Gilding Maine's Unexpected Oasis

My photo of the Jordan Pond Gate Lodge in Acadia National Park,
commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and built in 1932.
Acadia's gate lodges are today used for housing park staff, 
many of whom are temporary summer workers.

Have you ever heard of Mount Desert Island?

In a state full of remarkable sights, it's its own exceptional place.  Ironically, many tourists to Maine have visited it, perhaps without even realizing it.

How is that possible?  Well, for starters, its name alone can be misleading, and unexpectedly complicated.  For instance, consider how the word "desert" is normally pronounced: 

"DES-ert".  Right?  

However, for this specific place, Maine residents pronounce it "des-ERT".  Like the sweets that follow a meal's main course.

Regardless of how it's pronounced, Mount Desert Island isn't anyplace arid, like Sub-Saharan Africa.  Indeed, it could be considered something of an oasis.  It is an island, implying a locale with lots of water, with only one bridge to the mainland.  It is located in the Atlantic Ocean, along Maine's rugged coastline, a region not known for having scant precipitation.  

It's not a deserted island, either, although it's never been densely populated.  It's home to both Acadia National Park and the touristy town of Bar Harbor, which visitors tend to conflate into one grand attraction, since they're pretty intertwined geographically.  It's also been a long-time summer getaway for elites, although many grand mansions of long ago were destroyed in a 1947 forest fire.  Perhaps most surprising is its largest employer, the internationally-acclaimed research institute Jackson Labs, which since its inception has been a pioneer in cancer research, among other sophisticated biomedical endeavors.

The name of Mount Desert Island - known simply as "MDI" by locals - comes from the French explorer and cartographer Samuel de Champlain, who used the term "desert" to describe the barren crest of what has become known as Cadillac Mountain.  And it's because Champlain was French that European settlers ever since have used the French pronunciation for "desert" when pronouncing his word for the place.

Cadillac Mountain towers proudly over MDI, and is the highest point on the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.  It's literally the crown jewel not just of Acadia National Park, but of the entire island.  There are practically no trees atop Cadillac Mountain's crest - just sprawling patches of bare granite, with some scrubby bushes growing in amongst its crags.  So that explains Champlain's naming rationale.

So how did Cadillac Mountain get its name?  It wasn't named after the luxury car brand, or the Michigan town near Detroit, but another French explorer, Antoine Laumet.  But he wasn't the one who named it.  Laumet, who changed his name to Cadillac, died in 1730, and the mountain was named for him in... 1918.

Long before Europeans came to what is now called Maine, Native inhabitants from the indigenous Wabanaki people called the mountain Wapuwoc, which means "white mountain of the first light".  What's fascinating about their name is that even though they didn't have any of the European explorers' cartographic tools or expertise, Maine's Native peoples knew the mountain's geographic significance relative to astronomy.

Being swaddled below its summit by dense forests of lush trees, Green Mountain eventually became its name for two centuries' worth of European settlers.  However, during America's Gilded Age (from the 1870s to the 1900s), wealthy summer people began building palatial vacation homes there, and came to desire a name that sounded more ostentatious.  And as happens when people don't dig deep enough into history, the folklore surrounding Laumet at that time tended to ignore his more unscrupulous side.

Laumet was a French commoner who re-christened himself as French nobility after arriving in the New World.  In 1687, he married an indigenous Quebecois woman (yes, from what is now Quebec, Canada).  At that point, Laumet stretched out his name with the utterly fabricated affectation "Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac", or sometimes "Antoine de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac".  Laumet chose his affectation from the town of Cadillac-sur-Garonne, in southwestern France.  And in the New World, one's ability to research the validity of another's credentials were sorely limited.  Even if you wanted facts to be based more on truth and less on what people were willing to believe, corroborating the claims of another was far harder then than it is today.

For his part, we now know that during his tenure, Jesuit priests accused Laumet of selling alcohol to Native Americans in what became Michigan.  Laumet's French financiers accused him of swindling them.  And he imported slaves from Santo Domingo to work his lead mine in what became Missouri.  Even if these were unsubstantiated allegations, no evidence exists of Laumet ever actively seeking to rebuff them.

