Eagle Lake and Witch Hole Pond Carriage Roads: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Acadia National Park

Killion, Jeff; Ak, Tutku

The coastal islands and rugged shorelines of Maine serve as the setting for the historic carriage road system at Acadia National Park, located in Hancock County. Acadia was the first national park established east of the Mississippi River and today protects over 47,000 acres across Mount Desert Island, Schoodic Peninsula, and numerous smaller islands. Over 2 million visitors annually experience the park’s diverse landscape of granite cliffs, evergreen forests, glacial lakes, salt marshes, cobblestone beaches, and rocky coastlines facing Frenchman Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Three distinct yet integrated circulation systems allow visitors to explore these resources: 115 miles of historic hiking trails offer woodland walks and rugged climbs, 33 miles of historic motor roads stretch from mountain summits to the rocky coasts, and 57 miles of historic carriage roads track around lakes and along mountainsides. Acadia’s carriage roads were envisioned, designed, and funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. One hundred years ago, in 1913, Rockefeller constructed his first carriage road at his 15‑acre estate in Seal Harbor to enjoy carriage driving and sightseeing. When the last carriage road bridge was completed in 1940, Rockefeller had skillfully built a network of rustic carriage roads that continues to provide motor‑free access to some of the park’s most scenic destinations on the eastern half of Mount Desert Island. Rustic wood signposts help guide users on foot, bicycle, or cross‑country skis to roads that track alongside meadows and streams, encircle lakes and ponds, and curve around rocky mountainsides. Deciduous and evergreen forests line much of the system, and frequently open up to frame intimate vistas of the island’s interior and panoramic views to the mainland and the surrounding islands, bays, and ocean. Most of the views and vistas were part of the system’s overall design. The Eagle Lake and Witch Hole Pond Carriage Roads: The scope of the Northeast Region CLI Program’s work on the 57‑mile historic carriage road system is concentrated on the 44 miles of carriage roads that lie within the park’s boundaries. This includes 41 individual road sections varying in length from 0.1 to 3.6 miles, 16 of the 17 historic masonry bridges, and the 2 gatehouse complexes. The remaining sections of carriage roads and the Cobblestone Bridge are privately owned. These road sections are distinctly different in character because their road surfaces are much more vegetated than the surfaces of the federally‑owned roads. Due to the geographic extent of Acadia’s carriage road system, and the need to efficiently document and map its features for uploading into the national CLI database, the system has been divided into four distinct landscape areas as described in a Historic American Engineering Record documentation project completed in the mid‑1990s. The four areas were determined by a combination of factors, including location, natural features, topography, elevation, historical development, and similarities in road design. Thus, the four component CLI landscapes that comprise Acadia’s historic carriage road system are: Eagle Lake and Witch Hole Pond Carriage Roads, Hadlock and Aunt Betty Pond Carriage Roads, Jordan and Sargent Mountain Carriage Roads, and the Bubble Pond and Day Mountain Carriage Roads. The focus of this component CLI is the Eagle Lake and Witch Hole Pond Carriage Roads. Its 13 road sections are associated with seven different carriage road projects constructed between1922 to 1930, and include two masonry bridges and three wood bridges.

Eagle Lake and Witch Hole Pond Carriage Roads: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Acadia National Park

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