Travel in Time with Dan | Bar Harbor, Maine
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960) — son of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who was one of the most influential figures in Bar Harbor’s Gilded Age history. He spent summers here among the “rusticators,” the wealthy elite who built enormous estates they called “cottages” along the rocky Maine coastline. Rockefeller was responsible for creating approximately 40 miles of meticulously designed carriage roads on Mount Desert Island. These roads were explicitly closed to automobiles, a deliberate philosophical statement about preserving the natural landscape against the encroachment of the industrial age. He later played a central role in donating land that became Acadia National Park. Bar Harbor during this era rivaled Newport, Rhode Island as the premier summer destination for America’s wealthiest families, attracting figures like Joseph Pulitzer, the Vanderbilts, and Henry Ford. The Great Fire of 1947 would eventually destroy 67 of the grand mansions on Millionaires Row, transforming Bar Harbor from an elite private retreat into the public tourism destination it is today. This imagined conversation takes place during the height of the Gilded Age, while Rockefeller is actively building his carriage roads. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, inspired by Rockefeller’s documented philosophy of conservation, his complex relationship with wealth and public responsibility, and the unique culture of Bar Harbor’s rusticator community.
📍 Setting: Bar Harbor, Maine — the early 1900s, the height of the Gilded Age. The morning is clear and cool, the kind of Maine summer morning that makes everyone who experiences it understand immediately why the wealthiest people in America chose to spend their summers here. The rocky coastline is visible through the spruce trees, the water impossibly blue. A trim, quietly purposeful man in his thirties is standing at the edge of one of his carriage roads, studying a survey map with the focused attention of someone for whom attention is a habit rather than an effort. He is not what most people expect when they imagine a Rockefeller… there is nothing loud or theatrical about him. He is precise, thoughtful, and has the particular stillness of a man who has spent considerable time deciding exactly what he believes and is no longer much interested in arguing about it. He looks up from the map as I approach, folds it carefully, and extends his hand.
Dan: Mr. Rockefeller, thank you for speaking with me. I want to start with what you’re doing right here with these carriage roads. Can you tell me what you’re building and why?
Rockefeller: (With the quiet enthusiasm of a man describing something he genuinely loves)
What you are standing on is the beginning of what I intend to be a complete system of carriage roads covering this island — forty miles when it is finished, perhaps more. Designed to move through this landscape rather than impose upon it. The grades are gentle, the curves follow the natural contours of the terrain, and the stonework bridges are built to feel as though they have always been here. The intention is that a person traveling these roads… by carriage, on horseback, on foot… should feel that the road exists to serve the landscape, not the other way around.
Dan: And no automobiles.
Rockefeller: (Firmly, without apology)
No automobiles. Not on these roads. Never on these roads.
(A glance down the carriage road, the spruce forest on either side)
I have nothing personally against Mr. Ford. He is a neighbor here, in the summer at least, and a perfectly agreeable one. But the automobile is changing the relationship between human beings and the natural world in ways I find deeply troubling, and I am not willing to allow that change to happen here. These roads are a statement. They say that there are places where the machine does not belong, where the pace of a horse and the attention of a person on foot are the right technologies, and where we will protect that deliberately rather than simply allowing progress to pave over everything it encounters.
Dan: That is a striking position for a man whose family fortune is built on the oil that fuels those automobiles.
Rockefeller: (A measured pause, meeting the observation directly)
It is a tension I am aware of and do not entirely resolve. I will not pretend otherwise. The Standard Oil fortune exists. I did not build it… my father did… but I have inherited it and I make use of it, including here. The carriage roads are built with that money. Acadia, when we are finished, will be donated with that money. Whether the source of a gift changes the nature of the gift is a question I find genuinely complicated, and I have sat with it a great deal.
What I have concluded is this: the obligation created by great wealth is not satisfied by simply possessing it carefully. It requires putting it toward things that outlast the man who holds it. These roads will be here long after I am gone. The park will be here long after I am gone. That matters more to me than resolving the philosophical tension cleanly.
Dan: Let’s talk about Bar Harbor itself. This place has become something extraordinary. It’s the rival of Newport, the summer home of the Vanderbilts and the Fords and the Pulitzers. What is it about this particular place that draws people like that?
Rockefeller: (Looking out toward the water with genuine appreciation)
Newport is magnificent in its way. But Newport is a performance. The architecture there, the social calendar, the whole machinery of it… it is designed to be seen, to impress, to establish position. There is nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but it produces a particular kind of exhaustion after a while.
Bar Harbor is different. The people who come here… the ones who come back year after year… come because of this. (A gesture at the coastline, the spruce trees, the morning light on the water) The wildness of it. The coast doesn’t care who your family is. The ocean doesn’t make social distinctions. There is something clarifying about spending time in a place that is genuinely indifferent to your importance, and I think the people who are drawn here rather than to Newport are, at some level, looking for that clarification.
