A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

Volume v | Number ı | Fall 2009A Journal of Place

Essays: America the Beautiful:The National Parks 2Ethan Carr: The Natural Style and Park Design

Charles E. Beveridge: Olmsted and Yosemite

Lee H. Whittlesey: Yellowstone: From Last Place Discovered to International Fame

Anne Mitchell Whisnant: Conundrums of Commemoration: Blue Ridge Parkway’sSeventy-fifth Anniversary

Rolf Diamant: Diary for a Second Century: A Journey across Our National Park System in Search of Its Future

Paula Deitz: Acadia National Park

Place Maker 18Henriette Granville Suhr, Garden Creator

Television Review 19Reuben Rainey: The National Parks, America’s Best Idea A Film by Ken Burns

Memorial 21Ethan Carr: Hal Rothman and National Park History

Awards 22

Contributors 23

Ethan Carr, a scholar of the history ofAmerica’s nationalparks, is guest editorfor this issue of

Site/Lines. Our contributorsinclude landscape historiansand longtime National Park Service employees. Intheir essays, they honor the visionaries who soughtto preserve portions ofAmerica’s scenic heritage forthe benefit of its citizens. In addition, they explore thechallenging issues facingpark managers in the twen-ty-first century.

Frederick Law Olmstedcan be considered a precur-sor of such visionaries. Asleading Olmsted historianCharles Beveridge points outin his essay, the father ofAmerica’s municipal parksmovement wrote a report in1865 on the need to ensurepublic access to YosemiteValley’s spectacular scenery.

Soon thereafter, in thewake of the 1868 completionof the transcontinental rail-road, government-sponsoredsurvey expeditions made anarray of scenic discoveries.These natural wondersserved as the stimulus for anadventurous new brand of tourism, and they werequickly promoted by the

railroad companies as recre-ational travel opportunities.

Commerce and mappingwent hand in hand, while artand photography became ameans of revealing westerngrandeur to the rest of thecountry. The NorthernPacific Railroad funded theparticipation of artistThomas Moran and photog-rapher William HenryJackson in the FerdinandVandeveer Hayden Survey of1871. Their depictions of thewaterfalls, deep canyons, gey-sers, and steaming fumarolesof the Yellowstone regionhelped make the case for itsdesignation by Congress asthe first national park thefollowing year. Thus theimpetus for creating nationalparks was to preserveremarkable natural curiosi-ties as tourist destinationsrather than to set asidewilderness for its own sake.Lee Whittlesey, park histori-an for the National ParkService at Yellowstone, inchronicling Yellowstone’shistory in this issue ofSite/Lines, gives voice to thecontinuing dichotomy: Howcan we adhere to Thoreau’sdictum “In wildness ispreservation of the world,”while accommodating thosewho need access and visitorfacilities in order to enjoythe parks that were createdfor their benefit?

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.drew on his father’s Yosemitereport when writing key por-tions of the enabling legis-lation for the creation of theNational Park Service in1916. Before that date, therewas no governmental unit to administer the parks as anintegrated system. With theestablishment of a federalagency within the Depart-ment of the Interior, Con-gress, which had been previously intent on creatingparks in the western UnitedStates, expanded its purviewto include areas east of theMississippi. Acadia on MountDesert Island in Maine wasthe first such park.

As Paula Deitz explainshere, Maine’s coastal sceneryhad long attracted suchlandscape painters asThomas Cole, Frederic E.Church, Sanford RobinsonGifford, and other Romanticlandscape artists. Now pro-tected as a national park,Acadia became the beneficia-ry of a singular act of privatephilanthropy. In addition todonating 11,000 acres to theNational Park Service, JohnD. Rockefeller Jr. workedwith landscape architectBeatrix Farrand on layingout the fifty-seven miles ofcarriage roads throughAcadia’s unfolding scenery offorest and shoreline. Theirwork made movement a fun-damental part of the parkexperience, similar in con-

cept to the one achieved byFrederic Law Olmsted andCalvert Vaux in their designof the paths and drives inCentral Park. Here EthanCarr discusses the principlesof this aesthetic tradition,which he calls the “naturalstyle,” as exemplified both inCentral Park and the nation-al parks.

In making improvementsto the national parks duringthe Great Depression, feder-ally funded Civilian Conser-vation Corps teams used rustic timbers and rough-hewn rock, perpetuating thestyle pioneered by the rail-road companies who builtmany of the first park lodgesand visitor facilities. TheNew Deal era also saw theNational Park Serviceembrace automobile park-ways. A prime example, asAnne Whisnant relates, wasthe building of the BlueRidge Parkway connectingShenandoah National Parkand Great Smoky MountainsNational Park. The parkwaygave a new dimension toscenic recreation, but likethe earlier national parks, itwas vulnerable to exploita-tion by commercial tourism.Whisnant warns against thepolitically allied economicforces that can result inexcessive tourist-industrydevelopment.

As soldiers went off toserve in World War II, thefederally funded economicrelief programs that hadbenefited the national parkscame to an end. The parksthemselves languished, and

by the 1950s their visitorfacilities had become run-down and obsolete. In 1956,the same year that theFederal-Aid Highway Actauthorized the constructionof the interstate highway sys-tem, it became evident that asignificantly augmentednational park system wouldbe invaluable to a societywith more mobility andleisure than ever before.Deemed a ten-year effort, thebillion-dollar program –Mission 66 – was designed toprovide an array of servicesfor an estimated eighty mil-lion annual visitors. Promi-nent among these serviceswere administrative build-ings, housing for parkrangers, comfort stations,and more than a hundrednew visitor centers offeringinterpretive programs. In addition, the size of thenational park systemincreased by forty percentwith the acquisition of sev-enty-eight new sites. As newvisitor centers and otheramenities were built, thenatural style of park designgave way to such practicalconsiderations as automo-bile parking. At the sametime, modern architecturereplaced the rustic characterof the older park facilities.

In recent years, theNational Park Service hascreated parks in large urbanareas, notably Gateway

National Recreation Area inNew York City and GoldenGate National RecreationArea in San Francisco. RolfDiamant, superintendent of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Histori-cal Park, provides aninsider’s speculation aboutthe agency’s future steward-ship of America’s mostremarkable living legacyafter the Constitution.

We at the Foundation forLandscape Studies wouldargue that the national parksdid not fare well during theBush years, when there was alack of a clear leadership and adequate funding. Ourhope is that the ideals of the visionary Americans whocreated the national parksand former directors such asStephen Mather, ConradWirth, and Roger Kennedywill be revived and perpetu-ated during the administra-tion of Jon Jarvis, PresidentObama’s new head of theNational Park Service. Thesigns are good. Jarvis is ahighly qualified careeremployee who has filled var-ious important posts overthe past thirty years. Hisappointment has been hailedby environmental groupsand historic preservationistsalike. We send him – alongwith all our readers – goodgreen wishes,

Elizabeth Barlow RogersPresident

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Letter from the Editor

On the Cover:

Yellowstone Falls by Thomas Moran,

Courtesy Gilcrease Museum.

The Natural Style and Park Design

The Irish gardener William Robinson and the Ameri-can landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted metin New York in 1870, the same year Robinson pub-lished what would become one of the most influen-tial gardening books of all time, The Wild Garden.

We know little of the meeting except that Olmsted gave Robin-son tours of Central Park and Prospect Park, and that the two men apparently liked what each had to say to the otherabout landscape design. There is no record of a personal meeting again until 1892, but their correspondence indicates a sustained and mutual respect.

The basis of this alliance was not shared background, temperament, or training because the two men differed in allthese regards. Robinson was a true plantsman, who rejectedgaudy displays of bedded annuals in favor of more informalcompositions of perennials. His influence shapes residentialgardening to this day. Olmsted was not really a gardener at all, but held a wider ambition for what he called the public artof landscape architecture. The year he met Robinson, Olmstedspoke in Boston on “Public Parks and the Enlargement ofTowns,” making his most definitive statement on the socialand environmental goals of urban park systems. He was alsoin the thick of municipalpolitics in New York, strug-gling to achieve his vision ofa more healthful and beauti-ful American city. But if theydiffered in their preparationsand aspirations as artists, thetwo men immediately senseda common value: a deepbelief in the utility and beau-ty of what they would bothdescribe, in different terms,as a natural style of land-scape design.

