March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Acadia trails effort begins > Campbell’s heir gives $5 million

A $5 million pledge kicked off a $13 million project Thursday that aims to revive and expand Acadia National Park’s footpaths and create the first national park in the country with a privately endowed trail system.

The donation was the largest monetary gift from people still living to a nonprofit conservation organization in Maine. It will help to ensure that park trails winding through wooded groves, up mountainsides, around ponds and atop rock outcrops will be maintained for generations.

Campbell’s Soup heir Tristram Colket and his wife, Ruth Colket, pledged $5 million to help launch the $13 million campaign called Acadia Trails Forever. The campaign is the largest public-private fund-raising effort undertaken in the national park system, according to Friends of Acadia President Ken Olson.

The Acadia Trails Forever money will be used to restore the park’s 130-mile system of foot trails, reopen 11 miles of unmarked trails, develop five connector trails designed to link nearby towns to Acadia, and create an endowment to pay for trail maintenance.

The $13 million restoration might take 10 years to complete. It will begin in 2000. About $7 million will be used for reviving and building trails and the remaining $6 million will remain at Friends of Acadia in a permanent endowment.

The multimillion-dollar campaign is designed to enable trail crews to stay ahead of natural and human-related damage that occurs on the trails.

The forces of nature — and the footsteps taken during 3 million annual visits to the park — have caused erosion, soil compaction, mud troughs, avalanches and rock slides, rotting trail signs and bridges, and widening of trails, Friends of Acadia pointed out in a brochure. The mission of the nonprofit organization is to protect and preserve the park. It is not part of the National Park Service.

Acadia National Park will contribute $4 million from park entrance fees, and Friends of Acadia will match the figure by more than 2 to 1 by raising the remaining $9 million through private contributions.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and National Park Service Director Robert Stanton were on hand Thursday to announce the venture.

Babbitt called the event “a symbol of how individuals working together can … enable the creation of something great.” He recalled the generosity of private donors earlier this century who approached President Woodrow Wilson about giving parts of Mount Desert Island to the American people as a national park.

Applauding the cooperative effort involved in the Acadia Trails Forever project and private philanthropy, Babbitt said he hoped the move would inspire a new tradition of giving and called out, “Mr. Gates, can you hear me?” referring to Microsoft’s multibillionaire chairman, Bill Gates.

So far $10.6 million, or 82 percent of the fund-raising goal, has been secured, including the $4 million from park entrance fees, $5 million from the Colkets and $1 million from Shelby and Gale Davis, summer residents of Northeast Harbor. The Davises contributed $1 million as an endowment for the Acadia Youth Conservation Corps, a program for local teens to participate in stewardship projects with park staff.

Friends of Acadia is turning to the public to raise the remaining $2.4 million.

Tristram and Ruth Colket, who live in Bar Harbor and in a Philadelphia suburb, have a history of philanthropy. The couple last year offered a $5 million challenge gift for a campus center project at Roanoke College, where their son, Bryan, graduated in 1998. In 1994, Tristram Colket kicked off a $100 million capital campaign for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with a $5 million contribution.

Tristram Colket Jr., a grandson of Campbell’s Soup founder John T. Dorrance, was one of several heirs to the company. His net worth last year totaled $725 million, making him one of the nation’s 400 richest Americans, according to a list compiled by Forbes magazine.

Acadia Superintendent Paul Haertel likened the donation and the Acadia Trails Forever project to earlier contributions from some of the island’s prominent summer residents such as Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot and John D. Rockefeller Jr.

This is “the present-day equivalent of their love for this place,” Haertel said. Cooperative efforts are the cornerstone of the park’s future, he added.


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