effort decisively: he donated thousands of hectares and, above all, personally financed and designed, between 1913 and 1940, the celebrated network of 'carriage roads': car-free gravel lanes with elegant stone bridges, meant for touring the landscape by carriage. That combination of philanthropy, conservationist vision and landscape design made Acadia a pioneering case: a national park born almost entirely of land donated by private individuals.
One of the most original and lasting legacies of Acadia's creation is the 'carriage roads', the network of carriage lanes John D. Rockefeller Jr. had built between 1913 and 1940. Rockefeller, a great lover of horse-drawn carriage rides, wanted a way to travel the landscapes of the island's interior without having to share the road with the automobiles that were starting to take over everything. To that end he financed and personally supervised, with enormous attention to detail, the construction of some 72 kilometers of packed gravel roads.
Far from being mere paths, the carriage roads were conceived as works of landscape design. Their routes follow gentle curves that fit the terrain, open up carefully studied views over lakes and mountains, and are built with techniques that ensure good drainage and a firm surface. Their most admired feature is the seventeen stone bridges, each with its own design, raised with masterful craftsmanship to cross streams, gorges and waterfalls. Those bridges have become architectural landmarks and some of the most photographed corners of the park.
Today, those lanes built for carriages are one of Acadia's greatest attractions for visitors: cyclists, walkers, runners, riders and, in winter, cross-country skiers use them, all enjoying a natural setting with no motor traffic. Rockefeller's legacy means Acadia keeps a unique space where the landscape and the pleasure of traveling it slowly win out over the hurry of the automobile, faithful to the spirit in which they were created.
In October 1947, after an exceptionally dry summer and autumn, a great forest fire broke out on Mount Desert Island and burned for days, fed by the winds. The fire swept thousands of hectares of forest inside and outside the park, and destroyed numerous golden-age summer mansions in the Bar Harbor area, bringing an era to an abrupt end. It was one of the most dramatic episodes in the island's history.
Paradoxically, the fire also brought renewal. Before it, much of the island's forest was dark conifer (fir and spruce). After the fire, new vegetation grew in the burned areas with a higher proportion of deciduous trees —birch, poplar, maple— and these are the ones that today give Acadia the spectacular autumn foliage it is famous for. So the disaster transformed the landscape and, without meaning to, contributed to one of its greatest attractions today.
Since then, Acadia has become one of the most visited national parks in the United States, receiving millions of people a year drawn by its sunrises on Cadillac Mountain, its granite coast, its lakes, its carriage roads and its autumn foliage. The park now faces the challenges of mass tourism —hence measures such as the free Island Explorer shuttle and the timed reservation for driving up Cadillac— seeking to balance public access with protection of that unique landscape of mountain and sea that so many people, through history, worked so hard to preserve.