After more than a decade of preparation, a digital collection of 30,000 primary documents related to the creation of Acadia National Park is now available online as the Creating Acadia National Park Research Archive. Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. undertook the Herculean task of collecting documents from federal, public, and academic libraries and making physical copies of them available through the Jesup Library’s online archive, in cooperation with The History Trust.
Dr. Epp is the celebrated author of Creating Acadia National Park: The Biography of George Bucknam Dorr, which was published by Friends of Acadia in 2016.
The 40 feet of paper manuscripts covers the breadth and depth of early 20-century pioneering land conservation in New England. The philanthropic efforts on Mount Desert Island of Dorr, Charles William Eliot, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. dovetailed with the establishment of the National Park Service. Many of these documents highlight the importance of the Deasy & Lynam law firm of Bar Harbor and the Hale & Hamlin law firm in Ellsworth.
Both the paper and digitized archives were donated by Dr. Epp to the Jesup where they were catalogued. Now, students, scholars, and the public at-large can explore these resources online or in the new climate-controlled archive of the Jesup’s expansion, set to open in 2026.
This post is an edited version of an article that appeared in the Mount Desert Islander, 06 November 2025.
