 For more than forty years, the wealthy dominated summer activity on Mount Desert Island, but the Great Depression and World War II marked the end of the extravagance.The landscape architect Charles Eliot is credited with the idea for the park.George B. Dorr, called the "Father of Acadia National Park," along with Eliot's father Charles W. Eliot (president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909), supported the idea both through donations of land and through advocacy at the state and federal levels.