[On March 3rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ll celebrate Interior’s 175th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to a post on National Historical Parks!]
On a few
telling moments in the strikingly French history of the Maine National Park.
French
explorer Samuel de Champlain named Maine’s Mount Desert Island when he
sailed past it on his second voyage to the Americas, in September 1604;
Champlain noted that “the tops of [the island’s mountains] are bare of trees,
because there is nothing there but rocks,” and so Mount Desert it was. Nine
years later, in 1613, the Jesuit priest Father Pierre Biard and forty
settlers established the first French missionary colony on the island, in the
area of Southwest Harbor; but later that same year, the English
Captain Samuel Argall sailed north from Jamestown and
destroyed the settlement, taking two priests back to Jamestown as prisoners. As
that last hyperlinked article illustrates, the early 17th century
was full of such back and forth conflicts between the French and English up and
down the Eastern seaboard, and the earliest history of what would become Acadia
was defined largely by those shifting European American winds (while the region’s
Wabanaki people were of course an established part of that history as well and
remained a vital part of it through each evolution).
The island
changed hands between the two nations at least a few more times over the next
century and a half, but a late 18th century moment reflects a very
different international relationship as of the period of the American
Revolution. Mount Desert Island had been under the control of the English Royal
Governor of Massachusetts, Sir
Francis Bernard, since 1760, and in 1780 the newly independent state of
Massachusetts granted the western half of the island to (or, I suppose, kept it
in the possession of) Bernard’s
son John. But the eastern half was granted instead to Marie
Therese de Gregoire, a Frenchwoman and granddaughter of the
French explorer and island’s 17th century titleholder Antoine de
la Mothe Cadillac. Both John Bernard and Marie de Gregoire were
of course the descendants of elite families, reflecting a continuation of
landed gentry roles even in Revolutionary and post-Revolution America. But at
the same time, this joint US and French ownership of the island was from what I
can tell a first in its history, and illustrates both France’s
vital role in the American Revolution and the ongoing relationship between
the two nations (one that, of course, would be severely
tested before the end of the 18th century).
When much
of Mount Desert Island was first preserved by the federal government in the
early 20th century, the two initial such efforts overtly honored
these Franco-American histories. In July 1916 President Woodrow Wilson
established Sieur de
Monts National Monument, naming it after an early French explorer and
compatriot of Champlain’s (Pierre
Dugua, Sieur de Mons). Three years later, when the area was upgraded
to full National Park status, it was named Lafayette
National Park in honor of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de
Lafayette. Even Acadia, the name given to the park instead in 1929, is a
tribute to the French legacy in the area, as Acadia was
a French colony in northeastern North America that included Maine. But Sieur de
Monts and Lafayette more directly highlight and embody those Franco-American
figures and stories, and better remembering them as part of the establishment
and development of Acadia National Park helps us keep those contested,
conflicted, crucial Maine and American histories in our collective memories.
National
Historical Parks this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment