Between 1915 and 1940, John D. Rockefeller Jr. financed, designed, and directed the construction of roughly 57 miles of crushed stone carriage roads across Mount Desert Island — a system built deliberately without automobiles, at the exact moment automobiles were winning everywhere else. Sixteen of the 17 stone-faced, steel-reinforced concrete bridges came from his money. He later guided the Park Loop Road to completion in 1958, 27 miles that took 37 years to finish, threading Sand Beach, Otter Cliff, Jordan Pond, and Cadillac Mountain onto a single road. He purchased the land around Little Long Pond for its scenery; in 2015 it was donated and opened to the public. He helped finance the rescue of Beatrix Farrand's plant collection into the Asticou Azalea Garden in 1956. One man's sustained attention, across four decades, built most of what people come here to walk through.