For Robinson, natural style meant wild gardens of looselycomposed perennial borders, meadows strewn with “natural-ized” masses of bulbs and other flowers, or woodlands withunderstories of flowering shrubs and ferns. In Olmsted’s case,the natural style encompassed the varied landscapes of hislarge municipal parks: the pastoral beauty of meadows, thepicturesque scenes created by more densely planted or woodedareas, the expansive sheets of water meandering through andaround other features of the landscape. But the term also indi-cated Olmsted’s approach to preserving existing scenic land-scapes through minimally intrusive “improvements” – thedrives, paths, and other public facilities that could make alarge natural area like Niagara Falls into a (nearly) ready-madepark.

During a recent walk in the Central Park Ramble on aspring afternoon, I became convinced that this was whereOlmsted and Robinson found common ground in 1870. Anembodiment of a semi-divine, nineteenth-century ideal ofnature, the Ramble was conceived as the center of both thespatial experience and the iconographic program of the park.Originally, the landscape was merely a rocky hill rising out of a poorly drained area in the center of the site. But it wascrowned by an outcrop promptly named Vista Rock, and thearea already had an essentially picturesque character thatOlmsted heightened by adding a profusion of floweringshrubs, ground cover, and vines, as well as winding paths andrustic shelters and bridges. The Lake, excavated around it,

enhanced its solitary and dramatic aspect. To the south, thestraight, quarter-mile-long avenue of the Mall was angledbetween Vista Rock and the main park entrance, so that theaxis of this one great formal space in Central Park terminatednot on a monument or building but rather on a wild garden.Although there is no record of Robinson’s response to theRamble, he was extremely taken with the park itself, referringto it as “equal and in many respects superior, to anything ofthe kind in existence.” For his part, Olmsted later recognizedthat there could be “no better place than the Ramble for therealization of the Wild Garden,” instructing the park’s garden-ers to use Robinson’s ideas in the future management of thelandscape.

On that April afternoon more than a century later, I wasstruck by how pertinent the principle of the natural style stillis to the way we enjoy and protect our public spaces, whetherwe are talking about a landscape in the middle of New YorkCity or the vast wilderness of Yosemite National Park. Todaythe issues surrounding the management of municipal andnational parks systems may seem far apart or even antithetical.But historically both city parks and remote scenic reservationswere manifestations of the perceived importance of experi-ences of nature and landscape beauty. Olmsted, for example,strongly believed that people in cities required access to open,pastoral scenery in order to maintain their physical and emotional well-being. Urban parks therefore did not merelyprovide an amenity, but were necessary to public health. In the case of Yosemite Valley, he argued that government had a“political duty” to assure that such scenes should remain inviolate and available for the enjoyment of the “body of thepeople,” not just the wealthy few. In both cases, as different in scale and context as they were, the design of park “improve-ments” – paths, roads, shelters, and other features – wouldallow the public to enjoy natural and scenic beauty in largenumbers without trampling and destroying the landscapesthey had come to appreciate.

In 2008 a partnership of academic, government, and nonprofitgroups organized a two-part conference called “Designing theParks.” At the first half of the conference – which was hostedby the University of Virginia, where I teach landscape historyand preservation – scholars as well as park managers from allover the world were invited to present papers on the history

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America the Beautiful: The National Parks

Trail with rough-hewn rock wall

giving visitors access to a view of

Half Dome and the Merced River

in Yosemite Valley, postcard, ca.1910.

Courtesy of Tim Davis.

of park design. The second half was hosted by the NationalPark Service at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area inSan Francisco and brought together landscape architects, plan-ners, park officials, and others to draft a series of statementson future priorities for public parks of all types. (The resultsso far can be seen at www.designingtheparks.com, but theprocess is continuing and intended to be open-ended, drawingin new voices and partners.)

As a participant in this effort, I have been revisiting the roleof the natural style in U.S. park history. Defining the naturalstyle is admittedly difficult, as it is neither natural, since itinvolves human manipulation, nor is it a style, since it is notrestricted to a particular combination of expressive features.Rather, it is an approach to planned landscape interventionbased on scientific and poetic consultations of the “nature” ofa particular site: its natural systems, geology, visual qualities,and cultural meanings. Or, as Alexander Pope put it rathermore succinctly, the “genius of the place.”

The natural style was born in eighteenth-century Britain,but its greatest expressions arguably were made in the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the UnitedStates. This is because the natural style had enormousinfluence over how Americans conceived and developed thesystems of large parks and scenic reservations that we like to think of as “our best idea.” In other words, in the setting ofa large scenic reservation natural-style design is synonymouswith unimpaired preservation for the purpose of public enjoyment, a goal that is still part of the core mandate of manypark agencies today. A reconsideration of this aspect of thenatural style seems critical as part of a larger effort to considerfuture park design principles.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a term like“natural style” or even the word “design” can be viewed withsuspicion in the setting of a national park, where public useand enjoyment are seen by some as principal threats to parkpreservation. Since World War II it has become a common-place that national parks are being loved to death by an enthu-siastic but overly large public. Commercial interests – thesnowmobile industry, to cite a notorious example – are alwaysready to capitalize on new attractions and uses that may nothave even existed in Olmsted’s day. And yet most would agreethat without access for people, parks would be eviscerated oftheir social purpose, political justification, and diverse culturalsignificance. Both sides have a point, and this is why design

remains a critical practiceand subject for inquiry.Landscape design has alwaysbeen the essential activitythat allows the entire projectof park making – publicenjoyment without impair-ment – to succeed, or not. Toassure that public parksremain central in Americanculture and imagination, thisdefinition of the purpose ofdesign in these settings mustbe reclaimed. A reconsidera-tion of what the natural stylewas – and what it might be –is a good way to begin.

Consider what was, forOlmsted, the primary pur-pose of a large natural orscenic reservation: the expe-rience of the landscape itself,not of museums or culturalinstitutions, organized recre-ation, or didactic monu-ments that might be sitedthere. The emotionalresponse to nature andscenery provided healthfulbenefits that served a broad public interest and thereforejustified the government creation and management of publicparks. The task of the designer was to make those landscapeexperiences – whether more contrived and created, as atCentral Park, or previously existing, as at Yosemite – accessiblein a way that assured the preservation of the landscape beingenjoyed.

This remains the ideal for what design today can hope toachieve in the setting of protected natural and historic land-scapes. The natural style is not a question of designing build-ings or landscape structures with rusticated finishes orneotraditional themes; it has a more important objective thanpromoting one stylistic preference over another. If the experi-ence of the landscape is the principal purpose of a park, thendevelopment for any other purpose – no matter how praise-worthy that purpose may be – works against the purpose of thepark. As Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. wrote in 1916, the role ofany development in the setting of a large natural or historic

park is to create roads, trails, and interpretive experiences in amanner that allows the public to fully appreciate the beautyand significance of scenery, history, and wildlife withoutimpairing those resources in ways that would prevent futuregenerations from having the same enjoyment. The beauty andsignificance of a landscape should never be narrowly con-strued; there are multiple historical narratives and layers ofcommemoration in any historic landscape, for example. Butpark development should be about facilitating the apprecia-tion of the landscape, not some alternate attraction, program,or activity.

As new buildings and other park redevelopments are pro-posed, we should ask whether the new development serves ordetracts from the primary purpose of the park. New visitorcenters at the Old Faithful area of Yellowstone and at Gettys-burg, for example, exemplify rustic and neotraditional designintended to harmonize with landscape settings. But are large,centralized facilities with administrative and retail space stillwhat the National Park Service should be building, at leastwithin park boundaries? The new Heritage Research Center atYellowstone, for example, is outside the park in an area oncedominated by railroad infrastructure, and serves its purposes

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The invention of the automobile intro-

duced a new challenge for designers of

park circulation systems in the natural

style, postcard, ca. 1935. Courtesy

of Tim Davis.

beautifully without encroaching on park landscapes. The fol-lowing can therefore be suggested as a first tenet of natural-style design: If preserving a natural or cultural landscape for publicappreciation is the primary purpose of a park, then development inthe park should be minimized to that purpose.

If the experience of the landscape is to be paramount, a sec-ond tenet of the natural style is this: Any development deemedtruly necessary should visually complement, not dominate or dis-tract from, the landscape. The natural style is a design processand a general approach to the site. If a building is plannedwith an appropriate program, site, massing, and spatialsequence relative to its surroundings, architectural designneed only support these landscape design decisions in anunobtrusive way. The new visitor center in the Paradise area ofMount Rainier National Park, for example, reinterprets aregional rustic architectural idiom for contemporary purposes,but its impressive success is due more to its intelligent place-ment, which strengthens the spatial experience and pattern ofpublic use within a historically developed area of the park.References to park architecture of the past or to vernaculararchitecture of the region might or might not be good ideas,but on their own they do not constitute a natural style of land-scape design based on sound and responsive site planning.

