The Carriage Roads — Rockefeller’s Answer to the Automobile
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Transcript
Acadia’s carriage roads are infrastructure disguised as scenery. John D. Rockefeller Jr. began building them in 1913, partly because he preferred horse-drawn travel and wanted routes separated from the growing presence of automobiles.
The engineering is serious. Broken-stone roadbeds, crowned surfaces, culverts and wide drainage ditches were designed for Maine’s wet climate. Granite bridges and retaining walls were built from local stone. Curves followed contours rather than forcing straight lines across slopes.
The roads also belong to the island’s early twentieth-century “auto wars.” Some communities resisted cars, fearing noise, dust and a transformation of resort life. The eventual solution was not to keep technology out, but to create parallel systems: hiking trails, carriage roads and motor roads that intersected as little as possible.
That makes these roads more than a Rockefeller monument. They are an early experiment in traffic separation and landscape architecture. The visitor receives the illusion of effortless movement through nature because an enormous amount of design work was used to hide the effort.