Following a nine-year hiatus, a Freeport filmmaker is concluding his work on a documentary on the carriage roads at Acadia National Park to coincide with the park’s 100th anniversary.

Filmmaker Ronald Gillis interviewed John D. Rockefeller’s son, David, at the latter’s Seal Harbor home for the background material he needed to make the documentary.

“Rockefeller’s Teeth: John D. Rockefeller Jr., and his Carriage Roads to Paradise” will tell the story of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller’s monumental expansion of 57 miles of Acadia’s carriage roads, which have 17 granite bridges and two gate lodges still in use.

“Rockefeller’s Teeth” are how the cut granite stones along the edges of the carriage roads are known. These natural guard rails are known locally as “coping” stones, to help visitors “cope” with standing or riding so close to steep drops. 

According to a press release on the film, Gillis used never-before-seen archival photographs, contemporary footage and photography to film the beauty and history that encompasses one of the nation’s oldest national parks.

In addition to David Rockefeller, author-historian Ron Chernow and historians Will Reily and Roxanne Brouse provided material.

Gillis said he began filming in Acadia in 2003, but stopped two years later when grant funding dried up. He was spurred to return to the project two years ago, when David Rockefeller’s son, Richard, a Portland doctor Gillis knew, died in an airplane crash.

“That sort of woke me up,” Gillis said. “It was sort of an eerie thing. He had gotten me in touch with his father to do an interview on the carriage roads. It if weren’t for the son, I never would have gotten that interview. It sort of woke me up that life is short, and that there are a lot of good things in that documentary I had started. I thought it would be an interesting tie-in to start the film with Acadia’s 100th anniversary.”

July 8, 2016, will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of Acadia National Park.

“Rockefeller’s Teeth” explores the development of the landmark carriage roads, and the man who designed, built and paid for them. The name, “Rockefeller’s Teeth: John D. Rockefeller Jr., and his Carriage Roads to Paradise,” is derived from the construction workers’ affectionate nickname for the cut granite stones placed along the edges of the carriage roads as guard rails. Known as “copingstones,” they resemble molars.

The National Park Service at Acadia selected Gillis as its first filmmaker artist-in-residence when he began work on the documentary. Maine PBS had broadcast Gillis’ documentary on the history of the Pettingill Farm family, which lived at the historic saltbox saltwater farm, now owned by the Freeport Historical Society. “Words from Millie’s Garden” told the story of the farm’s history, and of Mildred Pettengill, the last person to live there in 1970.

Gillis said that he and his wife, Christine, who helped with the filming, thoroughly enjoyed their interviews with David Rockefeller.

“He was a really nice guy,” Gillis said. “He gave us all the time we needed, and welcomed us into his home.”

Joseph Conforti, professor of American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine, commented on the Gillis documentary.

“I do a lot of project and proposal evaluation, particularly for the National Endowment for the Humanities,” Conforti said in the press release. “I believe I know a quality humanist and skilled artist when I meet one. Ron Gillis fits the bill. I can simply assure you that he has the skill, knowledge, and commitment to perform excellent work.”

Gillis hopes to raise approximately $25,000 through the online site Kickstarter to wrap up “Rockefeller’s Teeth.” Gillis is editing the film, and hopes to have his longstanding project completed in the spring.

“From there I will enter it into a couple of film festivals,” said Gillis, who has lived in Freeport since 1989.

He grew up in Boston, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 1983. Gillis pursued a career in photography as a freelance photojournalist before settling in as a staff photographer at Maine Medical Center in 1986, and worked there for 15 years. He became an independent photographer and filmmaker in 2001.

Ronald and Christine Gillis are the parents of a daughter, Kayla, who is in graduate school and a son, Ronald, who attends the University of Maine.

Warm with a chance of crowds

By Katherine McKinney, first published in National Parks magazine

A polar bear stands stoically on a small ice floe. Haunting music builds as the frame expands to encompass the surroundings: the azure blue of an endless, unfrozen ocean. A somber voice explains the present realities of our melting ice caps and the future we can expect for our warming planet.

This is the sad, familiar face of climate change. We’ve seen the documentaries and read the news stories. We know about severe storms and droughts, sea-level rise, and shifting habitats. It should be no surprise that, in the coming years, these changes will acutely affect public lands. What might come as a shock, however, is how warmer temperatures could lead more people to explore national parks.

Using nearly four decades of visitation data amassed by the National Park Service, employees with the agency’s Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate recently plotted park visitation alongside historical average monthly temperatures at 340 parks. The results surprised them: Visitation at the majority of parks tracked the mercury reading even more closely than they expected. Basically, warmer air correlated with more visitors—at least until temperatures reached the 70s. Curious about how the hotter weather expected by 2050 would influence visitor numbers, the authors projected park visitation into the future. Their projections indicate that mid-century temperatures could be accompanied by a significant increase in annual visitor numbers in many parks and a busy season that is up to one month longer.

For Nicholas Fisichelli, an ecologist and lead author of the study, the message is clear: “Based on warming, you’re likely to see more visitors in your park for a longer period during the year.” Summer visitation at Wyoming’s Grand Teton and Maine’s Acadia National Parks, for example, may rise by more than a third. The projections predict these two parks could experience even bigger visitation jumps during other seasons. In Grand Teton, the number of visitors could double during the spring and fall, and Acadia might see an increase in winter traffic. Overall, the study showed that total annual visitation across all park sites could increase between 8 and 23 percent.

“The biggest single challenge facing Acadia right now is our popularity,” said Sheridan Steele, the former superintendent who retired this fall. Last summer, he said, some days were just “crazy.” Roads were gridlocked, parking lots overflowed, and overtaxed shuttle buses provided free rides for up to 9,000 passengers daily. Park rangers were forced to close one of the park’s most sought-after destinations, Cadillac Mountain, when congestion threatened visitor safety and challenged their ability to manage the crowds.

Excerpt reprinted with permission of the National Parks Conservation Association.

The bridges and carriage roads of Acadia National Park

John D. Rockefeller Jr., was an experienced horseman who wanted to travel by horse and carriage on Mount Desert Island roadways without encountering motor driven vehicles. His father, John D. Rockefeller Sr., had previously built carriage roads on his private estates in Ohio and New York.

John Jr. acquired a love for this same type of road building practice, which enabled him to envision the construction of similar roads on Mount Desert Island. His family’s great wealth allowed him to do something about it.

Throughout the construction period, John Jr. showed an excellent sense of landscape design by making sure that the roads flowed with the natural setting rather than re-shaping the land to accommodate new development.

Even Maine’s wet coastal climate was taken into account when choosing to use stone culverts, wide ditches, three layers of crushed rock, and a 6-8 inch crown that provided excellent water drainage. This showed a clear respect for the landscape and an understanding of the requirements.

His experience and love of traveling by horse-drawn carriages aided in making additional design choices that met those particular needs.

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