The subject of design may seem somewhat suspect for parkmanagers, who at times have condemned aesthetic considera-tions as superficial, under the assumption that a concern forvisual composition may be accompanied by a disregard for lessvisible ecological disturbances. In the early twentieth century,for example, the extirpation of wolves and other predators wasconsidered desirable, in part because large herds of ruminantswere valued as scenery. This policy had terrible consequencesfor wildlife and forests. But today an appropriate considera-tion for aesthetics can be combined with science-based deci-sion making, and this would be consistent with the idea of thenatural style.

Both Olmsted and Robinson advocated and employed thenatural sciences of their era, and were protoecological in theirdesign approaches. Olmsted in particular had a deep interestin geology and forestry. If he were alive now, he would proba-bly be labeled an ecologist. Advancement in the natural sci-ences, particularly ecological science, has resulted in a new, butentirely sympathetic, context for the natural style today. Athird tenet of the natural style would therefore embody thisrequirement: Landscape design must incorporate scientific knowl-edge as well as aesthetic judgment.

Finally, natural-style design has always been predicated on aspecifically modern mode of perception: that of the viewer in motion. Whether on foot or on horseback, in carriages or in

automobiles, the modern tourist has experienced the beauty ofthe landscape while moving through it. In natural-style land-scapes, transportation has never been merely a matter ofaccess, but a way of seeing and being in a place: a mode of per-ception and experience. But over the last thirty years alterna-tive transportation schemes for parks such as Grand Canyonand Yosemite have often been frustrated or had only limitedimplementation. A fourth tenet should state the following: Anyrevised, contemporary version of the natural style should have newand perhaps dramatic ideas for circulation – that is, the pattern,pace, and content of park visits – at its heart. As park transporta-tion planners know, alternative circulation patterns and newforms of transportation lead to revised modes of experienceand interpretation. An indication of this potential can be expe-rienced at Zion Canyon, where a fleet of buses shuttles visitorsin and out of the canyon, transforming the noise and distrac-tion of car traffic into a more appropriately hushed and rever-ential atmosphere.

New technologies – not only for transportation but for thedissemination of interpretive information – seem always to beon the cusp of offering major shifts in how the public movesthrough and appreciates parks. Will interpretive displays stillbe necessary once handheld devices are receiving educationalprogramming at specific locations in a landscape? Will theadvent of low-emission vehicles change attitudes about theimpact of personal vehicles? Ironically, one of the most popu-lar and successful forms of alternative transportation has beenthe historic “gear jammers” – open-top touring buses built in the 1930s – which have been restored and again take visitorsover Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. Thesocial and technological context for design, of course, neverstops changing. And yet principles of the natural style maystill have significant application as we continue to revise ideasabout how people arrive, move through, and experience parklandscapes.

The connection between natural-style design and the preser-vation of natural and historic landscapes may be more obscuretoday than it was when Olmsted and Robinson strolledthrough the Ramble together. But if we accept that the naturalstyle was significant in park history, there are good reasons toconsider how it has evolved over time while retaining funda-mental meanings and functions. These thoughts came to mindlast spring as I observed Central Park Conservancy gardeners

who have been engaged in a thoughtful, incremental restora-tion of the Ramble since 2007. One of the last major landscapecomponents of the park to be restored, the revitalization of this wild garden will be a high point of the Conservancy’s thirty years of remarkable stewardship. In the areas of theRamble already reopened to the public, Conservancy staff haveplanted ground cover and understory vegetation, uncloggedstream channels, and stabilized and amended the soil, whichfor decades eroded into the Lake. Surrounding the Ramble onthree sides, its edges are being restored by using portable cof-fer dams to temporarily drain sections of shoreline. This hasmade it possible for silted-in coves and inlets to be excavatedand replanted. The project has been planned in stages to avoidextensive, simultaneous environmental disturbance to thethirty-eight-acre landscape that is, among its other qualities,one of the most significant migratory bird habitats in theentire region.

As the Ramble is renewed, it struck me that the multiplemeanings and historical significance of the landscape are alsobeing resuscitated and given new immediacy. It is no longer aRobinsonian wild garden of carefully maintained shrubs andground covers. Since the 1920s, a secondary forest of blackcherries, ash, and other volunteer species has matured andreplaced many of the original ornamental plants. But the for-est has itself come to be valued as another vision of wildness –not a naturalistic garden but a product of a natural successionthat has reclaimed a rocky piece of Manhattan’s topography.The minimal-impact management of this landscape hasallowed this evolution to take place, and has emphasized theintegrity of wildlife habitat rather than visual effects. Deadtrees are left standing and native plant species are encouraged.

Today no one would advocate clear-cutting the Ramble inorder to re-create the historic, naturalistic garden it once was;instead it continues to embody an ideal of nature, but in acontemporary form. It has become a new kind of wild garden,one in which succession and other natural processes havebeen allowed full expression. Here habitat and ecosystem areshowcased – just as picturesque outcrops, shrubs, and othereffects once were. As an updated vision of wildness, theRamble fulfills its place in the larger park composition and inthe sequence of landscape experiences in ways that a nine-teenth-century shrub garden could not.

The revitalization underway in the Ramble today is a pow-erful metaphor for the resurgence of the social and environ-mental aspirations for public parks once espoused by figuressuch as Olmsted and Robinson and described by them as anatural style of landscape design. The definition and appear-

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ance of nature may change, but the conviction that the experi-ence of such landscapes is a necessary condition for humanhappiness has not: on the contrary, the reasons for preservinglandscapes in ways that allow the public to experience themmeaningfully and healthfully have only grown stronger as theworld has grown more crowded and urbanized. A reexamina-tion of the natural style, therefore, can be a logical and inspir-ing starting point in the process of renewing our vision ofpark design today. – Ethan Carr

Olmsted and Yosemite

When Frederick Law Olmsted embarked fromNew York City in the fall of 1863 to assume hisnew position as general manager of the greatMariposa gold-mining estate in the foothillsof California’s Sierra Nevada, he thought he

was leaving behind both his career as a park designer and hisCivil War role in preserving the Union as head of the U.S.Sanitary Commission. And yet the principal results of his two-year sojourn in California would be his formulation of a dis-tinctive style of regional landscape design for the semi-aridWest and the first comprehensive formulation of a rationalefor creating parks from the national domain.1

Olmsted’s first impressions of the California landscape sur-rounding the settlement of Bear Valley were hardly promisingfor success in either endeavor. The only time during his firstfew weeks on the Mariposa Estate that he took any delight inthe scenery was at twilight, when shadows gave the appearanceof turf to the parched ground and the “vegetable productions”briefly resembled fully formed trees. Still, after several monthshe could write a friend in the East that “there are certain viewshere which are sterner and more awful than any I ever sawbefore. I don’t love them, but I surrender to them; I feel thatthey have got me. I should feel humiliated to live anywhereelse, after having made myself at home with them.” The spotthat he found particularly “sublime in no contemptibledegree” was a mine on the edge of the deep ravine of the

Merced River where the view westward up the valley gave adistant glimpse of the bold granite face of El Capitan and theentrance to Yosemite Valley.

Within a month of his arrival at Mariposa, he began toexplore the scenic wonders beyond the mines, and the follow-ing summer, after the arrival of his family, he spent two weeksvisiting the Mariposa and Fresno groves of giant sequoias. Hewas awed by these ancient specimens, declaring that “you feelthat they are distinguished strangers who have come down tous from another world.” His experience of their majesty wasmost intense in the chiaroscuro effects provided by night-timecampfires. In such a setting, he recalled, “the scene of thewoods was one of the most impressive I have ever fallen upon,the stately trunks of two enormous sequoias a few hundredfeet off lighted up and standing out in a clouded gold color . . . ,perfect columns 170 feet, then lost in general obscurity offoliage.” This experience anticipated his reaction to the sub-lime elements of Yosemite Valley itself; there, too, he respond-ed to the grandeur of the place most intensely when it wasrevealed through light and shadow, moonlight and bold shaftsof sunlight, creating a sense of drama and mystery.

