Acadia National Park - Culture

People People inhabited this area at least 5,000 years ago. They were hunter-gatherers who shaped stone tools and used them to gouge out the trunks of hemlock trees to make canoes. They made tools for cutting and chopping and pounding, and as weights for fishing lines in the deep sea. From their dugout canoes, they fished and pursued swordfish, and hunted sea mammals. The groups who lived here over the thousands of years, left behind evidence of their time here: the stone tools, and large piles of mussel and clam shells, called shell middens, which provide clues to their daily lives. In more recent times, the Wabanaki, People of the Dawn, carried on hunter-gatherer activities as well. They built wigwams and canoes of birch bark.

They traded up and down the coast with other American Indians, and European explorers and fishermen. In the 1800s, they taught tourists and summer residents how to canoe on Frenchman Bay and crafted baskets for sale to the burgeoning tourist trade. The French navigator-explorer, Samuel Champlain, made the first reliable European record of the area in 1604, though because of the turbulance that followed between the French and British, it was not until 1762 that a permanent European settlement was established. These hardy folk subsisted here, farming and fishing, and eventually opening their homes to paying tourists, called “rusticators”, who enjoyed the rustic lodgings and the primitive and wild state of the island.

Tourism flourished beginning in the mid-1800s, and the island supported a population of wealthy summer residents who came here to escape the pressures of city life. Acadia National Park was founded by those who wished to see their favorite views and special places preserved for the future, rather than developed and harvested. Thanks to their stewardship and foresight, the island retains a little of its wild nature, which first attracted visitors in the 1800s. Today, three million visitors a year enjoy what the park founders fought to preserve.