Celebrity Travel
Bar Harbor Is Where the Rockefellers Built Roads Instead of Estates
Bar Harbor, Maine, was one of the Gilded Age’s grandest summer colonies until a 1947 fire ended it; what survived, including John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s car-free carriage roads through Acadia National Park, still shapes the town today.
Sep 25, 2026 · BigTravel.in
Bar Harbor, on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, was one of the grandest of America’s Gilded Age summer colonies, drawing the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors and Pulitzers from the 1880s through the 1940s to a stretch of coastline they filled with vast shingle-style “cottages”, a term the era used, with some irony, for houses that ran to dozens of rooms.
The fire that ended an era
Much of that first colony disappeared in a single event. The Great Fire of 1947 burned for ten days across the island, destroying roughly two-thirds of the town’s grand cottages along with large stretches of surrounding forest, and effectively closed the era of Bar Harbor as the exclusive, cottage-filled resort it had been for six decades.
What Rockefeller left behind
John D. Rockefeller Jr., who summered on the island for decades, funded and personally oversaw the construction of a network of carriage roads through what is now Acadia National Park: roughly 45 miles built between 1913 and 1940, engineered to be free of cars by his own insistence, and donated to the park along with a large share of the land it occupies. The roads, with their stone bridges, remain open today to walkers, cyclists and horse-drawn carriages, closed to motor vehicles exactly as he designed them.
Acadia itself
Acadia National Park, established in 1916 as Sieur de Monts National Monument and renamed Acadia in 1929, was the first national park created east of the Mississippi, its land largely assembled from donations by the same summer colony that built the cottages around it. Cadillac Mountain, within the park, is often cited as one of the first places in the continental United States to see the sunrise for part of the year.
Traveller tips
- Rockefeller’s carriage roads remain closed to motor vehicles; they are open to walkers, cyclists and, seasonally, horse-drawn carriage tours.
- Cadillac Mountain’s summit road has required a separate vehicle reservation during peak sunrise-viewing season in recent years; confirm the current system before planning an early visit.
- Much of what survives of the original Gilded Age cottages sits on the quieter, ocean-facing side of the island rather than in the town centre itself.
- Acadia National Park requires an entrance pass for most of the year; buy or confirm this in advance during the summer season.
Where this is
Bar Harbor, Maine