By the summer of 1864 – independent of any involvementby Olmsted himself – Californians had secured from Congressa grant to their state of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa BigTree Grove as inalienable public parkland. Governor FrederickLow moved quickly to protect the region. That September, he

forbade settling or lumbering in the area and appointed acommission of eight men to oversee creation of a public pre-serve. He appointed Olmsted as superintendent and chairmanof the commission and ordered that all suggestions concern-ing policy and all requests for use-leases be directed to him.Reporting his appointment to his father, Olmsted calledYosemite “far the noblest public park, or pleasure ground inthe world.”

In his new role, Olmsted immediately hired the geologistsClarence King and James T. Gardner to draw up an accuratesurvey of the grant. He also prepared a report, which he pre-sented to the commission in Yosemite Valley in September1865, in which he discussed the theoretical basis for scenicpreservation and proposed specific measures for safeguardingthe landscape of the protected area while providing for publicaccess.

The gist of his analysis was that the uniqueness of the valley was not due solely to its towering cliff sides and greatcascades. As he observed:

There are falls of water elsewhere finer, there are more stu-pendous rocks, more beetling cliffs, there are deeper andmore awful chasms, there may be as beautiful streams, aslovely meadows, there are larger trees. It is in no scene orscenes the charm consists, but in the miles of scenerywhere cliffs of awful height and rocks of vast magnitudeand of varied and exquisite coloring, are banked and

fringed and draped andshadowed by the tenderfoliage of noble and lovelytrees and bushes, reflectedfrom the most placid pools,and associated with the mosttranquil meadows, the mostplayful streams, and everyvariety of soft and peacefulpastoral beauty.

The union of the deepestsublimity with the deepestbeauty of nature, not in onefeature or another, not inone part or one scene oranother, not in any land-

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Merced River with Half Dome,

Yosemite National Park.

Photograph courtesy of the

National Park Service

Digital Image Archives.

1 The information in this article was drawn primarily from documents and editorial commentary in Victoria Post Ranney et al., eds., TheCalifornia Frontier, 1863-1865, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted,Volume 5 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), andCharles E. Beveridge and Carolyn Hoffman, eds., Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, The Papers of Frederick LawOlmsted, Supplementary Series Volume 1 (Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins University Press, 1997).

road to the reservation, patent-medicine purveyors had alreadydefaced picturesque outcroppings with their advertisements.

Olmsted realized how easily a few self-interested mencould destroy the beauty of a place that should be preservedfor the benefit of the public at large. Accordingly, he was will-ing to use the power of government to protect against suchprofit-making intrusions. “Itis the main duty of govern-ment,” he stated in hisreport, “to provide means ofprotection for all its citizensin the pursuit of happinessagainst the obstacles, other-wise unsurmountable, whichthe selfishness of individualsor combinations of individu-als is liable to interpose in that pursuit.” He had longsince rejected what he called“the besotted laisser aller[faire] principle,” which, hebelieved, sanctioned materi-alism in its least responsibleform and gave a decidedadvantage to men possessingcapital. Such a policy couldtoo easily result in perpetua-tion of power and privilegein the hands of the samefamilies from generation togeneration, whereas hefirmly believed that “govern-ment should have in viewthe encouragement of a democratic condition ofsociety.”

It was in these terms that Olmsted viewed the question ofscenic preservation. He considered reservations like YosemiteValley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to be public institu-tions of popular education of the sort that he had been work-ing to foster in the North for over a decade. In justifying theYosemite grant, in fact, he invoked A. J. Downing’s seminal

editorial “The New-York Park,” published in the Horticulturistin 1851, with its vision of “a whole people whose system of vol-untary education embraces…not only schools of rudimentaryknowledge, but common enjoyments for all classes in thehigher realms of art, letters, science, social recreations andenjoyments.”

As part of his demonstration of theimportance of the Yosemite grant as an edu-cational opportunity and civilizing force,Olmsted returned to a concept he had devel-oped after his trip to England in 1850: theUnited States had the ability, and theresponsibility, to disprove the preconcep-tions on which the stratified society of theOld World had been built. There the govern-ing classes had always believed “that thelarge mass of all human communitiesshould spend their lives in almost constantlabor and that the power of enjoying beautyeither of nature or of art in any high degree,requires a cultivation of certain faculties,which is impossible to these humble toilers.”

As Olmsted had realized during hisEuropean travels, and as A. J. Downing hadtaught, the American republic must proveitself capable of providing its citizens withfacilities for the full development of theircapabilities. The engrossment by the rich ofso many of England’s beautiful landscapesmust not be permitted to occur in theUnited States. Preservation and proper man-agement of the Yosemite grant would be a

crucial test of this ideal. It was this lesson concerning republi-can institutions and the promotion of civilization thatOlmsted taught in his Yosemite report – a lesson he combinedwith a cogent analysis of the beneficial psychological effect ofscenery. The report was his first formal statement of themesthat he would articulate many times during his next thirty-fiveyears as a practitioner of landscape architecture.

Having instructed his audience how to appreciate thescenery of Yosemite and spelled out a rationale for its preser-vation by the government, Olmsted went on to propose mea-sures for its development and management. He called forimmediate establishment of regulations that would protect thevalley from destruction, since careless habits once established

7

scape that can be framed by itself, but all around and wher-ever the visitor goes, constitutes the Yo Semite the greatestglory of nature.

In this heartfelt (if calculated) paean to the beauty of theplace, Olmsted was applying the aesthetic he used in his ownpark designs. There was to be no display of specimen objects,however impressive, in this landscape. The experience of theplace was to be a continuous, flowing, and changing one: asuccession of scenes in which the wall of the valley would sel-dom be viewed alone, but would instead be part of a well-com-posed scene in which the Merced River and its adjoiningmeadows, fern-brakes, and woods played a crucial part.Elaborating on this issue in later years, Olmsted recalled that“I felt the charm of the Yosemite much more at the end of aweek than at the end of a day, much more after six weeks whenthe cascades were nearly dry, than after one week, and whenafter having been in it, off and on, several months, I was goingout, I said, ‘I have not yet half taken it in.’ ”

Olmsted’s report carried significant implications for themanagement of the area. No lumbering, grazing, or home-steading should be permitted. The eminent botanist JohnTorrey informed Olmsted that within sight of a trail used byvisitors in the valley floor, there were some six hundredspecies of flora, “most of them being small and delicate flow-ering plants.” Moreover, within a few acres of meadow, Torreyhad found and named three hundred species native toCalifornia. The fragility of much of this valley vegetation dic-tated a management policy that would serve the requirementsof tourists while protecting the plants as fully as possible.Olmsted predicted that millions of people would visit the val-ley in the next hundred years, and he warned that “an injury tothe scenery so slight that it may be unheeded by any visitornow, will be one of deplorable magnitude when its effect uponeach visitor’s enjoyment is multiplied by these millions.”Professional guidance was needed for protecting both thescenic and botanical elements of the valley, and for this pur-pose he urged that four of the eight members appointed to thecommission be landscape artists and natural scientists.

The danger that individuals would mar the beauty of thevalley in their pursuit of private gain was already evident whenOlmsted drew up his report. James Hutchings had laid claimto much of the valley and was about to build a sawmill there.Governor Low’s proclamation ended that threat, but the cut-ting of trees continued. Commercial activity also accompaniedthe increased flow of tourists in the summer of 1865; along the

Descent into Yosemite Valley by

Mariposa Trail, Harper’s Weekly 1873.

Courtesy of Tim Davis.

would be hard to break. In order to provide access while at thesame time acting “to reduce the necessity for artificial con-struction within the narrowest practicable limits,” he proposeda narrow carriage path circling the valley by a course thatwould intrude as little as possible on the landscape. He alsoproposed construction of five cabins at the points most fre-quented by visitors. The cabins would be let to tenants whowere responsible for offering free resting space and facilitiesfor visitors and providing rental of tents, camping gear, andcooking utensils. The cost of these minimally invasive alter-ations was very little: a projected $6,600. But Olmsted was notmerely committed to protecting the land; he was equally com-mitted to bringing people there to experience it. Steamboatservice easily carried visitors the seventy-five miles from SanFrancisco to Stockton, but there remained an overland journeyof nearly one hundred miles. He therefore called for an appro-priation by the state legislature of an additional $25,000 tofacilitate construction of a good carriage road from Stocktonto Yosemite Valley. This costly scheme would prove the undo-ing of his vision.

