Mount Desert Island, Maine & Acadia National Park

Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine, is widely known as the home of Acadia National Park and the town of Bar Harbor. If we viewed the island from the air (a look at the Acadia map will do), we would notice north and south aligned gouges scooped out of the land as if by a very large hand. Indeed, in this case, the hand was that of a huge, slow moving, continental glacier over a mile high,... 2 miles thick in some places. When this giant glacier finally melted and retreated, it left rounded and bare mountain tops, long lakes, many boulders, and the 7 mile long Somes Sound - the only fjord on the East coast of the United States. A good place to see the impact that these glaciers had on the shape of the islands is Sheep Porcupine Island. Elsewhere on MDI is the massive Cadillac Mountain. Even after being sheared off by the glaciers, it remains the highest point along the North Atlantic Seaboard at 1,532 feet above sea level and provides spectacular panoramic views of Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Island, and other out islands.

To the original coastal Abnaki Indians, Mount Desert Island was known as “Pemetic” (the sloping land). Although the Abnaki's permanent villages were located on the mainland, they regularly fished and gathered shellfish from Mount Desert Island. (Check out the Abbe Museum for this history.) The island got its current name from the French explorer Champlain who ran aground here in 1604 AD. Today, Mount Desert Island is best known as the home of Acadia National Park, where land and sea, mountains and shore, people and abundant wildlife meet in a natural and spectacular setting.

There are many people who are surprised to hear that there are actually only four official townships on the island. They are Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor and Tremont. Bar Harbor encompasses the sections of Eden (once the original name for Bar Harbor), Hulls Cove, Salisbury Cove and Town Hill. Mount Desert, although having no official “center,” consists of Hall Quarry, Northeast Harbor, Otter Creek, Seal Harbor and Somesville. With Southwest Harbor comes Manset and Seawall. Bass Harbor, Bernard, Seal Cove, and West Tremont are part of the town of Tremont. To view a list of the various towns and villages in and around Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island as well as the Schoodic Peninsula part of the National Park, select Acadia Towns & Villages.

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