DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE WASHINGTON September 15, 1918. The U. S. Geographic Board, Washington, D. C. Gentlemen: In making application for the proposed name- changes of certain of the Mount Desert Mountains for the purpose of commemorating the early history of the Island, and - in a special instance - the part taken by our Nation in the present war, in aerial battle over the soil of France, I represent not only the Secretary of the Interior and the National Park Service but Presi- dent-emeritus Eliot of Harvard and other well-known citizens associated in the work of the Sieur de Monts National Monument's establishment by gift to the United States. And I represent also the Wild Gardens of Acadia, a corporation formed for the completion of this -2- work, upon whose board the Governor of Maine, Harvard University, the American Institute of Architects, and the National Association of Audubon Societies all are represented. We feel that the value of the change from the present names, proposed to be dropped - meaningless and without associations, - to others that tell of the past history of the region, of its half-forgotten associations with France in the early days of the country's settlement, and -- in an inspiring way on soil once owned by France - of the United States' cooperation with her in the present war, can not fail to be great in view of the now national character of the tract and the many people from the whole country over who henceforth will visit it. I remain, gentlemen, with respect, Sincerely yours, Custodian, Sieur de Monts National Monument. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE WASHINGTON September 15, 1918. U. S. Geographic Board, Washington, D. C. Gentlemen: One other name there is - for a bold, out- - standing shoulder of the proposed Champlain Mountain not named upon your map as yet - which we include in our request and ask you to name, in honor to De Monts and commemoration of the cause for which as a soldier first and afterwards as governor of Pons, he stood in France; Hueguenot Head. This shoulder dominates on its eastern side the deep, precipitously bordered pass torn out by the ice sheet in its southward flow between the proposed Champlain Mountain and the proposed Flying Squadron, through which the road runs from Bar Harbor to the - -2- resorts upon the southern shore. This shoulder, separated from its mountain by a valley eighty odd feet lower than itself, occupied by a grove of ancient spruce and hemlock, formerly a favorite noon-time haunt of deer, looks northward to Mount Desert Ferry across Frenchman's Bay and south- ward to Mount Desert Rock, twenty-five miles to sea, whose light flashes out to it at dusk from the darkening sea-horizon. At a recent time geologically, as a bench marks on the mountains show, this shoulder must have formed a superb headland, from five to six hundred feet in height, fronting precipitously on a narrow arm of sea that ran between it and the greater Cadillac and Flying Squadron mass. De Monts, a Hueguenot of ancient family in southwestern France, was also a man of broad and -3- liberal religious views, esteemed and trusted by Henry IV and warmly praised in his writings by Champlain - whom he brought out to aid him. In changing the name of the park, as the bill now passed already by the Senate does, from the Sieur de Monts National Monument to the Mount Desert National Park, De Monts should be recorded still, and this the hold headland that resisted successfully the tremendous ice-sheet thrust which tore out the pass below to within a hundred feet of ocean level offers a singularly happy and appropriate means of doing, linked as it is with the intended Champlain Mountain as the men themselves were linked in their Acadian venture and looking broadly out beside it across the waters that they sailed together in ex- pleration of our coast as far as to Cape Cod in 1605, fifteen years before the coming of the Mayflower. - -4- All these names proposed have been carefully devised with reference to the national ownership of the Sieur de Monts Monument, and are suggested by the same motives which gave that name to it - the President and Secretary of the Interior concurring. That motive is to convey to the American people, the new owner of these lands, some realizing conscious- ness of an interesting and half-forgotten past that this corner of their land has had. And to this motive now a new one has been added, to link that past, with its old French associations, with the present, epoch- making cooperation of America with France and England, on the battlegrounds of Europe and the seas these moun- tains look so broadly out upon, for the cause of freedom and humanity and France's preservation. Yours sincerely, Note on the name "The Flying Squadron." Several similar names are in cld-established use at Mount Desert. The White Cap is a northern spur of Green or Cadillac Mountain, as the Flying Squadron, or Dry Mountain, is an eastern one. The Beehive is a bold southern spur of Newport or Champlain Mountain, and the Triad is a similar southern spur of Pemetic Mountain. The Bubbles are two connected, but otherwise in- dependent, mountains lying between Eagle Lake and Jordan Pond. Norumbega Quoted from Francis Parkman. men as the Korumbega I name which it shared Norumbega was, in Ramustio's map, the country the adjadent region. embraced within Nova Scotia, southern New Brunswick, and a part of Maine. De Laet confines it to a district about the mouth of the Penobscot. Wytfleit and other early writers say that it had a capital city of the same name, and in several of the old maps this city is represented on the river Penebscot. The word is of Indian origin. II Weary of St. Crpix, De Monts resolved to seek out a more auspicious site. During the previous September, Champlain had ranged the westward coast in a pinnace, visited and named the Island of Mount Desert, and entered the mouth of the river Penobsect, called by him the Pentegoet and previously known to fur traders and fisher- DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE WASHINGTON September 15, 1918. The U. S. Geographic Board, Washington, D. C. Gentlemen: Those who