When Olmsted read his report to the Yosemite Commissionin the valley on August 9, 1865, his conclusions impressed vis-iting newspaper editors from the East. The response of thestate government was far less positive. Three members of theYosemite commission were also commissioners of the Califor-nia Geological Survey, which was itself seeking new appropria-tions. They convinced Governor Low to suppress Olmsted’sreport and budgetary request. The only verbatim portion ofhis report that reached the general public during Olmsted’slifetime was the description of the special landscape qualitiesof Yosemite Valley that he published in the New York EveningPost of June 18, 1868; the report itself was virtually lost to theworld for the following half century. Not until 1916, whenFrederick Law Olmsted Jr. turned to the only existing copy ofhis father’s document for inspiration and phraseology as he composed the enabling legislation for the National ParkService, did Olmsted’s carefully developed rationale finallyserve its intended role. Published several times since then inits entirety, the report has become an important part of thebody of design doctrine that has informed the Olmsted revivalof recent years.

Olmsted returned to the East in October 1865, resignedfrom the Yosemite Commission in October 1866, and was notofficially involved with setting policy for the grant thereafter.

Although he visited the area in 1886, while planning theStanford University campus, he seems to have intentionallyavoided returning to Yosemite Valley. Soon after, however, arising chorus of dismay at the spoliation of the valley’s land-scape led to a campaign by concerned observers against thepermissive and lax policies of the commission. RalphUnderwood Johnson, publisher of the Century Magazine,appealed to Olmsted for assistance, but he felt too far removedfrom the situation to comment effectively. He did, however,draw up and publish a brief paper in 1890, entitledGovernmental Preservation of Natural Scenery, in which he dis-cussed development of policies related to the cutting of treesand programs for replanting them.2

By this time, he had been involved for a decade in the cam-paign to create a scenic reservation at Niagara Falls – first as aleader of the effort and then in 1887 as co-designer with hisold partner Calvert Vaux of the land ultimately set aside forprotection by the State of New York. At Niagara he found thesame combination of widely varying landscape elements – inthis instance, torrential rapids, tremendous falls, and rich pro-fusion of native vegetation – that constituted the special charmof Yosemite. The problem was similar – how to provide accessand necessary facilities with least disruption of the landscape.In his response to Johnson’s appeal – Olmsted’s last statementon Yosemite – he quoted telling advice from his Niagara reportof 1887 that crystallized his final recommendation for bothsites and for scenic reservations in general:

Having regard to the enjoyment by visitors of naturalscenery, and considering that the means of making thisenjoyment available to large numbers of them will unavoid-ably lessen the extent and value of the primary elements ofnatural scenery, nothing of an artificial character should beallowed a place on the property, no matter how valuable itmight be under other circumstances and no matter at howlittle cost it may be had, the presence of which can beavoided consistently with the provision of necessary condi-tions for making the enjoyment of the natural sceneryavailable.

– Charles E. Beveridge

Yellowstone: From Last Place Discovered to International Fame

Since its founding in 1872, Yellowstone National Parkhas been renowned for the quality and quantity of itsnatural and cultural features. It has been designated aWorld Biosphere Preserve and a National Heritage Site.It is routinely proclaimed one of the world’s most

extraordinary places, and it appears on nearly everyone’s life-time-pilgrimage checklist. It is also a place that was decreed by Congress to be kept “unimpaired for future generations.” Asa National Park Ranger at Yellowstone, I saw the consequencesof this promise every time I watched my little daughter Tessplay in the park with her friends. Because it was the firstnational park ever established, its history is generally instruc-tive, and this spring’s National Park Week (April 18-26, 2009)led me to reflect on Yellowstone’s dramatic beginnings. It wasalready internationally famous by the mid-1870s – before itcould be reached by railroad, and when few Americans hadeven seen it.

One of the great riddles of Indian history is why local tribesdid not inform white people about the place. While ancienthumans and, later, at least twenty-six Indian tribes visitedYellowstone over the centuries, they did not pass along infor-mation about it to Euro-Americans the way they did aboutother locations in the American West. Nor did they pass alongto westward-bound whites what must have been well-estab-lished myths and legends about this strange land. Although weare not quite sure why, it seems likely that Yellowstone wasconsidered a sacred place and therefore not something to beshared. Historian Hiram Chittenden wrote in 1895: “It is a sin-gular fact in the history of the Yellowstone National Park that no knowledge of that country seems to have been derivedfrom the Indians . . . . Their deep silence concerning it istherefore no less remarkable than mysterious.”1

Eventually Euro-Americans found Yellowstone – fur trap-pers in the 1820s and ‘30s and gold prospectors in the 1860s –but these travelers also did little to pass on their knowledge.Difficult mountain geography, the presence of deep snow formuch of the year, the Civil War, and the lack of informationfrom Indians all contributed to the area’s obscurity. WhenYellowstone was finally “rediscovered” by Euro-Americans in1870, it was effectively the last place in the American West to beexplored and opened – and that was arguably fortunate.Otherwise settlers would have claimed the land and we proba-bly would not have had today’s protected national park.

8

2 Governmental Preservation of Natural Scenery will be published in Ethan Carr and Amanda Gagel, eds., The Early Boston Years, 1882-1890, Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Volume 8 (Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).

The wonders and curiosities of Yellow-stone were so amazing that even the 1869Folsom party and the 1870 Washburn party –the parties that received credit for its whitediscovery – were not initially believed. DavidFolsom stated on his return that he “wasunwilling to risk his reputation for veracity bya full recital…of the wonders he had seen.” N. P. Langford of the Washburn party statedto traveler Charles Whitmell that 1870 news-papers portrayed him as “the biggest liar inthe West.”2 Indeed the New York Timessneered that Langford’s submitted magazinearticle “reads like the realization of a child’sfairy tale.” 3 Walter Trumbull of Langford’sparty wrote an account for Overland Monthlymagazine that the editor of the Boise Tri-Weekly Statesman blasted as fiction:

A great fault of our western literature is itsgross exaggeration and its vulgar strainingfor effect. Simple people are astonished(which generally seems to be the purposeof the writer), but sensible ones are dis-gusted with this style of “old trapper”lying. We are of the opinion that when Mr.Walter Trumbull saw that column of waterfrom the Beehive [Geyser] spouting up twofeet in diameter to an altitude of 230 feethe must have been under the influence ofan element more inspiring than RockyMountain water. And that other five footcolumn from the Giantess [Geyser] spout-ing up two hundred feet, and falling indrops and spray and shrouded with goldenmist is equally tough. Now we like goodhealthy exaggeration; it indicates the poeti-cal temperament, and lends a change oftento a dull, practical subject, but this is a lit-tle too clumsily done. We suggest to Walterthat he knock off a hundred feet or so andcall the balance steam.4

If this editor in Boise,Idaho, could not believe inYellowstone geysers, thenwho could blame those ineastern cities for doubtingthat the strange wonderlandexisted?

It required a third expedi-tion – the 1871 HaydenSurvey – to fully documentthe glories of Yellowstonewith photographs and scien-tific reports so that peoplecould believe they were real.But even expedition artistThomas Moran worried thatthe colors with which hepainted were so bright thatpeople might think him aliar.5 Fortunately W. H.Jackson’s photos and thoseof Joshua Crissman couldnot lie, so Congress declaredYellowstone the world’s firstnational park on March 1,1872. Originally singled outbecause of its unique 200-feet-high geysers, the newpark soon revealed otherastounding features, includ-ing huge lakes, colorfulcanyons, petrified trees, tallwaterfalls, large mammals,and thousands of hotsprings.

Once Yellowstone wasknown to the world, newspapers and magazines quickly madeit famous, despite its remoteness. Initially all travel was onhorseback, over what the New York Times referred to in 1873 as“wild and difficult bridle-paths.” A search today of one onlinearchive shows that at least 1,336 newspaper articles about

Yellowstone appeared between 1872–1883. In addition, thelargest Yellowstone bibliography reveals at least 209 publishedmagazine articles published during the same period. Thesestatistics do not include government documents, book chap-ters, individual letters, or items that were published in Europe,fed by the great number of wealthy European travelers whovisited the park. Those miscellaneous productions number inthe hundreds.

