Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
For countless generations, the Wabanaki people have referred to Mount Desert Island as Pesamkuk, and to the largest mountain on the island as Wapuwoc, which means “white mountain of the first light.”
Today, it’s most commonly referred to as Cadillac Mountain — the centerpiece of Acadia National Park that’s visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year, who gaze out over Frenchman Bay from its easily reachable summit.
Cadillac only got that name in 1918, when administrators of the park then known as Sieur de Monts National Monument ditched a name it had at the time, Green Mountain, and retitled it for a man with a deeply complicated story: Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
At the time of the renaming, Cadillac was hailed as a pioneering figure in colonial North America. But historians would later reevaluate his legacy, with one even going so far as to call him little more than a “scoundrel.”
Cadillac was born Antoine Laumet in France in 1658. At age 25, Laumet decided to seek his fortune in North America and boarded a ship bound for New France, arriving in Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia in 1683.
Over the next four years, Laumet traveled throughout what is now Maine, the Maritimes and Quebec, and at one point traveled as far south as the Carolinas. He married a Quebecois woman in 1687, at which point he assumed his new name: Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, reinventing himself as a French nobleman, despite coming from solidly middle class stock.
In 1688, the governor of New France granted Cadillac control over the estate of Les Douacques, today known as Mount Desert Island. According to the National Park Service, Cadillac lived in his Otter Creek home for less than two years before he set out on a series of naval expeditions throughout North America.
In 1694, he was named commander of the French colonial region known as Pays d’en-Haut, which included control over all the fur trading done on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and in the Great Lakes. Cadillac made a big mark in the area, especially in founding the city of Detroit.
King Louis XIV then named Cadillac governor of the Louisiana territory in 1710, though he did not take up the post for three more years. Cadillac and his family returned to France for the final time in 1717, where he lived out the rest of his days until his death in 1730.
So why is one of the most iconic sites in Maine named for a man who spent less than two years living here and whose legacy in North America is far more deeply connected to the Midwest?
It’s not because he made a big impact on what is now Maine. The governor of the Acadia region, of which Mount Desert Island was a part, said around 1690 that Cadillac was “the most uncooperative person in the world… a scatter-brain who has been driven out of France for who knows what crimes.”
Despite his claim to fame as the founder of Detroit, Cadillac didn’t fare much better in the Midwest, either. The governor general of New France said in 1697 that Cadillac had left affairs in the Great Lakes region “extremely confused.”
Cadillac became extremely wealthy during his time in the Midwest, mostly due to two things: fur trading, and selling brandy to the Indigenous people of the area, a practice which was condemned by Jesuit missionaries and which would cause irreparable harm to generations of Native people. A military officer stationed alongside Cadillac said at the time that “Never has a man amassed so much wealth in so short a time and caused so much talk by the wrongs suffered by the individuals who advance funds to his sort of trading ventures.”
Among Cadillac’s few accomplishments during his tenure in the Louisiana territory was founding a lead mine about 90 miles south of what is now St. Louis, Missouri. He staffed the mine with enslaved Africans, which made him the first to introduce slavery to what is now the state of Missouri.
Cadillac didn’t make many friends during that assignment, either: a colleague in the colonial government called him “very troubled and very restless” and “the most barefaced liar I had ever seen.” His primary French financier cut off funding for Cadillac’s various projects in the region in 1715, under suspicion that he was more interested in making himself rich. In 1716, Cadillac was dismissed from his position and returned to his home country for good.
A month after his arrival in France, in September 1717, Cadillac and his son both were thrown in the Bastille prison on charges of making improper statements against the government, and languished there for six months. After his release, Cadillac attempted to regain some control over the Detroit colony, but was rebuffed. He became governor of a small town in southern France, a position he held until his death.
Around 50 years after his death, Cadillac’s reputation began to be polished up by one of his descendents. His granddaughter, Marie Therese Cadillac de Gregoire, left France with her husband in 1786, and knowing her grandfather’s connection to Mount Desert Island, the couple laid claim to around 60,000 acres in what is now Hulls Cove and nearby Trenton. According to the Mount Desert Islander, in a post-revolution era of good feelings toward the French, Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette both sponsored their claim, and the land was granted.
The Gregoires lived on the island for 27 years — far longer than their grandfather ever did — and both are buried in a small cemetery in Hulls Cove. Portions of their vast estate were gradually sold off, and their three children all returned to France at some point in the early 19th century. Nevertheless, memories of the long history of the Cadillac family on MDI remained in the minds of its increasingly wealthy residents and the tourists that would later come.
A century later, when the National Park Service created what would become Acadia National Park, there was a push to honor the first Europeans to live there.
While he was alive, the man they chose had inspired irritation, anger and even outright disgust among his contemporaries, and was personally responsible for several of what we’d now call human rights violations — but that didn’t really factor into the decision to rename the highest mountain on the eastern seaboard for Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