We don't get taught nasty stuff like this in grade school history classes, do we?

Of course, an interesting sidenote to Cadillac's legacy extends to the automobile brand that bears his name.  Cadillac, the legendary car company, started in 1902 as an offshoot of a manufacturing business originally begun by Henry Ford.  The car company's name and logo were derived from the flamboyant explorer's, since Laumet concocted his own coat of arms out of whole cloth (I think there are multiple puns there!) since he was zero percent royalty or nobility of any kind.

When it comes to old cars, how unexpected to find on MDI a bona-fide automobile museum that specializes in that industry's earliest years.  Seal Cove Auto Museum owns 48 cars and displays even more in a red metal barn in the enclave of Seal Cove, on what locals call the "quiet side" of MDI, since its the furthest away from touristy Bar Harbor.

After the turn of the 20th Century, in a frenzy similar to Silicon Valley's towards the end of that same century, there were about 1,000 car companies in the United States.  Each had been founded by a group of industrious, driven entrepreneurs (yes, the puns continue) eager to capitalize on the 1885 invention of the car by Germany's Karl Benz.  

And no, Henry Ford did not invent the automobile.  

And technically, Ford didn't invent the assembly line, either.  That was another early car guy, Ransom E. Olds, who founded Oldsmobile, a brand which was treated as kindly by General Motors as Olds' overall legacy has been.  The assembly line Olds invented was basically stationary, as workers bustled around it with their specialized parts or tasks.  What Ford invented was a streamlined version of Olds' assembly line that kept workers stationary while the line moved past them.  With Ford's improvement, work got done even faster and more efficiently - which in turn drastically lowered the price of whatever was being manufactured on the line, from automobiles to refrigerators.  

That whole period of early car manufacturing has come to be called the "Brass Era", and one look at any vehicle from about 1895 to 1920 will show you why:  Behold at all that bright, shiny yellowed metal!  What an appropriate motif to close out the Gilded Age, before the Great Depression, and before chrome, which actually is easier to maintain.

Seal Cove Auto Museum's collection of bling-gilded horseless carriages includes Olds' original claim to fame, his "Curved Dash" model.  It also has a couple of early Cadillacs, and ten Fords!  They even have an electric car from the same Brass Era company that, ironically, Henry Ford himself patronized.  You see, even though his company built millions of cars, not one of them was electric, and Ford's wife, the prominent suffragist Clara Jane Bryant Ford, was afraid of sitting atop a gasoline tank next to an internal "combustion" engine.  Which wasn't exactly an irrational concern, was it - especially back in those free-wheeling Brass Era days?  (Did you catch it?)

His wife's distrust of his products notwithstanding, Ford built a mighty empire that is reflected not just in this notable museum in Seal Cove, but in a far grander edifice in another MDI town named Seal Harbor.

(If you ever take one of the whale-watching excursions out into the Atlantic from Bar Harbor, you'll see lots of seals on rocky islands and outcroppings all along the way.  Seals are kind of a big thing in that part of Maine.)

Seal Harbor is more exclusive than Seal Cove, and has historically provided summertime shelter to Rockefellers and other industrialists, and their heirs, including the only child of Henry and Clara Bryant Ford:  Edsel.  

Edsel's wife, Eleanor Lowthian Clay, had grown up spending her summers on MDI.  Her uncle owned the popular Hudson's Department Store in Detroit, and one of his business partners was Roscoe B. Jackson, who eventually married into Eleanor's family, and also eventually ran the Hudson Motor Car Company.  While Edsel and Eleanor provided some funding, the institute on MDI that is now called Jackson Labs received most of its initial financial backing from Jackson, hence its name.  

For his part, Edsel remains best-known today as the namesake of some wildly unpopular Ford vehicles in the 1950s, but in 1925, he and Eleanor built in Seal Harbor one of MDI's most remarkable estates:  Skylands.

Today, Martha Stewart owns the property, and has called it her "favorite place".  When Skylands was constructed, most of MDI's trophy homes were rambling wood confections.  However, Edsel and Eleanor's architect, Duncan Candler, wanted another native building material instead of wood, and he chose the island's pink granite for the exterior.  Over the decades, it has weathered so marvelously that the sprawling home blends surprisingly well into its overall landscape.

