The Wabanaki named this island Pemetic — "range of mountains" — and understood immediately what the land was. The modern park's origin is more tangled: President Woodrow Wilson designated Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916, the name chosen by George Dorr after a French explorer's title. Congress remade it into Lafayette National Park, then Acadia in 1929. Dorr stayed on as the park's first superintendent until 1944. Today the park encompasses roughly 49,000 acres across Mount Desert Island, the Schoodic Peninsula, and Isle au Haut — protecting the tallest mountain on the Atlantic Coast — and draws nearly four million visitors a year. The carriage road network, financed and built by John D. Rockefeller Jr., remains its quietest path through that terrain. The spring at Sieur de Monts, where the Monument began, still marks where the story started.
