Blackwoods Campground is significant for its association with the twentieth-centurymovement to develop national parks for public enjoyment. It is a reflection of the principles and practices of rustic park landscape design used by the National Park Service (NPS) andCivilian Conservation Corps (CCC) between the years of 1916 and 1958, and retains characteristics developed during the New Deal era. Blackwoods Campground is significant not only as an individual landscape feature, but also as a component of the larger development of Acadia National Park."John D. Rockefeller, Jr., helped finance the construction of a private campground at 'The Black Woods' in Otter Creek in the mid 1920s. Later, Rockefeller's donated Blackwoods Campground to Acadia, contingent on a commitment of funds from the federal government for the construction of a section of the Park Loop Road. In 1936, the NPS successfully obtained $500,000 in funding for construction of the road and so work on Blackwoods began. In an effort to make sure that the new campground would be invisible from neighboring Seal Harbor, Rockefeller had his own engineer Paul Simpson, review the proposed location for the campground with Acadia's resident landscape architect Benjamin Breeze. The addition of Acadia's third public campground happened under the RDA program and the CCC conducted most of the work."Preliminary designs developed for Blackwoods were ambitious. They featured a formal 'camp court' at the center, flanked by three separate campground loops ('A,' 'B,' and 'C.') with 400 campsites. The "camp court" was to feature an administrative/concession building on the east, perched above an open vista looking down to the waters of Otter Cove. Access to the campground was originally designed from both the villages of Otter Creek and from the Park Loop Road. This design went far beyond the Meinecke system [the standard for NPS campground construction in the 1930s and 40s] and was very ambitious. Early on it was clear that both funding and the skills of the CCC workers were not sufficient to complete the scope originally planned for Blackwoods. Though work on Blackwoods began in 1936 funding and construction challenges continued until the CCC was disbanded in 1942 and Blackwoods was left largely incomplete."Due to the ambitious nature of the plans for the campground, only Loop A was completed before World War II. NPS crews began constructing the second loop between 1956 and 1961. Loop C was never constructed. Today, Blackwoods Campground consists of two camping loops, the camp access road, a central 'camp court,' comfort stations (both historic and contemporary), an amphitheater, and water tank built after World War II. Campsites were historically marked by wood post-markers, which survive only at the intersection of the lateral and perimeter roads" (National Park Service. "Historic Campgrounds" at Acadia National Park [
https://www.nps.gov/acad/learn/historyculture/historic-campgrounds.htm : accessed 03 March 2025]).
