Acadia National Park

Every other national park in 1916 had been carved from land the federal government already controlled. Acadia was different: it existed only because a group of wealthy summer residents on Maine's Mount Desert Island, led by George B. Dorr, spent more than a decade buying up parcels of coastline and mountain with their own money and donating them to the public. Congress accepted the gift as Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916 and upgraded it to full national park status in 1919, making it the first national park established east of the Mississippi River and the first created almost entirely through private philanthropy rather than federal land already in government hands.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. became the project's largest benefactor, personally funding and designing 45 miles of crushed-stone carriage roads through the park beginning in 1913, complete with 17 hand-cut granite bridges, built specifically to keep automobiles off trails he thought should stay open to horses, bicycles, and walkers. The land itself had been used by Wabanaki peoples, including the Penobscot, for thousands of summers before European settlers arrived on Mount Desert Island, a long history the donors' land titles did not erase but also did not acknowledge at the time. The park's highest point, Cadillac Mountain, is the first place in the continental United States to see sunrise for part of the year.

Acadia now draws more than three million visitors annually to a park that covers less land than many single ranches out west, and its carriage roads — closed to cars by design — remain open today exactly as Rockefeller intended, used by hikers, cyclists, and horse-drawn carriages alike. Mount Desert Island's rocky shoreline, battered year-round by the North Atlantic, makes Acadia one of the only national parks where granite peaks rise directly from the sea.