George Bucknam Dorr belonged to exactly the class of American that does not, as a rule, die broke. Born in 1853 to Boston money — a textile-and-merchant fortune on his father’s side, Baring Brothers banking blood on his mother’s — he was a Harvard-and-Oxford gentleman scholar who never needed a career, raised on Wordsworth and long walks, the sort of Brahmin who summered where the other Brahmins summered.

Where they summered, from his fifteenth year, was Mount Desert Island, on the coast of Maine. The family bought oceanfront at Bar Harbor in 1868 and built a 30-room “cottage” called Old Farm. And it was there, decades later, that Dorr spent the fortune down to almost nothing — on purpose, and to remarkable effect.

The island under threat

The thing Dorr set out to save was a specific kind of access. Through the late 1800s, Mount Desert had drawn a summer colony of the very rich — Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans, Fords — precisely for its open forests, granite peaks and rugged shore. Then two forces began closing it in: the same wealthy landowners fencing off scenic ground for private estates, and, as Dorr specifically feared, the newly invented portable gasoline sawmill, which made it suddenly cheap to log the island’s woods.

In 1901, at the urging of Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, Dorr helped found the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations — a private corporation with one purpose: to hold Mount Desert land for the perpetual use of the public. Eliot was president; Dorr became the executive officer, which is a polite way of saying he became the man who actually did it.

Forty-three years of buying land

“Doing it” meant acquiring the island, parcel by parcel, for the rest of his life.

Dorr spent the next four-plus decades as a one-man land-assembly machine: identifying key tracts, negotiating with owners, and, again and again, reaching into his own pocket when persuasion or public money fell short. He bought watersheds, mountaintops, the spring at Sieur de Monts, coastline, whatever came available and mattered. By 1913 the Trustees held 6,000 acres — much of it Dorr’s doing, and increasingly Dorr’s money.

Then he went to Washington to give it away. In 1916 President Wilson accepted the assembled lands as Sieur de Monts National Monument; in 1919, after Dorr’s relentless lobbying, it became Lafayette National Park — the first national park east of the Mississippi River, and the first ever assembled entirely from donated private land rather than carved from the public domain. It was renamed Acadia in 1929. Dorr, appointed its first superintendent, simply kept going: buying, donating, and expanding the park, often paying its early expenses himself.

The National Park Service puts his commitment in a single sentence: he devoted 43 years of his life, energy, and family fortune to preserving the Acadian landscape. He worked, in the park’s later decades, alongside John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose money built Acadia’s famous carriage roads — but where Rockefeller was deploying a rounding error of an oil fortune, Dorr was spending his whole one.

Nothing left but the view

He spent it, and he spent it out. By the end, Dorr had liquidated most of his inheritance into land that he had already signed over to the public. He never married and had no children; he had converted a Gilded Age fortune into a national park and kept for himself essentially the deed to nothing.

He went blind in his final years and stayed on the island regardless, at Old Farm, near-penniless by the standards of his birth, being read to and walking the paths he had preserved by memory. He died in 1944, at 90. His own house and its grounds went, by arrangement, into the park after his death — the last parcel.

His biographer’s verdict is the one that lands. Dorr’s fortune, Ronald Epp wrote, was not the family inheritance, however useful that had been in buying hundreds of parcels; those who knew him understood that the park itself had become his fortune. He had performed an unusual alchemy for a rich man: turned money into landscape, permanently, and then let the money go.

The scale of the bequest is easier to grasp now than it was then. Acadia draws several million visitors a year to its roughly 50,000 acres, one of the smallest and most-visited parks in the system — every one of them walking, unknowing, through a gift. The Boston heir who assembled it ended with almost nothing in the bank and everything in the public trust: no heirs, no estate, no fortune left to count. Just the island he’d bought for strangers, and, from the terrace of a house that is now a ruin inside his own park, the view he died holding.