And speaking of the "desert" aspect of MDI's name - and its contradiction with a typically non-arid Maine - there was that massive forest fire in 1947 which destroyed Millionaire's Row on the island's eastern shore.  Bar Harbor's fabled Gilded Age estates burned easily because they were built almost entirely of wood, and while Seal Cove fortunately escaped the conflagration, the fact that Skylands had been clad in pink granite might have provided some protection.

Still, as big as Ford family financials were back then, of all the money that has influenced MDI, what other family name comes close to matching that of the Rockefellers'?  

Maine's irony-laden oasis has been preserved as well as it's been not just because it's relatively remote.  Wealthy people may have their bad habits, but one thing wealthy people do well is protect their environment, and the natural ecosystems throughout blue-blood MDI have been righteously championed by generations of people with the money and clout sufficient for the task.  And perhaps the most prominent defender of at least his brand of habitat preservation was industrialist heir John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  

His estate, called The Eyrie, was next-door to the Fords' Skylands, and the two families were good friends.  You can say what you will about some of his more controversial pursuits, but "Junior", as he was called both respectfully and derisively, dearly loved MDI.  He aggressively lobbied for Acadia's national park designation, as well as Grand Teton's, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Yosemite's.  Junior wasn't Acadia's most ardent supporter - that was local entrepreneur and philanthropist George Dorr, who donated the land for Jackson Labs.  However, Junior purchased land and then donated it for not only Acadia, but those other national parks as well.  

Today, some people think they'd like much of that land to revert to private ownership.  And yes, at least in the case of Acadia, it's true that MDI property values are particularly high because the park commands so much of it.  But fortunately, so far, nobody seems willing to watch subdivisions and shopping centers snake their way up Cadillac Mountain.

In addition to land for Acadia, Junior gifted the island with 57 miles of carriage roads, 45 miles of which are in Acadia National Park itself.  One of my mother's uncles (by marriage), Earl Carter, was a laborer on Junior's project.  The carriage roads are for pedestrians and non-motorized vehicles, and feature 17 stone bridges.  Along more treacherous portions of Junior's trails, rows of granite stones suffice as guardrails, dubbed "Rockefeller's Teeth" from their uncanny resemblance to the real thing.

Isn't it odd that for a mountain with a name closely associated with a luxury motorized automobile, the park's most influential benefactor didn't want any cars - Cadillacs or otherwise - on his roads?  Initially, Junior was so adamant about keeping his roads free of motorized vehicles that he commissioned two picturesque gate lodges that blend into the rustic Acadia habitat.  Actual gatekeepers were supposed to live in these buildings to ensure cars would be stopped, but that never happened.

The photo above is of Rockefeller's gate lodge near the Jordan Pond House, a favored Acadia rest area next to... the scenic Jordan Pond.  There really was an original Jordan Pond House, a restaurant built in the 1870s which became popular with MDI's society folks, including Junior, who eventually bought it for the park.  It burned in 1979, and its replacement structure includes a gift shop and expanded restroom facilities in relatively anonymous quarters that hardly match Junior's pseudo-country-French aesthetic.  But they still serve the historic kitchen's signature popovers, and they are a genuine treat.  

Just don't dip your feet into Jordan Pond itself - it's not just picturesque; it's the town water supply for Seal Harbor.  What would Martha say...?

And yeah, that pseudo-country-French aesthetic for Junior's gate lodges... Junior and his architect, Grosvenor Atterbury, had settled on a type of medieval French Romanesque style to honor MDI's connection with historic France.  After all, each of the three modern names given to what became Junior's Maine park had connections with French colonialism, from Sieur de Mons, to Lafayette, to Acadia.

But let's not start with those names again.

Suffice it to say that regardless of what they're called, or why they're called what they're called today, Mount Desert Island, Cadillac Mountain, and Acadia National Park are well worth the visit.  And if you don't own one, maybe you could rent a Cadillac for the trip.  

Or even a Ford.  A classic Edsel would certainly be apropos.

And please - have an extra popover for me, without jam.

You'll probably get jam of another sort anyway - if you drive back through downtown Bar Harbor...

_____