The story of the carriage roads, the granite guardrails and the summer neighbors who fought them.
See those rough granite blocks along the edge of the road? They're guardrails, and everybody here calls them Rockefeller's teeth. John D. Rockefeller Junior had a passion for road building. Between about nineteen thirteen and nineteen forty he built forty-five miles of carriage roads through this park, closed to cars. He paid for sixteen of their seventeen stone-faced bridges, no two alike. George Wharton Pepper, a summer resident and a sitting United States senator, called the whole plan a rich man's hobby. The Park Service, he said, was surrendering the park to an oil man. Rockefeller won. He paid for most of the motor roads too, including a good deal of this one. The woman who planted those carriage roads lost more. Beatrix Farrand saw the fire destroy much of her work. She reportedly asked Bar Harbor for tax relief on her own garden and was refused. In nineteen fifty-five, with her gardener retiring and her costs mounting, she tore down her house and carried off the front door.
Photo: Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress, public domain · Public domain