50 free Acadia National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Acadia was the first national park east of the Mississippi and the first assembled entirely from private land given to the public, on an island Samuel de Champlain named for its barren peaks. This quiz covers the whole story: the Wabanaki and the Mi'kmaq word behind the name, Champlain's pinnace holed on a rock in 1604, the French mission colony destroyed by Virginians, Cadillac's grant from Louis XIV, the rusticators and the Hudson River School painters, the 'cottages' of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, George Dorr and the Eliots, Woodrow Wilson's monument, the Lafayette years and the anglophile heirs who forced the name Acadia, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s 57 miles of carriage roads and 'Rockefeller's Teeth', the cog railway on Green Mountain, the great fire of 1947, Somes Sound the fjard, Bubble Rock the erratic, the sea caves, the 1,530-foot summit that sees the first sunrise, the Island Explorer buses and the four-million-visitor years. Early questions suit anyone who has eaten a popover at Jordan Pond House; later ones are for regulars who know the Precipice from the Beehive: which islands the park owns in Frenchman Bay, what perthite does to the granite, when the summit road needs a reservation, and where the walrus fossils were found. Good for a road-trip car game or a Maine pub quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the park, Cadillac Mountain, Jordan Pond House and Bass Harbor Head Light, and each question shows its source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Besides Mount Desert Island, Acadia takes in most of which island Champlain named for its height?
Isle au Haut
It also owns the tip of the Schoodic Peninsula and parts of sixteen smaller islands.
Q 02How tall is Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the US Atlantic coast?
1,530 feet
The park's lowest named summit, Flying Mountain, is just 284 feet.
Q 03Between which dates is Cadillac Mountain the first place in the US to see the sunrise?
October 7 to March 6
Its height and eastern position give it the edge only in the darker half of the year.
Q 04Which king granted Mount Desert Island to Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in 1688?
Louis XIV
The island passed to Britain in 1713 under the Peace of Utrecht; his granddaughter Mme de Gregoire got the eastern half back in 1790.
Q 05Before it was renamed for Cadillac in 1918, the mountain was known as what?
Green
The Wabanaki are thought to have called it Wapuwoc, 'white mountain of the first light'.
Q 06What happened to the 19th-century cog railway that once carried visitors up Cadillac Mountain?
It was sold and moved to Mount Washington in New Hampshire
The Green Mountain Hotel at the top burned down in 1895.
Q 07The name Acadia derives from 'akadie', a word meaning 'piece of land' in which language?
Mi'kmaq
French explorers rendered it l'Acadie, and English speakers made it Acadia.
Q 08The Wabanaki Confederacy, 'People of the Dawnland', is made up of how many related Algonquian nations?
Five
The Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki and Penobscot; some call Mount Desert Island Pemetic, 'range of mountains'.
Q 09Which explorer named the island Isle des Monts Deserts, 'Island of Barren Mountains', in 1604?
Samuel de Champlain
His pinnace was holed on a rock just off the island; Verrazzano had sailed past 80 years earlier.
Q 10The 1613 French mission on Mount Desert Island was destroyed by an armed vessel from where?
Virginia
It is regarded as the first act of open warfare in the long struggle leading to the French and Indian Wars.
Q 11By the early 1620s, disease and war had cut the native population from Mount Desert Island to Cape Cod to what fraction?
Ten percent
Smallpox, cholera and influenza arrived with the fur traders at posts like Castine.
Q 12What term described mid-1800s visitors who lodged cheaply with local fishermen and farmers?
Rusticators
Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church had popularised the island; by 1880 there were thirty hotels.
Q 13What did the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age families call their elegant Mount Desert estates?
Cottages
The Depression and World War II ended the extravagance, and the 1947 fire destroyed 67 of them on Millionaires' Row.
Q 21The fire that began on October 17, 1947, burned more than how many acres inside the park?
10,000
Another 7,000 acres burned outside the park; regrowth of birch and aspen now brightens the autumn foliage.
Q 22Somes Sound, which nearly divides Mount Desert Island in two, is technically what kind of feature?
A fjard
It is five miles long and 130 feet deep, with Southwest Harbor and Northeast Harbor facing each other across its mouth.
Q 23Bubble Rock, perched on the South Bubble, is an example of what?
A glacial erratic
Ice carried such boulders 20 miles or more from their origins; the Bubbles themselves are roches moutonnées.
Q 14Who is known as the 'Father of Acadia National Park' and served as its first superintendent?
George B. Dorr
Landscape architect Charles Eliot had the original idea; his father, Harvard's president, backed it with land and advocacy.
Q 15Under what name did President Woodrow Wilson first give the area federal protection in 1916?
Sieur de Monts National Monument
It was the first national park created from private lands gifted to the public.
Q 16When Congress made it a national park in 1919, it was named after which Revolutionary War figure?
The Marquis de Lafayette
It was the first national park east of the Mississippi and remains the only one in the Northeast.
Q 17Why was the park renamed Acadia in 1929?
Donor heirs were anglophiles who rejected the Lafayette name
George Dorr suggested Acadia, and John Godfrey Moore's widow and daughters completed the gift.
Q 18Roughly how many miles of carriage roads did John D. Rockefeller Jr. build on Mount Desert Island?
57
About 45 miles remain maintained inside the park, closed to motor vehicles including e-bikes.
Q 19The granite coping stones that edge the carriage roads as guard rails are nicknamed what?
Rockefeller's Teeth
The roads close each spring mud season, generally in March, to protect the gravel surface.
Q 20Which landscape architect, who summered at Reef Point in Bar Harbor, designed the planting for Acadia's carriage roads?
Beatrix Farrand
Rockefeller sponsored her work around 1930.
Q 24What gives Cadillac Mountain granite its pinkish colour?
Perthite
The Silurian granite is 424 to 419 million years old and is cut by north-south diabase dikes.
Q 25What is the oldest rock in the Mount Desert Island region, formed 500 million years ago from buried mud and ash?
The Ellsworth Schist
The Bar Harbor Formation came about 450 million years ago when the micro-continent Avalonia hit North America.
Q 26How thick was the glacier that covered the Mount Desert range during the last ice age?
About one mile
It moved a few yards a year, rounding the summits and carving the U-shaped valleys now filled by Jordan Pond and Eagle Lake.
Q 27Fossils of which large marine mammal have been reported from the Presumpscot Formation near the park?
Walruses
Whale bones and even a mammoth, found at Scarborough, also turn up in the post-glacial silts.
Q 28How long is the one-way Park Loop Road that circles the eastern side of Mount Desert Island?
27 miles
It runs clockwise from Bar Harbor to Seal Harbor past Sand Beach, Thunder Hole and Otter Cliff.
Q 29Thunder Hole, a stop on the Park Loop Road, is what?
A crevasse into which waves crash loudly
Nearby Otter Cliff, 60 feet high, is the park's most popular climbing spot.
Q 30Which cliffside trail on Champlain Mountain is famous for its exposure and iron rungs?
The Precipice
Rangers run peregrine falcon viewing programmes; the smaller Beehive sits nearby.