Along with the sheer volume of articles came glowingpraise that hardly any place could live up to. Only one yearafter Congress’s act to establish the protected area, the NewYork Times proclaimed that “it is only necessary to render thePark easily accessible to make it the most popular summerresort in the country.”6 Over and over we read sentences like“Every person in our estimation should visit the Yellowstone.”7

Poetic language in the style of an intricately worked quilt wasin vogue and produced lines like these describingYellowstone’s Grand Canyon:

The whole gorge flames. It is as though rainbows had fallenout of the sky and hung themselves like glorious banners.The underlying color is the clearest yellow. This flushesonward into orange. Down at the base the deepest mossesunroll their draperies of the most vivid green; browns,sweet and soft, do their blending; white rocks stand spec-tral; turrets of rock shoot up as crimson as though theywere drenched with blood. It is a wilderness of color. It isimpossible that even the pencil of an artist can tell it.8

9

1 Hiram M. Chittenden, The Yellowstone National Park: Historical and Descriptive (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke Company, 1895), 8, 99. Forthose interested in more on this subject, I’ve written about it in thesecond chapter of my book Storytelling in Yellowstone: Horse andBuggy Tour Guides (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,2007) and in “Native Americans, the Earliest Interpreters: What isKnown About Their Legends and Stories of Yellowstone NationalPark and the Complexities of Interpreting Them,” George WrightForum 19, no. 3 (2002): 40-51.

2 Aubrey L. Haines, Yellowstone National Park: Its Exploration and Establishment (Washington: GPO, 1974), 54; Charles T. Whitmell, “TheAmerican Wonderland, the Yellowstone National Park,” Report andTransactions of the Cardiff Naturalists Society 17 (1885): 102.

3 New York Times, October 14, 1870. 4 TriWeekly Statesman (Boise, ID), June 6, 1871. 5 Brooklyn (NY) Eagle, August 14, 1883. 6 New York Times, March 12, 1873.7 Daily Gazette and Bulletin (Williamsport, PA), September 29, 1884.8 Rev. Wayland Hoyt, 1878, quoted in Whittlesey, Storytelling in

Yellowstone, 191.

Northern Pacific Railroad brochure,

1884. Courtesy of the National Park

Service.

Many writers made much of their inability to do justice toYellowstone’s wonders in words. They stated that seeing theplace was the only thing adequate for understanding:

The exuberance and…profligacy with which nature hasdumped out into this National Park the grand, gorgeous,and awful creations of her infinite power fill the touristwith unspeakable awe and amazement, and furnish suchillimitable material that the pen is puzzled both for abeginning point and a language to convey even a feebledescription. The boldest and most successful effort of theablest exaggeration would fall far short of the…realities thatmeet the eye at every step in this “goblin land.”9

With so many glowing reports emanating from the press, itis not surprising that Yellowstone was already famous by thetime its railroad arrived in 1883. The Northern Pacific Railroad(NPRR), extending its line across the Dakotas and Montana inwhat was effectively the nation’s second transcontinental rail-road, reached Livingston, Montana, in 1882. That was onlyabout fifty miles north of Yellowstone Park, so the NPRR madeimmediate plans to build a branch line south. Working foreight months, the companylaid the last iron on August 30and ran its first regularly-scheduled train to Yellowstoneon September 1, 1883. Thismarked the first time inAmerican history that a rail-road company built tracksspecifically to a tourist destina-tion. It was appropriate thatthe place so honored was theworld’s first national park.Eventually four other railroadswould offer service to the park,but for eighteen years theNPRR was the only one. Nearlyninety thousand visitors rodeits trains to the park in thefirst fourteen years, many ofthem wondering, as did 1907visitor Elizabeth Rowell,“Would Yellowstone equal itsreputation?” Her party soon

“no longer questioned” the park’s “right to fame.”10

By 1897, Yellowstone was a grand tourist success. It had sixhotels and numerous smaller lodging facilities. It received10,000 visitors per year who were transported around its 140-mile loop in four-horse stagecoaches. At least two dozen bookshad been published about it and the park’s existence wastaught in geography classes the world over. Geologists andother scientists came from around the globe to study it.

During the twentieth century, promotion of Yellowstonegrew more intense and more sophisticated. The first motionpicture of the park was filmed in 1897, but between the 1970sand the end of the twentieth century so many commercialfilms were produced about the park that they are difficult tocount. A search of our online newspaper archive at Yellow-stone shows that at least 125,917 newspaper articles about thepark or mentioning it were published from 1884 to 2008.Beginning in the 1950s, television producers also promotedthe park worldwide. I saw Yellowstone on television during mychildhood in faraway Oklahoma, not knowing that my daugh-ter – little Tess – would grow up there in the 1990s.

Various crises and controversies in the twentieth centurykept the park in the news. After scientists proposed keepingYellowstone natural in the Leopold report in 1963, their find-ings were widely debated in the press. In the mid-1960s, manyAmericans became angry over artificial reduction of Yellow-

stone’s elk numbers through planned hunting by rangers; thena seeming lack of grizzly bears in the 1970s stimulated nation-al discussion. The huge fires of 1988 provoked massive public-ity and continuing media scrutiny. A proposed gold mine inthe park in the 1990s made environmentalists so angry thatPresident Clinton intervened and declared that “Yellowstone ismore valuable than gold.”

In 1995, the reintroduction of wolves and the revelation ofhundreds of new waterfalls in 2000 garnered still more pub-licity for the park. The spectacular combination of grizzlybears, wolves, and other large mammals in the Yellowstone’sLamar Valley has caused that area to become known as the“American Serengeti.” It attracts continuing attention from thenational media and park visitors. Arguments about “harvest-ing” small amounts of bacteria from hot springs and aboutdrilling outside the park for thermal energy continue to annoypark purists today. It is impossible to guess what aspect ofYellowstone will be next to claim our attention.

Those early Indians, explorers, newspaper editors, survey-ors, railroad passengers, and stagecoach tourists would proba-bly have been amazed to know the extent of their park’seventual fame and the numbers of people who would ulti-mately visit it. Today, as America and the world become moreand more urbanized, Yellowstone National Park looms assomething truly unusual and desirable for visitors seekingnatural wonders, elusive wilderness, hoped-for inspiration,necessary solace, intellectual stimulation, and emotional reju-venation. Although its railroads are long gone, it still witnessesthree million visitors per year thronging its five entrances.Tourists from other countries routinely include it in theirplans, and, as one 1885 visitor wrote, “every American must seeit once before he dies.”

The fact that Indians may have kept it a secret, that manynineteenth-century white men could not find it or penetrate it,and that numerous others did not believe in it at all werelucky breaks for Yellowstone during its journey to protection.Those breaks were also fortunate for the rest of us. May mydaughter, your children, and all other children play in it, loveit, and help us protect it “unimpaired for future generations.”– Lee H. Whittlesey

9 “Acres Upon Acres of Hot Springs,” New York Times, August 31, 1883.10Elizabeth Rowell, “Ten Days in the Yellowstone,” Alaska-Yukon

Magazine (August 1907): 475. The Northern Pacific Railroad’s historyfor Yellowstone is in Lee H. Whittlesey, A History of the MammothVillage in Yellowstone National Park: Culture and Nature at MammothHot Springs (Yellowstone National Park, WY: National Park Service,forthcoming), 55. 10

Old Faithful erupting, Yellowstone

National Park. Photograph by Craig

Mellish.

Conundrums of Commemoration: Blue Ridge Parkway’s Seventy-fifth Anniversary

In 2010, the Blue Ridge Parkway will celebrate its seventy-fifthanniversary. As the author of Super-Scenic Motorway: A BlueRidge Parkway History (2006), I was invited to take part in the planning for this event, but mobilizing history for cele-bratory purposes, I have learned, can present unforeseen

challenges. Anniversaries are purportedly about rememberingand reflecting upon the past, but celebrations take place in the present, and are planned and shaped by contemporaryissues and stakeholders. My role in this particular event isespecially delicate because powerful interests similar to thosethat influenced the parkway’s founding and development still threaten its future.

A product of the Great Depression and New Deal, the BlueRidge Parkway connects Shenandoah National Park with GreatSmoky Mountains National Park. Carved from national forestand private lands, with 469 miles of glorious mountain views,campgrounds, and hiking trails, the parkway has been themost visited site in the national park system since just afterWorld War II. This triumph of automobile-related engineeringand landscape design was part of a coordinated system ofsouthern Appalachian parks that brought the national parkidea traditionally associated with the western public domain tothe more heavily populated eastern United States. To protectviews from the parkway, the National Park Service stringentlylimited access to it; the road’s completion also required liberaluse of state powers of eminent domain, which sparked numer-ous conflicts with local political and business interests in thesouthern Appalachians. At the same time, the parkway repre-sented the success of some of those same interests in securingfederal funding for the development of a key travel attraction.

