Acadia became the first national park east of the Mississippi thanks largely to George B. Dorr, who spent 43 years and his family fortune preserving the landscape. The park encompasses nearly 48,000 acres of granite-domed mountains, woodlands, lakes, and ocean shoreline on the coast of Maine.
Evidence suggests people have lived here for at least 5,000 years. Later centuries brought European settlers, and eventually the affluent families of the Gilded Age, who came to frolic and -- crucially -- to conserve. The diversity of habitat, from rocky coast to boreal forest, makes Acadia a haven for wildlife.