Biography of GBDORR. First PRospectus. 2008 11/08 Becoming Acadia National Park: The Life of George Bucknam Dorr A Prospectus by Ronald Harry Epp, Ph.D. Prepared for Mr. Bruce Wilcox, University of Massachusetts Press The life of conservationist George Bucknam Dorr spanned nearly a century, from the decade prior to the Civil War to the final months of World War II. While he is celebrated as the founder of Acadia National Park, Dorr's seminal contributions to the American environmental movement have gone largely unacknowledged. Even in the present day, those who live on-or travel to-Maine's Mount Desert Island do not fully comprehend the scope of Dorr's achievements during the three decades of his administration (1916-1944). Whenever his life has been recounted, the treatments have been piecemeal and overly simplified. This biography of George B. Dorr (1853 1944) relates Acadia's progenitor to the institutional and historical contexts in which he lived. Dorr came late to a sense of personal identity. The long formative period (his first fifty years) have been virtually ignored in earlier publications. Here the applications of his conservation principles will be traced, many derived through family associations, through interactions with his alma mater (Harvard University) and his extensive travels-domestically and abroad-as a young man. Previous Dorr biographers have consulted only regional newspapers, Park archives, and popular anecdotal lore for their information. The archival record has been largely ignored. There has been no comprehensive account of his entire life. Significantly, Dorr's relationship with Harvard, which this study contends is central to a full understanding of his motivations, has not been addressed. The influences of Harvard Professors Josiah Royce and William James on Dorr have also gone unrecognized. So too, the influence of the Dorr family on the intellectual development of these two philosophers has not been traced. This biography will address these interactions and their intersection in the funding and construction of the first academic building in the United States devoted exclusively to philosophy, Emerson Hall. From 1898-1905 Dorr chaired the philosophy visiting committee that secured the funds that Harvard required to erect this facility. In due course he learned those donor solicitation skills that would be vital to assembling the hundreds of parcels of land for Acadia National Park. His solicitation efforts were also a tribute to a long standing relationship between his family and that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dorr's experience at Harvard, coupled with his exposure to the larger late-nineteenth century societal climate of philanthropy, combined to produce a man who was not content to remain idling in the realms of speculative philosophy. Dorr seized upon the challenges presented by Mount Desert Island in much the same way as Charles W. Eliot had accepted the daunting task of reforming Harvard when the latter accepted the mantle of its presidency (1869-1909). Just as Harvard's William James labored to marry philosophical doctrines to practical outcomes, SO Dorr sought to wed the need for public awareness for the need of private philanthropy to land conservation. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the new movement to conserve nature was joined with the existing machinery of philanthropy. The key advocates that emerged were George B. Dorr, landscape architect Charles Eliot, President Charles W. Eliot, and later John D. Rockefeller Jr. Dorr did not shirk from the direct consequences to himself that his fellow philanthropists avoided. Nearing fifty, Dorr invested the bulk of his own financial resources in conserving land on Mount Desert Island. Increasingly, 2 he directed his efforts away from his horticultural business and towards acquiring contiguous island properties of exceptional natural character. Becoming Acadia National Park is the history of a concept familiar to us today, the idea of the land trust. In its Victorian Downeast Maine iteration, the landscape preservation idea is inseparable from the life of George Bucknam Dorr. The Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations established in 1901 was modeled on Charles Eliot's Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservations. As the first land trust in Maine, Dorr was its chief executive who almost single handedly induced the donation of island properties of scenic value. In one of many examples of political savvy, Dorr persuaded federal officials to initially accept 5,000 acres of donated land as a public resource, a precedent setting action on the eve of the 1916 establishment of the National Park Service. Dorr responded to the same philanthropic impulses that moved his parents and grandparents but directed them largely to the preservation of a unique piece of the New England landscape; a landscape that was increasingly threatened by the encroachment of a myriad of forces by an ever-evolving industrial society. Dorr was also a community activist who served Bar Harbor as a Selectman and established on the island scientific laboratories (e.g., the internationally renowned Jackson Laboratory), a music theatre, a museum, and a public library. Dorr's correspondence with John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874-1960) and his less restrained letters to and from President Eliot (1834-1926) provide the key manuscript resources for this study. Other important administrative documents-including monthly reports to the National Park Service-are contained in the Sawtelle Research Center at Acadia National Park and National Archives and Records Administration facilities. Collections of Dorr manuscripts are preserved at the Bar Harbor Historical Society, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Unfortunately, some of the secondary literature perpetuates misunderstandings of the man and his time. To better appreciate Dorr's historic context, dozens of interviews were completed with Rockefeller, Eliot, Dorr, and Ward family members as well as others whose thoughts bear on the themes of this biography. The origins for Dorr's conservation thinking antedated his first experiences on Mount Desert Island. The values transmitted to him by his parents and grandparents were critically relevant to the evolution of his thought, as were several key literary personalities and historical events in antebellum America. Like the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dorr was born into a community adjacent to the sea. Indeed, for more than six decades he lived adjacent to the Public Garden and on Park Street at the foot of the Massachusetts State House. Some of Dorr's favorite haunts-the Boston Common, Beacon Hill, and Commonwealth Avenue-were close by the ocean. He never grew weary of revisiting these, nor of the mountain charms of the Berkshires where in the two decades before the Civil War, both sides of the Dorr family had been among the pioneering cottagers of Lenox. For more than fifty years Dorr would journey to Lenox, providing landscaping