More than a year ago, Blue Ridge Parkway partner organiza-tions formed a new nonprofit – Blue Ridge Parkway 75, Inc. –to coordinate plans to celebrate the parkway’s seventy-fifthanniversary. Blue Ridge Parkway 75 includes representativesfrom the National Park Service, the states of Virginia andNorth Carolina, several private nonprofit parkway volunteerand fundraising organizations, and several land trusts andconservation groups. Also represented are universities, com-munities, and especially the travel and business sector in themountains: Biltmore Estate, Luray Caverns, GrandfatherMountain, the Blue Ridge Parkway Association, Blue RidgeHost, Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, andAsheville Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Everyone involved shares the goal of protecting and pre-serving the parkway for the next seventy-five years and beyond.But hidden within that broadly shared outlook are divergent

perspectives. In particular, there is an unacknowledged dividebetween those whose focus is scenery and conservation andthose whose interest lies in promoting regional tourism.These divergent agendas have coexisted uneasily throughoutthe parkway’s history, and were a major focus of my book. ButI didn’t fully appreciate that the board would so accuratelyreflect the power relations among the park’s original stake-holders. How does a historian who is aware of how these agen-das haveshaped theparkway inthe pastnegotiatethem in thepresent?

The ten-sions inher-ent in theparkway firstemerged in1933, whenboostersfrom threestates gath-ered inVirginia sen-ator Harry F.Byrd’s Wash-ington officeto hammer out their vision for a federally funded scenic “park-to-park highway” to link Shenandoah and the Great Smokies.While Virginia’s Skyline Drive, being built in Shenandoah, pro-vided a model of a stunning ridgetop road, it became clearearly on that business interests would also drive the parkway’sdevelopment. “The greatest industry in the world,” NorthCarolina senator Robert Reynolds told those convened, “is notthe building of automobiles, the steel, the mill or the tobaccoindustry, but . . . the tourist industry.”

By 1934, however, that great southern Appalachian touristindustry was spiraling down fast. Asheville, North Carolina,known since the late-nineteenth century as the “Land of theSky,” had recently invested lavishly in city infrastructure towelcome tourists to grand new hotels. When the regional real-estate market collapsed, western North Carolina’s largest bankfailed, taking millions of dollars in city funds down with it.Asheville’s resulting crisis lingered for decades.

In this context, the parkway’s most fervent supporters in1934 were not conservationists but persons associated withAsheville’s media, hotel, and business community, who werebanking on the fact that a new parkway would drive streams oftourists through Asheville on their way to the Smokies. Notlong after the parkway was approved for federal funding in late1933, however, North Carolina and Tennessee plunged into ayearlong conflict over its route. North Carolina’s preferred

route looped south aroundAsheville while Tennessee’sturned northwest at Linvilleand hugged the state line onthe Tennessee side, headingtowards the Smokies atGatlinburg.

The Tennessee routecompletely bypassed Ashe-ville and the city’s boosterswere determined to avoidsuch an outcome. Fortunatelyfor them, scenery was ontheir side. The NorthCarolina route, laid out bythe state’s skilled highwaylocating engineer R. GettyBrowning, clung near theridgetops and soared above5000 feet. The Tennesseeroute, on the other hand,lurched up and down themountains and crossed several streams. In the faceof an early decision by

a federal committee in favor of the Tennessee route, NorthCarolina’s boosters pressed interior secretary Harold Ickes and President Franklin Roosevelt to adopt their mappinginstead. When the dust settled, Roosevelt and Ickes agreed.

For a time tourism and scenery coexisted peacefully. Buteven in the 1930s some voices cautioned that their interestswere intrinsically opposed. Writing to Ickes in 1933, Knoxvilleconservationist Harvey Broome (two years later a founder ofthe Wilderness Society) warned that “a skyline link would splitthe whole mountain region wide open, and with the cleavagewould vanish much of the spell of the primeval.” Businesses,he argued, would soon follow as “service stations of all kindswould necessarily have to be dragged up from the valleys to meet the needs of the motorists.” The combination of theroad, cars, and service stations, “all extraneous to the wilder-

11

Traffic jam at Mabry Mill, Blue Ridge

Parkway, 1963. Courtesy Blue Ridge

Parkway.

ness,” would turn the road’s surroundings into “but a mockeryof the fresh, green, inviolate nature such a road is supposed toreveal.”

Broome rightly foresaw how hard it would be to promotebusiness development while also preserving natural scenery.In the late 1930s Little Switzerland resort developer and statesupreme court justice Heriot Clarkson lobbied North Carolinahighway officials, launched a public relations campaign, andultimately filed a lawsuit to force changes in the parkway’sprotective 800- to 1,000-foot right-of-way through his proper-ty. Well-connected throughout North Carolina political circlesand originally a parkway supporter, Clarkson commanded alevel of attention from the highway commission that manyother landowners could not attract; commission officials madeseveral concessions to reduce the damage the parkway wouldinflict on his development.

Eventually, the case wound its way through the court sys-tem, right up to the North Carolina Supreme Court, andClarkson recused himself. Upholding a county superior courtdecision, the supreme court in 1939 agreed to a settlement thatreduced the right-of way through Little Switzerland to 200 feet(the narrowest in North Carolina), opened an unprecedentedfour access points from the resort to the road, and awardedClarkson $25,000 for eighty-eight acres of land. At about $281per acre, this payment far exceeded the average of $37 per acrethat North Carolina had paid for all parkway lands it had purchased up to that time. The narrow right-of-way also hadan additional benefit for Clarkson. With a parkway entrancefronting on his Switzerland Inn, he could advertise LittleSwitzerland as the “Only Resort Directly on the Blue RidgeParkway.” The traveling public’s experience suffered, as numer-ous buildings associated with the resort crowded the parkwayview.

The fragile early alliance between parkway planners andregional tourism interests further deteriorated in the late1940s when Grandfather Mountain owner Hugh Mortonaccused the park service of failing to build up the regionaltourism industry that had, as he correctly noted, been centralto the parkway’s founding. This form of boosterism, although a force behind the parkway and many national parks, was notwritten into the park service’s mission in 1916. But Morton,who had recently opened his own nearby travel attraction – theMile-High Swinging Bridge – resented policies prohibitingcommercial signage along the parkway that would direct visi-tors there.

Morton also chafed atpark service attempts toimpose fees on the scenicroad, as well as its Mission

66-era plans to build what he called “socialized” lodging andfood-service facilities on the parkway. Enraged, he and his fellow mountain-tourism boosters in the Blowing Rock andBoone area proclaimed in a flyer, “We are Not Going to Sit Still while the Tourist Business Is Sold Down the River.” In thelate 1940s and early 1950s, the parkway superintendent tried to devise ways to inform travelers about nearby accommoda-tions, but he nevertheless remained wary of making the park-way “a publicity agent for private interests.”

In the mid-1950s, with the route of the parkway completeexcept for the “missing link” on Grandfather Mountain,Morton lambasted park service plans for building the parkwayhigh along Grandfather’s slopes. Launching a statewide mediablitz and mobilizing his connections with several governorsand other top state officials, Morton by 1968 had shoved theparkway down the mountain to a location less likely to inter-fere with his travel attraction. Although the final route, whichwas completed in 1987, included the stunning Linn Cove

Viaduct that carried theparkway around Grand-father’s rocky shoulders, thecost was high: a parkwayconceived in the publicinterest and paid for withpublic funds was reshapedaccording to the demands ofa single well-connected pri-vate developer.

The episode raised thedisturbing prospect that thepublic interest may not prevail over the private andcommercial goals of thosewho own land near the park-way or have political powerover it. Just a few years ago,Republican congressmanCharles Taylor sponsored theparkway’s new Asheville visitor center. Although thebuilding is now run by theNational Park Service, muchof it is clearly designed toinduce parkway travelers tovisit commercial attractions

throughout the region such as Grandfather Mountain, theBiltmore Estate, and the casino at Cherokee. More recently, aFlorida-based private developer has acquired a lease on landsjust off the parkway near Roanoke, where there had formerlybeen a “living history” park. Because the park’s historic aimshad been seen as consonant with the spirit of the parkway, a connector road had been built in cooperation with theNational Park Service in the 1980s. But the Florida developerhas recently debuted plans for building a fantastical commer-cial resort named “Blue Ridge America” on the site. Completewith luxury spa, sprawling village complex, cable car, swankyhotel, riverside light-show pageant, super-big zip line, and golf course, Blue Ridge America – unlike other local accom-modations – would be easily accessible from the parkway. Thedeveloper has predicted that the proposed resort, which isobviously very much out of character with the rest of the park-way, would be “like a national park on steroids.” Unfortunately,as it is controlled by an array of public entities, both state andlocal, the park service has only modest influence over deci-

12

Pastoral scene in Doughton Park,

Blue Ridge Parkway, 2008. Photograph

by David E. Whisnant.

sions about the site. Even if the developer’s plans fail to mate-rialize, the park’s future remains uncertain.