have in charge the Sieur de Monts nation- al Monument and its development are greatly desirous of using it as a means toward strengthening the tie between the United States and France, now brought so close top gether by the war. The Monument is unique in the opportunity it gives for this for its lands were discovered and named by a Frenchman, Samuel de Champlain, and were for a long time owned by France. It is, moreover, the only national parkland in the country that borders on the sea and looks broadly out across the ocean toward France and the waters that our troops are traversing to bring her aid. -2- With this and the awakening of our people to the monument's historic interest in view, the Secretary of the Interior and the National Park Service unite with those who have gathered the parklands together and given them to the people in asking the United States Geographic Board to consider favorably the following proposed and carefully considered changes in the names of certain of the mountains that constitute the dominant landscape feature of the Monument: (1) Cadillac Mountain in place of Green Mountain - (2) Champlain Mountain in place of Newport Mountain (3) Acadia Mountain in place of Robinson Mountain - (4) St. Sauveur Mountain in place of Dog Mountain - (5) Norumbega Mountain in place of Brown's Mountain (6) Bernard Mountain in place of Western Mountain, western peak - (7) Mansell Peak in place of Western Mountain, eastern peak - -3- (8) The Flying Squadron in place of Dry Mountain, the great eastern spur of Green Mountain. I submit 8 map of Mount Desert Island showing the location of the names proposed. None of the names proposed to be changed are old, in the sense of going back to early days, and none of them embody any personal or historical association useful to retain. As late as 1855 Green Mountain was called Newport Mountain, and the present Newport Mountain had no separate name, nor had Dry Mountain. Robinson Mountain got its name within my own recollection from a worthless and half-crazy man who lived in a cabin at its foot and dug for tresure. He did not own the moun- tain. Dog Mountain was similarly named from the chance fall of a dog over its eastern cliff. Brown's Mountain, long owned by native Northeast Harbor people, had no name at the beginning of the summer-visitor period, and -4- the origin is obscure of the name now given it, which is not as Somes, Clark, Salisbury or Hadlock, characteristic of the Island. And Western is less a mountain name than a descriptive term covering two separate mountain peaks, best separately named. The names Dry and Green, again, given also as descriptive terms by early summer visitors, fail utterly to describe, Dry Mountain, frequently stream- ing visibly from below with water, and Green Mountain, fireswept, being now a mass of grey rock, treeless gener- ally above its lower slopes. The names proposed all have direct relation to the Island's history, with the exception of the Flying Squadro spur, which has direct, immediate relation to the present war. Cadillac, a French noble serving in Acadia, was the Island's earliest owner save the Crown of France. The deed giving it to him as a feudal fief, together with the adjacent mainland shores, signed by Louis XIV and counter- -5- signed by Colbert, is still on record in Quebec; and still when engaged a dozen years later in the founding of Detroit he signed himself Seigneur des Monts Deserts. We have record of him also living on it, on the shores of Frenchman's Bay, in a memoir drawn up by Governor Andros of Massachusetts in the spring of 1689, with reference to a descent upon Acadia. Champlain was the discoverer of the Island and gave it its name from the impression of wild and solitary nature made on him by these same mountains as he sailed at dusk into Frenchman's Bay and saw the bare crest and darkly shadowed precipice of the eastern- most against the sunset sky. Sir Francis Bernard, two generations later still than Cadillac, became the owner of the western portion of Mount Desert Island, in which the proposed Bernard Mountain and Mansell Peak are situated, by the gift of Massachusetts Province, confirmed by a special -6- grant from George III. It was given by Massachusetts in reward for having secured for it, as against the rival claims of Nova Seotia, that portion of the present State of Maine which had formed part of Acadia. This also had its influence in securing later that same portion for the United States. Governor Bernard took the English side, naturally, in the Colonies' revolt, and his property, including that on Mount Desert, was con- fiscated, but after the war was over and he himself had died his Mount Desert ownership was restored to his son, John Bernard, from whom our title to these western mountains is derived. Sir Robert Mansell, vice-admiral of the British fleet in the early part of the 17th century, was a member also of the New England Council and for him the English originally named Mount Desert Island. The name Mount Mansell may be found on all the English maps and charts of the region published at that period. -7- But Champlain's name of Mount Desert ultimately prevailed. The township in which the proposed Mansell Peak lies was originally named Mansell also by the inhabitants, through tradition of the early English name, though later changed, and the fishing town and post office of Manset opposite Southwest Harbor is a survival of that township name, altered by a clerical error. St. Sauveur was the name given by the Jesuits to their settlement at the entrance to Somes Sound, made in 1613, whose later wrecking by Samuel Argall in a semi-piratical descent on it in an armed vessel from Virginia was the immediate, initial cause, according to Parkman, of the long warfare between the French and English for the possession of Acadia and Canada, which only ended on the Heights of Abraham. This colony, moreover, inspired by a true though narrow religious zeal and well equipped for permanent -8- occupation, was the only missionary settlement ever attempted by the French on the Atlantic Coast, correspond- ing with those on the River of Canada, as they called it - the St. Lawrence. Its site lies practically