George Bucknam Dorr

According to George Dorr’s obituary in the August 10, 1944, edition of the Bar Harbor Times, “his interest in community affairs was always active.” In addition to his crucial role in founding Acadia National Park, beginning with the formation of the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations in 1901, he was also instrumental in the creation of the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory [today known as the Jackson Laboratory], the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, the Jesup Memorial Library, and other projects of a public nature for the improvement of the community.

An important motivating force in much of his philanthropy was his passion for landscape gardening. In his later years he once said that his explorations with his parents, when he was twenty-two, “of English landscapes and culture led directly … to the building of our old home at Mt. Desert and the establishment of the first true pleasure garden on MDI… for without this interest the work I later did at home would never have been done nor Acadia National Park come into existence,’” [1]. Included in that later work is the Jesup Memorial Library, for it “had its origin as a thought in a collection of books on gardening. [2].

[1] Epp, Ronald H, "Creating Acadia National Park: The Biography of George Bucknam Dorr." Friends of Acadia, Bar Harbor ME, 2016

[2] Dorr, George Bucknam, "The Founding of the Jesup Memorial Library," April, 1936, Unpublished Manuscript.