MOUNT DESERT, Maine — Standing at a podium underneath a large white tent a few feet away from the edge of Little Long Pond, David Rockefeller Sr. made it clear Friday that Mount Desert Island is a special place to him and his family.
“Seal Harbor, maybe more than any other location that I can think of in the world, has been important to me since I first came here when I was 3 months old in my parents’ hands,” the 99-year-old billionaire told more than 100 people who had gathered around him.
Rockefeller, three of his grown children and dozens of others connected to the land conservation community on MDI had come to a meadow next to the pond to celebrate Rockefeller’s donation of more than 1,000 acres of land surrounding the pond to the Mount Desert Land and Garden Preserve. The donation of the land, which includes woods, streams, trails and carriage paths, was announced Thursday.
Rockefeller, who is making the gift to mark his 100th birthday next month, noted that many people he and his family have worked with over the years in conserving land on MDI were in the audience. They included other philanthropic donors, as well as representatives of Acadia National Park, Friends of Acadia, Maine Coast Heritage Trust and other organizations.
“I hope that [the philanthropy] will continue with me but, more importantly now, with my wonderful children and grandchildren and friends,” Rockefeller said. “My love to you all, my gratitude to you all, and my expression of hope that we can keep on, for a time at least, working together.”
The land and garden preserve currently consists primarily of two gardens in the local village of Northeast Harbor: Asticou Azalea Garden and Thuya Garden and Lodge. The land being added is one contiguous parcel that lies in between Eliot Mountain, which is part of the Thuya Garden property, to the west and Stanley Brook Road to the east. It abuts Acadia National Park and includes carriage roads, hiking trails, fields, woodland and streams.
David MacDonald, president of Friends of Acadia and a member of the garden preserve’s board of directors, said “there’s no place like it in the world.” The donation of the Little Long Pond parcel to the garden preserve is a complement to the national park’s conservation work and that of other groups on MDI, he added.
“We all benefit and the land benefits from a diversity of management decisions,” MacDonald told the gathering. “I have great confidence that the preserve and the park will work cooperatively on the trails, the streams, the natural communities that cross boundaries between this land and the park, which is all around us and is really the essence of the conservation work here on the island.”
Sheridan Steele, superintendent of Acadia, said after Friday’s event that the Little Long Pond parcel lies outside the park’s allowable boundary limit that was set by Congress in 1986, though it is within the area of abutting property where Acadia can have conservation easements.
He said that the park is happy to see the land, which has commanding views of Penobscot Mountain, become part of the garden preserve.
“I think It is a perfect outcome,” Steele said.
Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, Rockefeller’s daughter and president of the board for the garden preserve, said that the eventual goal of the organization and her father is to link the family-owned Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, which abuts the donated parcel to the east, to the Asticou Azalea and Thuya gardens, which abut it to the west. Rockefeller intends to leave the garden named after his mother to the preserve in his will, Goodwin said, and the 1,000-acre parcel will tie all three gardens together.
“He enjoys owning and managing it himself, individually, so that isn’t in this gift but will be coming in the future,” Goodwin said. “This will create a continuous parcel between them.”
Goodwin said her father and mother, the late Margaret “Peggy” MacGrath, planned many years ago to donate the land to a private foundation of some sort, not to a public entity. She said the preserve does not plan to make any changes to the public uses currently allowed on the property, which include walking, cross-country skiing and horseback riding but not bicycling or the use of motorized vehicles.
“[The garden preserve] is working on an east-west trail right now,” Goodwin added. “In the long run, we imagine people having a garden day where they go to all three gardens.”
Rockefeller, who according to Forbes is the world’s oldest living billionaire, is the patriarch not just of the Rockefeller family but of the wider community of wealthy summer residents on MDI, some of whom were in attendance at Friday’s event. In addition to three of Rockefeller’s children — David Rockefeller Jr., Eileen Growald and Goodwin — lifestyle maven Martha Stewart and billionaire Mitchell Rales and his family were present to applaud the donation.
