Reaching the Summit: Green Mountain

The surveyor route

The first real route to the top was built for science. In 1853 Professor Alexander Dallas Bache of the U.S. Coast Survey began mapping the Maine coast, and a year later he chose the summit, which he called "Mount Desert," as a triangulation station. Richard Hamor of Eden (the old name for Bar Harbor) built a 10-by-12-foot frame house on top for $50. Coast Survey artificer Thomas McDonnell cut a rough road to drag the instruments up. C. O. Boutelle set up a heliograph, a mirror that flashed sunlight between distant stations, and it stayed in use until 1860.

The road ran up from the Eagle Lake Road across rock, bog and ledge, possibly over an older "Green Mountain Path." The HAER report calls it the first route to the summit other than old Abnaki trails. The station is still in the national survey record as "Mount Desert 1856."

The summit hotels

Visitors who climbed the mountain wanted somewhere to eat. The Brewers built a small frame hotel on top, which George Dorr remembered as "a simple frame structure which was admirably placed looking broadly out southward across the ocean." Clergue's company added the Summit House on the middle peak, with a square rooftop observatory. On 2 August 1884 fire destroyed both buildings; a temporary one went up in 13 days.

In 1885 the larger Summit Hotel opened on the east peak, with three floors, a veranda, an octagonal rooftop observatory and a telescope. From 1889 to 1891 the U.S. Signal Service ran a weather station on its third floor. After the railway closed, John D. Rockefeller Jr. remembered the hotel as "more or less of a disorderly and disreputable resort." When it was torn down in 1896 or 1897, he wrote, "the whole community was relieved." Sources name the early hotels differently; this page follows the Cultural Landscapes Inventory.

The carriage road war and the Toll House

In 1888 the Green Mountain Carriage Road Company opened a road wide enough for two carriages to pass. Its lower part ran just east of the worn-out buckboard road; its upper part mostly followed it and ended in a loop near the middle peak. The railway put gates across it where it crossed the tracks. When the gates were torn down, the railway hired sixteen men who spent the night laying dynamite and blew up the road at dawn. It was quickly repaired, and there were no more fights.

An 1890s guidebook page in the archive gives the tolls: 25 cents for each horse and each passenger, and 10 cents for a walker. By then the railway was "disused at present," a small hotel on top still served meals for a dollar, and walkers were told they would "do better" on the path up the Gorge.

Our crews have spent more field days on the Toll House paths than on almost any other lost route on the mountain. The Toll House Trail leaves the buckboard road, crosses Kebo Mountain Road and reaches the North Ridge Trail. Cairns 1 to 37 were found or set in September 2010, cairns 102 to 130 in 2018, and many were checked and rebuilt in October 2023. One 2009 note marks a worn path "from period when North Ridge entered from Tollhouse."

The Featherbed and the Pot Holes

While the summit was crowded with buildings, the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Society was building footpaths on the quieter south side. The Featherbed is the boggy saddle on the South Ridge where the South Ridge Trail, described in the 1870s guidebooks, meets the Canon Brook Trail, which older guides call Canyon Brook.

The Pot Holes Trail of 1905 left the South Ridge south of Eagles Crag, dropped down the east slope into the Otter Creek valley, made a U-turn and climbed back northwest to the Featherbed. It was named for potholes worn into the rock. One set looked like footprints and was called the "devil's foot tracks." Old maps of the area show names like the Old Leopard, the Great Flat, Resting Rock and the Old Man and Woman.

The trail went off the official maps but was never quite lost. On 31 July 2014 our crew found or set cairns PC1 to PC17 on the Potholes Connector; several turned out to be older cairns ("PC13 = old cairn 7").

The modern park road

Grading started in 1924, and the federal Bureau of Public Roads took over in 1928. The road was paved in 1931 with an aggregate of the mountain's own pink granite, its grades held to 7 percent, at a cost of about $350,000. It opened on 11 October 1931, when about 3,000 people drove up in 800 cars, and was dedicated on 23 July 1932. The Portland Sunday Telegram called it "one of the finest mountain drives in the world." The Park Service landscape architect Charles Peterson called it "the worst piece of landscape damage which any road has done in a national park."

The motor road roughly follows the buckboard route up the north ridge and in several places lies directly on top of it. In 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps built the summit loop path, and the Cadillac Tavern of 1933–34 was sited by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and designed by Grosvenor Atterbury.

The summit at war

In March 1941 the Army Corps of Engineers chose the summit for a radar station. Park Service crews finished a concrete platform and short road on 17 June 1941 for $4,556.75, reusing old paths to limit the damage. The Army Air Corps ran the station for early warning of aircraft; the HAER report says it was also there "to seek out enemy submarines plying the coast." The summit was closed to the public for the rest of the war.

The first station stood on bare ledge on the middle peak inside a chain-link fence 300 feet square. Probably in 1944 it moved lower and to the south, to a site half that size. The CCC turned the Cadillac Tavern into barracks; it was torn down in 1945. The road reopened in October 1945, and the parking area at the old radar site is now Sunset Overlook. The mountain also gave its name to Project Cadillac, the MIT Radiation Laboratory's airborne early-warning radar of 1944–45, "named for the Maine mountain where experimental equipment was tested," and the forerunner of today's AWACS aircraft.

The new toll road

The Brewers asked for 10 cents and posted boys at the bottom of the hill. The 1888 carriage road had a toll house. Today the summit is a toll road again, though it is no longer called one. To manage crowding, the Park Service requires a vehicle reservation to drive the Cadillac Summit Road in season. Reservations cost $6 per vehicle and are sold only in advance on Recreation.gov, on top of a park entrance pass. Walkers and cyclists don't need one. In the 1890s walkers paid 10 cents and were told they would "do better" on the Gorge path. Today, walking up is still free.