Cadillac Mountain

Cadillac Mountain is located on Mount Desert Island, within Acadia National Park. With an elevation of 1,530 feet (466 meters), its summit is the highest point in Hancock County and the highest within 25mi of the shoreline of the North American continent between the Cape Breton Highlands, Nova Scotia and Mexican peaks 180mi south of the Texas border.HistoryBefore being renamed in 1918, the mountain had been called Green Mountain. The new name honors the French explorer and adventurer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac. In 1688, De la Mothe requested and received from the Governor of New France a parcel of land in an area known as Donaquec which included part of the Donaquec River (now the Union River) and the island of Mount Desert in the present-day U.S. state of Maine. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, a shameless self-promoter who had already appropriated the "de la Mothe" portion of his name from a local nobleman in his native Picardy, thereafter referred to himself as Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, Donaquec, and Mount Desert.From 1883 until 1893 the Green Mountain Cog Railway ran to the summit to take visitors to the Green Mountain Hotel on the summit. The hotel was burned down in 1895. Also in 1895, the cog train was sold and moved to the Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire.