Cadillac Mountain

History

The Wabanaki People, known as the "People of the Dawn Land," originally inhabited Cadillac Mountain. The Wabanaki Confederacy includes the Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot tribes. Mount Desert Island served as a meeting, trading, fishing, and hunting ground for them. Before the mountain was called Green Mountain, it is thought that natives referred to it by the Passamaquoddy word Pesamkuk, though additional research indicates that Pesamkuk refers to Mount Desert Island generally, and the mountain itself was named Wapuwoc, meaning "white mountain of the first light."

European colonization confronted the natives in the 1500s, but they withstood it and continue to inhabit the land today. The mountain was renamed in 1918 from Green Mountain to honor French explorer and adventurer Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac. In 1688, De la Mothe requested and received from the Governor of New France a parcel of land that included part of the Donaquec River and Mount Desert Island. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, a self-promoter who had appropriated the "de la Mothe" portion of his name from a local nobleman in Picardy, thereafter called himself Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, Donaquec, and Mount Desert.

From 1883 until 1893, the Green Mountain Cog Railway carried visitors to the summit's Green Mountain Hotel, which burned down in 1895; the cog train was sold and moved to the Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire. During World War II, the summit served as a base for early-warning warcraft detection, with its height and location making it ideal for a radar facility. Today, the mountain is used for communication by the police, National Park Service, Coast Guard, and fire department.

Hiking trails and a paved road lead to the summit, and viewing the first sunrise in the continental U.S. is a common activity, though Cadillac experiences this only from October 7 through March 6. For a few weeks around the equinoxes, the sun rises first at West Quoddy Head in Lubec, Maine, and during spring and summer, it rises first on Mars Hill, 150 miles to the northeast.