THE EARLY YEARS OF GEOLOGY ON MOUNT DESERT ISLAND, MAINE, 1800 TO 1920

The unique environmental setting of Mount Desert Island, Maine, includes bare mountain summits, cobble and sand beaches, and sheer oceanfront cliffs. This striking and obvious geology attracted surveyors, landscape painters, and naturalists in the nineteenth century. Their published works, in turn, attracted both professional and amateur geologists to Mount Desert. Tracing the lineage of geologic work on the island, from a visit by Charles T. Jackson in 1836, to Louis Agassiz, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, William Morris Davis and others, to Florence Bascom’s U.S. Geological Survey report of 1919, illuminates the evolution of geologic scientific thought, in particular about glaciation and sea-level change. Yet this history has relevance outside of geology. Some of the scientists who worked on Mount Desert provided inspiration to conserve the landscapes that would become Acadia National Park, making it possible for the pursuit of scientific knowledge to continue on Mount Desert throughout the twentieth century.