Schoodic Education and Research Center, Maine

This 130 acre campus was a base for secretive naval communications work, but as of 2002, has been operated by the National Park Service. As Acadia National Park was being developed on much of nearby Mount Desert Island in the 1930s, the park’s principal developer and benefactor, John D. Rockefeller Jr., established this location with the Navy, in order to get them to move their radio “listening station” base then located at Otter Cliffs, off the Island. (Otter Cliffs dates back to 1908, and was one of the Navy’s most important early long range radio sites in the country, evolving in to a radio receiving station with eight transatlantic and ship to shore antenna systems, some with antenna wires as long as five miles, listening to transmissions in Europe, and was critical to US operations in World War I).  Rockefeller oversaw the design of the new base’s buildings, using the same architect that designed the monumental gates to the Park, Grosvenor Atterbury. It opened in 1935 as the US Navy Radio and Direction Finding Station Winter Harbor. The base at that time was centered around the large Rockefeller Building, which was flanked by two 210 foot tall towers, with antenna wires strung between them. By 1947, there were several other rhombic antennas, using hundreds of poles and wires in cleared areas. In the 1950s, it expanded onto 450 acres of land a few miles northeast, near Corea, where three separate antenna systems were built over the years. At its peak in the early 1990s the base had 320 military personnel, some living in housing built in Winter Harbor, had 228 buildings, and employed an additional 150 contractors. The site was known as Naval Security Group Activity Winter Harbor when it was closed, in 2001. The main base was transferred to a nonprofit, the Schoodic Institute, which manages it with the National Park Service, as the largest of the NPS’s 18 Research Learning Centers. The land it is on is now part of Acadia National Park, the first National Park established east of the Mississippi (initially as Lafayette Park, in 1917).