Acadia National Park

Indigenous peoples

The park’s 2007 ethnographic overview, by Harald Prins and Bunny McBride, names five Wabanaki nations — Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot; the park’s website names four, without the Abenaki. [3] [4] Wabanaki guiding Champlain to the island in 1604 called it Pemetic, “range of mountains,” and the sakom (chief) Asticou’s invitation led to the 1613 Saint Sauveur mission at Somes Sound, destroyed by an English privateer from Virginia. Within a few decades, the authors write, diseases, firewater and firearms left up to 90 percent of the Wabanaki dead — what they call an American Indian holocaust. From the mid-1800s island Wabanaki encampments sold crafts to summer visitors; in 1970 a short-lived Wabanaki educational center, T.R.I.B.E., was founded within the park. [3]

The park says that for most of the last century the federal government barred Wabanaki people from harvesting sweetgrass inside Acadia; since 2015 the Park Service has worked toward renewed gathering by federally recognized tribes. [4]

Climate & environment

A 2014 Park Service resource brief compared recent decades with the record since 1901 and found six temperature measures at Acadia in the “extreme warm” range and three precipitation measures “extreme wet,” none extreme cold or dry: recent conditions, it concluded, are already moving beyond the historical range. [5] The park’s climate page puts numbers to it: annual average temperature up 3.4°F over the last century; the surrounding Gulf of Maine up about 3°F and among the fastest-warming parts of the global ocean; sea level up eight inches since 1950, with shorelines — Wabanaki heritage sites among them — eroding. A June 2021 storm dropped more than five inches of rain in under three hours and caused over $1.5 million in damage to carriage roads, trails, streams and paved roads. If sea-level rise continues unabated, the park says, Thunder Hole will very likely be covered. [6]

Labor & the New Deal

Acadia’s administrators were among the first to apply for a Civilian Conservation Corps company. In May 1933 enrollees arrived at McFarland Hill — today’s park headquarters — and camps followed south of Great Pond in June and at Ellsworth in July. From 1933 to 1942 the three camps took on nearly 450 projects in forestry, watershed development, beautification, trail construction and facility development. Apart from two out-of-state contingents, the companies were Maine men; McFarland was the only camp in Maine, besides district headquarters, to run for the whole program. The park’s CCC study (final draft, 2009), drawing partly on interviews with 26 former enrollees, names the Perpendicular Trail, the Beech Cliffs Ladder Trail and much of the Ocean Trail as surviving CCC work, and Seawall and Blackwoods campgrounds, Sieur de Monts Spring and Sand Beach among enduring New Deal sites — stressing that the Corps was only one of several federal agencies involved. [7]