Photograph of Robert Patterson that hangs in Jordan Pond House

Patrons of the Jordan Pond House will know the photograph: A gentleman in his sixties surveys the dining room, hands at rest on lapels in the manner of 18th–century portraits. Those who knew him can imagine this composed man offering advice in a calm voice on the right moss for a garden recess, how to feather a paddle stroke in wilderness waters, a fresh way for morning light to flood a room–to–be, or a path to compose the needs of town and park. The man is Robert Whiteley Patterson, known to many as a leading architect of 20th–century coastal Maine. Less known is his earlier contribution—to composing nature and design in our park.

Patterson was enabled by the Acadian visionaries. Born in 1905, he was just four years younger than the conserving collaboration of Eliot and Dorr, and the Harvard from which he graduated in 1927 was still the University of President Eliot less than twenty years after his retirement. Patterson came to Mount Desert Island in 1934 in time to participate in Superintendent Dorr’s last full decade of park development when he joined New Deal resources and private philanthropy. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the principal source of that philanthropy, was then at work on his grand bequest of lands, roads, and bridges when Patterson arrived. Patterson would design and build for Rockefeller’s children, and for many islanders for whom park roads were and are a way to work.

From the same good New England soil as Eliot and Dorr, Patterson was raised in modest comfort in the well–wooded village of Wayland, Massachusetts, only a short ride from Boston. His father died when he was two, but a strong mother and aunt filled some of the loss, and older brothers guided him through the woods and waters near his town, nurturing the future conservationist. Soon enough, the tall, young Noble and Greenough man straight–arrowed through academic and athletic achievement to Harvard in 1923.

There Patterson found his professional passion in architecture, returning to the Graduate School of Design in 1932 to specialize in landscape architecture. He had already found personal happiness with Barbara Brown, also of Wayland. They wed in 1931 when he was 26 and she 19, and it was she who first brought him to Mount Desert and Acadia. The couple enjoyed a summer stay in 1932 with her relatives who were second–generation rusticators in Southwest Harbor.

The island drew him back. In January of 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression—and into a howling blizzard— the Pattersons and their baby daughter drove north to Maine, where they made their home for the next 54 years, save two away during World War II. Soon employed on the staff of the new Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Ellsworth, Patterson was enlisted for island projects, many within the expanding park where the young designer’s skills were a welcome resource for Benjamin Breeze, the park’s landscape architect.

One of Patterson’s first assignments was to conceive an expansion and integration of the Beech Cliff and Beech Mountain trail system, building on the achievements of the Southwest Harbor Village Improvement Association. A parking lot and short trail up to the cliffs were roughed in by island men employed by the New Deal CWA program late in 1933, but heavy snows had halted them. In the spring of 1934, Bob Patterson’s CCC lads finished this work and built the trail loop around the cliffs, working to his design that “one of the most important requirements in stone work here is that it looks harmonious and unobtrusive in its surroundings of beautifully lichened ledges.” The 29–year old designer wanted the Beech Cliff loop trail to be “safe and passable, but nothing more, leaving the route as unchanged as possible.” It remains so after 75 years.

Young Patterson’s design aesthetic also shone in the challenging Perpendicular Trail up the rugged east side of Mansell, also begun in 1934. “The requirements of the trail are first scenic beauty, either in distant views or nearby forest stand; second, an ultimate objective point climaxing the hike; and third, there must be embodied in the trail itself a natural change of pace—for example, from steep rock climbs to level moss or needle surfaced walks.” The ultimate objective of his design was achieved in full only in 2007, when the Acadia trails crew finished the upper section with an aesthetic worthy of Patterson.

The Perpendicular Trail clearly engaged all the skills of the young artist, who saw the need for strength, delicacy, and design against despoilers. In one section, “the problem [was] one of securing substantial steps as security against heaving by the ice and frost action, or a rugged coping of a size defying movement or dislodgement by any one or two individuals’ efforts.” In other sections, his attempt would be to “soften and naturalize [the] rocky sections by clothing ragged and bare surfaces with moss and mats of rock fern, such as grow for the most part throughout the talus slope.” As the authors of Pathmakers would observe more than 70 years later, in a telling break from their usually austere style, “The trail is one of the most highly constructed on the island . . . [the] views are grand to the southeast, but the stonework steals the show.”

By 1935, Bob Patterson had become the full–time assistant to Ben Breeze at Acadia National Park. From the beginning, he was a man of vision, committed to conservation and mindful of the frailty of the trails his CCC crews created. As he would soon advise his supervisors, there is a “’fundamental principle [that] areas used by the public (unless most carefully planned for several decades of time), tend to destroy themselves for the particular park purpose for which they are used.”

Did George B. Dorr hear the distinctive voice of his designer? Documentation does not confirm this, but since the Pattersons rented a home on Livingston Road very near the old Park Headquarters at Park and Lower Main, it seems likely that the vigorous octogenarian enjoyed good talks with this young park employee, a Harvard man and proper Bostonian who shared Dorr’s passion for plants and lived just a few steps away.

Robert W. Patterson’s future, however, was only a few steps more in another direction, toward the shore at Reef Point Gardens, and into history. His long professional association with Beatrix Farrand and commitment to her vision led to many commissions, and to his essential roles in honoring the decisions of Farrand’s final years, and saving the plants of Reef Point for their lasting life at the Asticou Azalea and Thuya Gardens, created by his good friend Charles K. Savage.

The young Bob Patterson who came to the portal of that future had already found an island aesthetic while high on Acadian slopes, directing young CCC men from across Maine. Lessons learned working on the Beech Cliff and Mansell trails as he began his decades here helped guide the hand that gave us more than 40 MDI houses, grand and modest, for frugal townsmen, as well as Astors and Rockefellers. The public service he began in the park would lead to many of our amenities, from wading pools and wharfs to landscaping for schools and churches. The thoughtful young park designer would become a wise counsel for both park and towns on the long path to recovery after the 1947 fire. The lover of things wild, drawn to Acadia in his twenties, would found the Maine Natural Resources Council, and further conservation of our northern wilderness.

Friends of the Acadia that Bob Patterson cherished might pause at his portrait on their next visit to the Jordan Pond House, to reflect on the unsigned works that the young artist contributed at the beginning of his career on our island.

JACK RUSSELL and his wife, Sandy Wilcox, live at the north end of Echo Lake. He thanks his neighbor Robert Whiteley Patterson, Jr. (Lee) for generous guidance on this essay. They are now, as once their fathers were, good friends.