How Jackson Lab Got Its Moniker
BAR HARBOR — Forget Michael, Reggie, Mahalia or even “Stonewall.”

Roscoe B. Jackson

Who?

When the laboratory was being organized in 1929 as a cancer research center, Roscoe B. Jackson was a wealthy summer resident of Mount Desert Island. As head of the Hudson Motor Car Co. in Detroit, he was a friend of another early automobile baron, Edsel Ford, whose family’s estate on the Island is now owned by Martha Stewart. The two men were instrumental in bankrolling the then-unnamed laboratory and providing $25,000 for construction and a $44,350 stipend to cover first-year operating expenses.

George B. Dorr, an active promoter of the land gifts that created what’s now Acadia National Park and Ellsworth’s Woodlawn estate, donated 13 acres of family-owned land as a building site. It was his hope that the laboratory would be named as a memorial to his late father, Charles H. Dorr. By a quirk of fate, that never happened.

While visiting Europe, where his company built cars in England and Belgium, Roscoe B. Jackson was killed in March of 1929, ironically in a motor car accident. In the wake of Jackson’s death, George B. Dorr withdrew his original naming suggestion.

On May 4, 1929, the laboratory was formally incorporated as The Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory.