Revisiting Seal Harbor and Acadia National Park

Book excerpt: Seal Harbor and Acadia National Park are areas rich with history and natural beauty. Several hundred photographs, taken by Seal Harbor's original residents, inspired this pictorial history of the well-known resort and surrounding Acadia National Park. A perusal through Revisiting Seal Harbor and Acadia National Park will reveal to the reader the natural beauty of the area, through views that attracted the early rusticators and created such dedication from the island's summer and winter residents, that Acadia National Park was born. The pages within trace the community's history, from its humble beginnings as a small fishing hamlet, through its metamorphosis into a Victorian-era summer resort, and on through the park's development, an economic boon for the island's residents. From images of a time filled with sweeping Victorian dresses, grand yachts, and wildwood hikes, to accounts of the area's prosperity in the 1910s and 1920s-when the area became synonymous with the Rockefeller and Ford names-Revisiting Seal Harbor and Acadia National Park invites the reader to take a lingering look into the lives of the early islanders and summer visitors.