Dan: The cottages here are… and I use the word loosely… enormous. Fifty-room estates. Is calling them cottages a kind of studied modesty, or is there something genuine in that?
Rockefeller: (The faintest smile)
Both, I think, depending on the person using the word. For some, yes — it is modesty of the studied kind, the performance of simplicity layered over anything but. For others, I think it is genuine. The intention, at least in the beginning, was that the buildings here should defer to the landscape rather than dominate it. The materials are local. They are the granite, the shingle, the wood that weathers to grey and begins to look as though it grew here. The idea was that a cottage, however large, is something that belongs to its setting rather than something that announces itself against it.
Whether that intention has survived the scale of what has been built here… (a slight pause)… I will leave for others to judge.
Dan: You mentioned Acadia. What is the vision there — donating land that the rusticators came here precisely to keep private?
Rockefeller: (With quiet conviction)
That is the paradox at the center of it, and I think it is worth sitting with honestly. The people who built here came in part because this place was unspoiled and difficult to reach. They wanted the wildness without it being democratized, if I am being frank about it. The privacy was part of the appeal.
But I have come to believe… and this is a belief that has grown stronger the longer I spend time here… that a landscape this extraordinary cannot be justified as the private possession of the families wealthy enough to summer on it. It belongs, in the deepest sense, to everyone. To every person who might stand on that shoreline and feel what I feel when I stand there. The fact that we got here first and built our cottages does not give us the permanent right to keep everyone else out.
The park is an acknowledgment of that. It is also, I will be honest, an act of preservation. If we do not protect this land deliberately, it will be developed. The pressures of the coming century will see to that. A national park is the strongest protection available. So the donation is both generous and practical, and I see no reason to pretend it is only one of those things.
Dan: Bar Harbor has already changed enormously from the fishing village it was fifty years ago. Do you ever think about what it will look like fifty years from now?
Rockefeller: (A long pause, looking down the carriage road)
I think about it more than I discuss it. The honest answer is that I do not know, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing. What I know is that places change whether we plan for the change or not. Bar Harbor was fishing shacks. Then it was this. What comes after this will be determined by forces that none of us fully controls — economic shifts, disasters, the tastes and needs of generations we cannot yet imagine.
What we can do is leave things behind that are strong enough to survive the changes. The carriage roads are built from granite. The park, if we do this correctly, will be protected by law. Those things can outlast whatever comes next in ways that the cottages, perhaps, cannot.
(Quietly, and with a quality that suggests he believes this more than he usually says out loud)
A place that has something worth preserving will find people to preserve it. My job is to make sure the right things survive.
Dan: Last question, Mr. Rockefeller. People will come to Bar Harbor for generations to walk your carriage roads, to visit Acadia, and to look at what remains of this era. What do you want them to understand about what was built here?
Rockefeller: (Folding the survey map again, looking one final time at the road curving away through the trees)
I want them to understand that the most valuable things built during this era were not the cottages. The cottages were expressions of wealth, and wealth is a temporary condition. What I hope lasts… what I am trying to ensure lasts… are the roads and the park and the coastline itself. The things that belong to everyone rather than to anyone.
And I want them to understand something about resilience that this place has already demonstrated and will demonstrate again: a community with something genuinely worth preserving will survive almost anything. Fire. Economic change. The passing of whatever era made it famous. What survives is not the grandeur — grandeur is fragile. What survives is the landscape, the coastline, the wildness that drew people here in the first place.
(A pause, the morning light moving on the water through the trees)
The cottages will come and go. The carriage roads I am building will still be here. The ocean will certainly still be here. Build the things that belong to the landscape rather than sitting on top of it, and the landscape will take care of them long after you are gone.
I watched John D. Rockefeller Jr. walk back down the carriage road, the survey map tucked under his arm, the spruce trees closing quietly behind him.
The 1947 fire came, as fires do, without asking permission. Sixty-seven mansions on Millionaires Row… the fifty-room cottages, the grand estates, the whole gilded machinery of the era… burned. The grandeur that had made Bar Harbor the rival of Newport was largely gone in a single catastrophic night.
The carriage roads did not burn. Acadia National Park did not burn. The rocky coastline, entirely indifferent to the fire as it had always been indifferent to everything else, did not burn.
Bar Harbor adapted. The fishing village had become an elite resort. The elite resort became a tourism destination. The transformation was not painless and it was not planned, but the bones of the place… the landscape, the park, the roads built from granite to follow the natural curves of the terrain… held.
Resilience builds legacy. Not the resilience of things that resist change, but the resilience of things built deeply enough into their landscape that no single disaster can unmake them. Rockefeller understood that instinctively, even in the middle of the Gilded Age, surrounded by the most fragile kind of grandeur imaginable.
He built for what would last. Most of what lasted is his.
The carriage roads are still there. No cars allowed. 🌲🏔️
Travel in Time with Dan is where travel, history, and leadership come together. Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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