The Man Who Made Himself a Lord

Don't you believe everything you read on the signs around here. Cadillac Mountain, they say, and that's a fine-sounding name, and there's hardly a true word in it. The man was born Antoine Laumet, in France, and he was nobody in particular. He came to the New World and made himself a gentleman. He invented a title and a coat of arms and the noble name of de Lamothe Cadillac. The governor of Acadia called him the most uncooperative person in the world, a scatter-brain driven out of France for who knows what crimes. In sixteen eighty-eight he was granted this island. He almost certainly never lived on it. He went on to found Detroit, which is the part you know. In seventeen eighty-six his granddaughter came over from France with her husband, to claim what was hers. Madame Marie Therese de Gregoire. She had Thomas Jefferson on her side, and the Marquis de Lafayette, and Massachusetts confirmed her claim to a great piece of this island. They settled by Hulls Cove, right where you began this tour. They tried a farm and a mill, and poverty had them all the same. Parcel by parcel they sold it off. Tradition says her husband died in a bitter winter, with the snow so deep they couldn't reach the little graveyard, so they dug his grave just outside the churchyard wall. This mountain was Green Mountain for a long while. In nineteen eighteen George Dorr started putting French names on the map, and Green Mountain became Cadillac. In nineteen thirty-one the readers of the Bar Harbor Times voted a hundred and seventy-five to five to take those names back off. The Park Service paid them no mind. You'll see that name on a sign in a minute, and since nineteen oh six that phony coat of arms has been riding around on the front of a luxury automobile. About the only place you won't find that name is on the man's baptism papers.