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As we travel, and I compile information for my writing, the connections never cease to amaze me. I know where I am going geographically—in this case Mount Desert Island—but I never know where my research will take me. With this island, I kept ending up in France.

Mount Desert Island’s (MDI) story starts with geology; it has fine examples of all three rock types: metamorphic, sedimentary and igneous. The oldest rock on the island is the Ellsworth Schist (metamorphic) which formed about 600 MYBP. Roughly 100 million years later the siltstones and sandstones of the Bar Harbor Formation (sedimentary) were laid down. Things got a little more violent as nearby volcanoes began spewing lava and ash, the basis of the Cranberry Island Series (igneous) around 400 MYBP. Shortly thereafter the granite domes that earned the island its name were formed. The now iconic domes weren’t visible until extensive erosion removed their overlying mountains and revealed them.

Powerful glacial forces carved the island. 25,000 years ago a continental ice sheet covered most of North America including MDI in the Bay of Maine. This glaciation scoured away topsoil and crushed or moved rocks. Since granite is one of the hardest rocks on the surface of the earth, the large domes on MDI were not destroyed by the ice. When the glacier finally receded, about 13,000 years ago, it left behind long narrow lakes that fill U-shaped valleys dammed by till piles (moraines), random erratics, scratches, striations, and sheens on the resistant granite.

Fast forward several thousand years and the first Native peoples arrive in the area. Archaeological evidence suggests that they wintered along the coast and spent the summers inland starting around 6,000 years ago. The Abenaki people were still using the island when the first Europeans arrived. They called it Pemetic which means “sloping land.” I find the translation of their name more revealing. It means “People of the first light”” or “People of the dawn.” And they were: their range included all of the Maine coast which receives the first of the sun’s rays in the U.S. The spot changes through the year as the earth rotates and wobbles its way around the sun but from October to March, Cadillac Mountain on MDI claims the honor.

So now France enters our story for the first of its many appearances. In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian sailing for France, mapped and claimed the continent’s northern lands for France, naming it L’Acadie. It took the French eighty years to set up shop in New France. In 1604 Samuel Champlain, the navigator for Sieur de Monts, gave Maine’s largest island its name, L’Isle des Monts Deserts, the Island of Barren Mountains. He was referring to the large, bald granite domes that dot the east side of the island, like Cadillac Mountain. The name was later rearranged to Mount Desert Island but the pronunciation remains French, so it is correctly pronounced as dessert (“deh-ZERT”) even though it is spelled as desert (“DEH-zert”).

Since the Maine coast was highly contested ground for the French and English not many people tried settling the area, and few succeeded. In 1688 an ambitious young French soldier, Antoine Laumet, assumed the name of a nobleman from his hometown in France and requested land along the coast. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac’s request was granted and it included MDI. Supposedly, he and his wife lived on the island for a brief time but found it too harsh and remote. Or perhaps Laumet just felt he could make more money elsewhere.

In 1691 he moved to Quebec, and by 1701 he had convinced the French government to put him in charge of founding a new colony, Detroit. The smooth riding Cadillac car is named for this rather conniving man, even the car’s emblem resembles the coat of arms he “borrowed” for himself all those years ago.

Finally, after the British defeated the French in the 1760s, settlers arrived in earnest. They had many ways to make a living on MDI from fishing, logging, shipbuilding, and farming to ice harvesting and granite quarrying. The rock was shipped to destinations along the East Coast for use in construction. At one point there were over 70 granite quarries on MDI. Even the popplestones (as they used to call them up here) from the island, which were used as ballast in the ships, became integral parts of cities farther south, as cobblestone roads.

By the early 1800s artists from the Hudson River School such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, William Hart and Fitz Henry Lane found their way to the island to paint. Better than any travel brochure, their canvases portrayed the natural beauty of the MDI landscape with such realism that visitors began streaming in. Known as “rusticators,” these first visitors were satisfied with paying room and board to local families. By the mid 1800s there were more people than the local families could host, and hotels sprang up. MDI’s main breadwinning industry, tourism, had begun.

The area became so renowned that the rich and famous began building “cottages” on the island. The owners of the mansions were a who’s who list: Astor, Carnegie, Ford, Morgan, Pulitzer, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt. Many of these same families also had homes in other areas we’ve recently visited, Newport, RI and Jekyll Island, GA. By the 1900s there were 150 of these grand homes on the island, mostly centered around the Bar Harbor area. Briefly, Brooke Astor, the last in a long line of Astors who summered at the family’s Cove’s End cottage on the island just passed away in New York at the grand age of 105 (August 13th, 2007).

It is to these ultra-rich that we owe the existence of Acadia National Park. In response to the encroachment of the automobile, the threat of logging and increased development, Charles W. Eliot (President of Harvard at the time) organized the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations in 1901. George B. Dorr was the executive officer of the group and he oversaw the procurement and preservation of the Trustees’ growing acreage. In 1916 Dorr, with a little help from Mrs. Wilson, persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to create a National Monument out of the Trustees donated land. Thus the roughly 5,000 acre Sieur de Monts National Monument was born.

Dorr’s passion for the area is evident since he accepted appointment as superintendent of the new monument for $1 a month salary. Dorr continued to push for land donations and even used his own money to purchase key parcels for the growing monument. In 1919 Dorr convinced Congress to change the monument into a national park. Congress named the park in honor of Lafayette, a Frenchman who had volunteered and fought for America’s freedom during the Revolutionary War. Lafayette was the first National Park east of the Mississippi River.

Still under Dorr’s guidance the Park continued to expand. In 1929 the park received an offer of a substantial amount of donated land with one caveat, the philanthropists objected to so French a name. A deal was struck and the Park was renamed Acadia. I find that rather ironic since the name is still French! Acadia is just a corruption of the term France gave to the area in 1524.

Dorr’s good friend and fellow MDI resident, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., also treasured the island. He not only financed and supervised the creation of 56 miles of carriage trails but he donated close to 11,000 acres to the Park. There was one small catch with his donation: the carriage roads were to remain off limits to cars forever. Rockefeller’s involvement did not end there. After the great fire of 1947, which burned over 17,000 acres on the island in the course of a month, he bankrolled a salvage and clean-up crew to assist the Park.

Rockefeller certainly had plenty of money to give. His father founded Standard Oil in 1870 and through questionable tactics he created an empire and quickly amassed a huge fortune. At the time of his death in 1937 he was worth over 1.4 billion dollars. He was so wealthy that Oysters Rockefeller was named after him because it is so “rich.” Considered by some historians as a classic example of a “robber baron,” Rockefeller Sr. was a generous philanthropist.

As a young man Jr. was put in charge of his father’s many foundations and he actively donated to a slew of causes. This quote by Jr. sums up his view well: “I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.” Jr. influence was so widespread that when a letter of his was published on the front page of The New York Times calling for the ending of the 18th Amendment, it was repealed. It remains the only Amendment to have been repealed (of course, it was also the only Amendment that restricted freedom).

Acadia was not the only National Park to have benefited from Rockefeller gifts. Grand Teton, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, and Shenandoah also received sizable donations. Rockefeller money funded far more than conservation projects in the United States. For example, in the 1920s Jr. gave 60 million francs to France for the restoration of the Palace of Versailles.

Today, many of MDI’s year-round residents still make their living from the sea, like other islanders in Maine. They live in numerous small towns that dot the island, surrounded by Acadia National Park’s patchwork boundaries. The island is famous because of the park, which is one of the most visited in the U.S. The stark beauty of the land and sea, which has attracted international attention for centuries, makes Mount Desert Island a special place.