#021 - Acadia, Part 1: The History | The Wabanaki, George Dorr & the Carriage Roads

On the coast of Maine, granite mountains drop almost directly into the Atlantic. There are no canyons or geysers here — what Acadia has instead is depth: layers of history and ecology packed into a park that would fit inside Yellowstone several times over. This kicks off the Wildlands Acadia trilogy.

Host Shawn Spainhour, a former Army officer, traces the full arc. Twelve thousand years of Wabanaki presence on the island they called Pemetic, the sloping land — the shell middens, the sophisticated management of the tidal zones, and the epidemics that reduced them before colonial settlement even arrived. Champlain naming the island of bare mountains in 1604, the glacial forces that shaped it, and Somes Sound, the only fjord on the East Coast. Then the Hudson River School painters whose canvases sent the wealthy rusticators north, the Gilded Age estates that followed, and the conservation collision that produced the park's founding. George Dorr — the Boston heir who spent his entire family fortune and forty-three years assembling Acadia and died on the land with nothing left. Rockefeller's 57 miles of hand-built, motor-free carriage roads. And the great fire of 1947 that ended one era of the island and made the one we see today.

This is Part 1 of the Wildlands Acadia series. Part 2 covers the visit; Part 3 covers where to stay.

Wildlands — know the land before you reach it.