at the mountain's foot, with only the low ridge of Flying Moun- tain - said by the Indians, according to early local traditions, to have flown down from the top of the proposed St. Sauveurs Mountain and rested there - inter- posed between. A portion of this site, a great sloping meadow-land facing the outer harbor and the sea and known as Jesuit Field, has now been secured for the park with all that lies between it and the mountain. Acadia Mountain, given in memory of an early summer resident whose home was on the opposite shore, was given with the one request that the name Robinson with its un- worthy local associations be changed, and the desire was expressed that the name proposed be given it to recall to summer visitors to the park hereafter the old asso- -9- ciation with France and its Acadian province. so long as Acadia was held, Mount Desert Island formed a prominent feature of it, being used with its fine eastern bay -- Frenchman's Bay - and harbor at the entrano to Somes Sound as a rendezvous for the French fleets gathered for descents on the New England coast as far as to New York - as a memoir drawn up by Cadillac still shows - and prominent besides as a great landmark from the sea and a source of masts. The mountain is a very noble one, in site and character, although but 700 feet in height, and one may sail in a boat of any draught close to the precipitous front it thrusts boldly out into Somes Sound, which is itself the single true glacial fiord upon our eastern coast. Opposite this, across the Sound, which it dominates on the eastern side, lies the mountain it is proposed to name Norumbega Mountain, now called Brown's. Norumbega, (10 j an Indian name used by Champlain and by the early fishermen, represented variously, according to the writer of the accounts that have come down, an Indian kingdom with a fabulous capital in the near-by interior on the Penobscot River, which dominated that religion, or the region itself lying between the Penobscot River and the sea. On some of the early maps it is made to embrace a very wide territory, practically identical with that of French Acadia, and seems to have been the only broadly regional word the Indians used, besides Acadia, descriptive of that area. The Indians used to come down the Penobscot River seasonably to Mount Desert Island in their canoes, which they could do in sheltered waters all the way, for hunt- - ing and fishing, spending a good portion of the year there; and one of their regular and chief settlements on it lay close by the foot of this mountain, on the eastern side of the entrance to Somes Sound. Indians from here it was who persuaded the French Jesuits to settle where they -11- did, opposite to their encampment, instead of upon Frenchman's Bay where they first intended, as told in Father Biard's Jesuit narrative. Their chief was called Asticou, and the name Asticou is given to the little summer settlement and post office at the head of North- east Harbor, near the mountain's eastern foot. The name Norumbega given to the mountain, with Acadia Mountain opposite, would recall in a very interest- - ing way the age-long occupation of the Island and its waters by the Indians of the Norumbega region, and Champlain's exploration under guidance from it of the Penobscot River, which he regarded as extending to Mount Desert Island through the narrow water-way of Eggemoggin Reach. We have few Indian names on the Island, and Norumbega is a name it would be desirable to retain as unquestionably historical, and valuable in the Indian background it suggests to European occupation. Pemetic the only Indian name we howehave associated with a major -12- mountain, was the Indian name for the Island, it is thought. The Indians, probably, like the early fishermen and settlers, had no names for the individual mountains, which they only climbed doubtless in occasional "battue" hunting, driving the moose and deer before them into the sea where they killed them swimming. The names the early settlers gave were always asso- ciated with harbored waters, bays, or islands, as French- man's Bay, Somes Sound, Salisbury Cove, Bass Harbor, Southwest Harbor, Seal Cove, Sutton's Island, Cranberry Island, Bar Harbor, Otter Creek. These entered into their lives, but neither the lakes nor mountains received any name apparently until the summer people came. Eagle Lake, the earliest of the lakes to get a name save Denning's Pond, was named by Frederick Church, the artist, from the many eagles he saw there, fishing in its clear waters. The name now perposed for the great spur of Green or Cadillac Mountain, now called Dry, "The Flying Squadron, 11 - -13- is one selected after the most careful thought and in consultation with army and other men, to link with this new service of the nation the war memorial intended on the Island summit. It has the same broad outlook beyond the country's bounds, over the danger-beset ocean highway con- necting us with France and making possible our part in the world war. It rises from the edge of the broad meadowland intended to be developed as a Flying Field for landing and departure in connection with the park and with Bar Harbor, and already named by the Secretary of the Interior Lafayette Field in honor to Lafayette, as announced by him at the Lafayette banguet in New York on September 6th. Dominating on the Western side the pass that con- - nects Bar Harbor with the ocean front, it has itself a superbly monumental character, lending itself wonderfully to a commemorative use. The name - The Flying Squadron - more appropriate than a mountain name it has seemed to us for what is really but a giant mountain spur, is derived -14- in part directly from the French word Escadrille in use upon the battle front and tells in part besides of the wonderful new art, acquired contemporaneously with the park's creation, in conquest of the air. Plans for the development of the mountain in a memorial sense have already been prepared initially, and the story it will tell to the great and growing stream of visitors who annually henceforth will seek the park by land and sea can not fail to make its deep impression and bear its fruit in patriotism. Yours truly,