advice for the development of wild gardens when he was Edith Wharton's guest at The Mount. Dorr emerges as a bachelor preoccupied with "historical associations," a desire to amplify the positive elements of his Brahmin inheritance. His decision in middle age to use a small island in Maine as a vehicle to instruct subsequent generations in the importance of sanctuary-a place (for the public) set aside to foster recreation for and reconstitution of one's personal identity-stamps, unmistakably, Dorr's distinctiveness. For more than four decades, Dorr's physical energy, intellectual focus, and spiritual aspirations were directed at "this historic, mountainous and timeworn landscape" hard against the Atlantic coast. Dorr's success was achieved despite two lifelong disabilities: a visual impairment that would eventually rob him of his sight and a chronic speech impediment, the disfluency of the stammerer. In appraising the full range of Dorr's published work, consisting of thousands of pages of manuscript material, I have sought to augment Dorr's The Story of Acadia National Park. Our respective methodologies diverge in one significant respect. Dorr's account was primarily descriptive. He covered 3 the Park's inception, development, and growth. The work of a seasoned federal administrator, it emphasized the chronology of events and kept interpretation and evaluation to a minimum. By contrast, Becoming Acadia National Park is attributive. It traces how he applied certain birthright attributes (whether actual or inferential), which he derived from both sides of his family, and shaped them to his own ends. This work further examines the development of Dorr's unique leadership skills from the behavioral models he observed and embraced as a descendant of powerful Brahmin families. Dorr's quest had four primary motivations: (1) a desire to set aside exceptionally scenic areas for unmediated aesthetic appreciation; (2) a concern to secure places for recreational use as a tonic to the increasing pressures of living in an industrialized society; (3) a wish to provide for the scientific communities places of natural distinctiveness where researchers could learn about (what we now term) ecosystems; (4) a hope to redefine the Brahmin philanthropy of the prior generation through the creation of an enduring natural legacy. The last was Dorr's gambit to join the ranks of John Muir, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and some other men of vision within the National Park Service who were instrumental in creating this new form of public benefaction. The first half of Dorr's exceptionally long life, graced with a Harvard education and a privileged position in society, was seemingly given over to dilettantism and indifference. In fact, the idleness that many perceive in his first twenty-five years out from Harvard was instead the period during which Dorr marshaled the resources he would require for his subsequent intense involvement in four distinct but related spheres of activity: (1) promoting conservation through the establishment and administration of Acadia National Park; (2) institutionalizing the progressive agenda through the establishment on Mount Desert Island of scientific institutions (3) applying the Harvard University private fund-raising experience to Mount Desert Island through community activism that addressed the cultural needs of the public; and (4) developing a leadership style that enabled him to advance his conservation agenda in halls of Congress-and when necessary to stand outside the constraints of the new National Park Service in his efforts to collaborate effectively with the private philanthropic ambitions of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Dorr found in the landscape of Mount Desert Island his particular medium; a medium with which he could recapture the flavor of his childhood. As a boy, he had been content with a passive invitation to enjoyment generated by the salty ocean tang that had blown inland from Boston's wharfs. As an adult, Dorr pursued the therapeutic power of that same ocean with active daily immersions (throughout all four seasons) in the waters of Frenchman Bay. When we think of Dorr-and of the men and women who established Acadia National Park-we must remain mindful that the landscape they sought to preserve was not limited to the island itself. Their vision of preservation extended to the islands peripheral waters, to its unique climate, and to the biological diversity and interplay that SO few understood a century ago. And like the sea itself, their legacy extends to us and our heirs. Contextual Information: Presently I am nearing the completion of a rough draft of Becoming Acadia National Park. It will take the remainder of this year to document the final decade of Dorr's life, insert supplemental content, remove substantial ancestry background information, relocate the embedded scholarly apparatus, and polish the narrative. Its length at present is 300 single-spaced pages. Regarding the use of images, Dorr documented the natural splendor of Mount Desert Island photographically and enlisted the help of a close friend, renowned landscape photographer of the national parks, Herbert Wendell Gleason. Underutilized by the Sawtelle Research Center, few of the several thousand images in this collection have been seen by the public but many are appropriate to supplement historical images available from diverse sources. The potential audience for this work is anyone interested in the origins of the American environmental movement, especially historians of science interested in the establishment of biological laboratories that 4 mature into institutions of global standing. Conservationists and landscape historians will appreciate the detail provided herein for seminal land protection east of the Mississippi. Those engaged in various forms of philanthropic fund raising will find that Dorr's pioneering methods still resonate today. Educators focused on the leadership role provide by Harvard University, especially during the Eliot administration, will be drawn to the yet unreported mentoring that Eliot offered both Dorr and Rockefeller. General readers will be drawn to the human story of how Dorr, Eliot, and Rockefeller achieved their respective goals as well as how the collective vision of this triumvirate was realized at great personal expense. Dorr's biography is timely given the forthcoming preparations for the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service and its first national park east of the Mississippi, Acadia National Park. More immediate is the forthcoming 2009 twelve-hour PBS series Our National Parks being finalized by the Florentine Studios of cinematographer Ken Burns. For the past five years I've been a consultant on this project and am confident that this dramatic story of the evolution of our national parks system will generate sustained public interest in parks like Acadia where this series is focused. April 1, 2008 Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. 47 Pond View Dr. Merrimack, NH 03054 603-424-6149 Eppster2@verizon.net