The origins of conservation on Mount Desert Island can be traced to a clear, cold night in March 1880, when Harvard student Charles Eliot gathered six of his friends together in 34 Grays Hall in Cambridge to discuss a camping expedition to Maine. Over the course of the summer, and for the next decade, members of the Champlain Society conducted the first natural history surveys of the island. They also influenced the eventual purchase and protection of land that would become Acadia National Park.
The Champlain Society journals are held by the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, and we are working to digitize and transcribe the notebooks as part of a project with Maine Memory Network.
Catherine Schmitt 