But in commemorative moments we tend to elide both his-torical conflicts and persistent differences, instead emphasiz-ing harmony, shared goals, and a sense of forward progress.How can the historian meaningfully participate in thisprocess? Reminding everyone of past disagreements amongconstituencies now working together and of complicatedpower relationships that persist in the present raises one’s riskof being seen as a spoiler or, worse, being marginalized to thepoint of having no effect on the celebratory programs, events,or projects relating to the upcoming anniversary. But by play-ing along, I fear I may unwittingly reinforce an essentiallycommercial vision for the parkway’s existence. I see no reasonfor participating in the creation of bland and uncriticalrhetoric, consensus history, and system-serving processes thatfail to address the serious problems of encroaching develop-ment and the ongoing fights for access and commercialbenefit. Thus, I am forced to ask myself how can I retain myintegrity as a scholar while being a good team player?

As a first step towards resolving this dilemma, I have had toaccept that, rather than engaging in paradigm-shifting analy-sis, I often need to function simply as a compendium of park-way facts – facts that are used in developing lists of potentialsponsors, guests, or honorees, writing commemorative legisla-tion, creating a timeline of key dates for the Web site, or devis-ing a reenactment of a key event. But even that has provedcomplicated.

From the commemorative standpoint, the most importantissue has been: “When did the parkway begin?” “Begin” in thiscase has many possible meanings: November 16, 1933, whenfederal funding was approved, September 11, 1935, when thefirst contract was let, September 19, 1935, when the first shovel-ful of dirt was turned, or June 30, 1936, when the project wasapproved by Congress and named Blue Ridge Parkway. Itseemed that the group wanted the “first shovelful” date, whicha contemporaneous letter that I uncovered unambiguouslyplaces on September 19. Unfortunately, my answer differs fromwhat is emblazoned on at least two metal plaques installedalong the parkway, as well as from the widely publicized dateused for the fiftieth anniversary celebration: September 11,1935. And so conventional wisdom and inground historicalmarkers carried the day, and the new Blue Ridge Parkway 75website asserts that “on September 11, 1935, construction of thefirst 12.5-mile section began near Cumberland Knob in NorthCarolina.”

More significant and distressing have been the ongoinginteractions with tourism industry representatives, who makeup a large percentage of board members. My book criticizes

13

Diary for a Second Century: A Journey across Our National Park System in Search of Its Future

Solstice Canyon

It is late August 2008 in Solstice Canyon in Santa MonicaMountain National Recreation Area in southern California,and the streamside oaks provide some welcome shade. Thisis the first meeting of the National Parks Second CenturyCommission, and the commissioners are spending this

warm afternoon in the field seeing things they never expectedto encounter in a national park. Following a brief amphithe-ater orientation by Henry Ortiz, who is the Science Coordina-tor for the Los Angeles Unified School District, we make ourway to the water’s edge where three dozen or so young“EcoHelpers,” recruited from inner-city East Los Angeles, arecarefully planting trees and shrubs. Most of these kids arefrom single-parent homes, and today is family day for theEcoHelpers. Alongside their parent and a sibling or two, shov-els in hand, they are hard at work. National Park Service (NPS)biologists share encouragement, advice, and a strong armwhen needed. This is clearly not the stereotypical family visitto a national park. The pride and stewardship associated with this program suggest not only positive outcomes for par-ticipants but also a deeper level of public engagement in thepark itself.

The National Parks Second Century Commission, fundedthrough a grant to the National Parks Conservation Associa-tion, has two main responsibilities: producing a report out-lining a vision for the NPS and national park system, andshaping an action agenda for the administration and Congress.There are five commission meetings scheduled – in SantaMonica, Lowell, Yellowstone, Gettysburg, and Great SmokyMountains – and each will highlight challenges and opportu-nities specific to these parks and common to parks across the system. The report is expected to be completed by fall of2009, coinciding with the broadcast of the Ken Burns docu-mentary The National Parks, America’s Best Idea.

The Commission is co-chaired by former US senatorsBennett Johnston and Howard Baker and staffed by retiredNPS chief of policy Loran Fraser. Jon Jarvis, Pacific Westregional director, is the NPS point of contact. I’ve been askedto work with Jon to capture lessons learned from the commis-sion’s national park visits and conversations with park andprogram staff, subject-area experts, and park constituencies.Somewhere along our route through Santa Monica we stop ona ridgetop, part of a slender corridor of open land recently

how powerful tourist interests – most prominently Grand-father Mountain’s Morton – manipulated the parkway for theirown benefit. Morton died in 2006, but well-placed friends of his throughout North Carolina have tried to influence thediscourse and tone of the parkway commemoration.

In the fall of 2008, at my suggestion, Blue Ridge Parkway 75organized a public discussion of the parkway’s past and future;it was held in Roanoke, Virginia, where the threat of encroach-ment on the parkway is particularly severe. I presented thepolitical and social history of the road, University of Georgialandscape architect Ian Firth explained the evolution of park-way design, and parkway planner Gary Johnson talked aboutcurrent management issues. We have emphasized that manyparkway challenges have roots in parkway history and thatbeing fully aware of history provides us with valuable tools inthe present. I highlighted the ongoing risk of commercializa-tion by noting that Hugh Morton had exercised dispropor-tionate power over parkway development in the 1950s and1960s. What I didn’t say was that, with two representatives onthe Blue Ridge Parkway 75 board, Grandfather Mountain con-tinues to have disproportionate influence on our discussion of the parkway.

During the question period, one of the board membersfrom Grandfather accused me of unfairly maligning Morton,with whom he had worked since the early 1970s. My analysis, Iresponded, accurately represented the historical record, anddid not purport to address his later experiences. The momentpassed, but the edge of conflict apparently made some in theaudience uncomfortable.

Shortly afterwards, someone else involved with planningthe celebration told me that in a time of budget woes, a criticalstaffing shortage, and development pressure, my talks on park-way history should seek to inspire stewardship by instilling amessage of “hope and joy.” But history, as we know, is not fullof hope and joy, and the history of the parkway is still beingwritten: policies implemented now will shape our experiencein the park for the next seventy-five years. A message of blindoptimism would leave those who love the parkway ill-equippedto make the difficult decisions necessary to protect it fromthose who would elevate private interests over the public good.A key task for those who participate in the commemoration isto face the parkway’s future prospects honestly. To meet thatchallenge, forthright work by historians is essential. – Anne Mitchell Whisnant

traversed by a radio-collared cougar. The cougar has threadedits way past some nearby subdivisions to reach another of therugged ridges that envelop this vast landscape. Denny Galvin, acommissioner and former NPS deputy director, reminds methat it was in 1979 that he and I drove these mountain roadstogether when, as a very young landscape architect, I wasassigned to organize a planning team for Santa Monica. Theink on the enabling legislation was barely dry, and it took anentire day’s drive for us to traverse this archipelago of futureparkland, all the while thinking that Santa Monica was goingto present the NPS with one of its most complex and difficultchallenges to date.

But now it is thirty years later, and Denny and I are listen-ing to Superintendent Woody Smeck explain how one of themost densely populated places in the United States can sup-port a viable population of mountain lions. He also describesthe critical role played by his partnerships – a seamless net-work of private, local, state, and national parks programmati-cally and physically linked to communities throughoutmetropolitan Los Angeles. Many members of these communi-ties, particularly those who have been traditionally under-served by park agencies, are not only using these parks butgradually becoming their most committed stewards and advo-cates.

When people ask why the Second Century Commissionchose Santa Monica as the venue for its first meeting, theanswer now seems obvious. If a national park can be so trans-formative and meaningful in this environment, with its com-plex mosaic of land uses and agency jurisdictions, intenseurban and suburban pressures, and so many diverse commu-nities, perhaps there is reason to believe that all national parkscan make similar positive contributions no matter what theirsetting, how they are constituted, or what communities theyserve.

Wannalancit MillA brisk October breeze blows through the open sides of thetrolley as we complete our urban journey across the city ofLowell to the oversized wooden doors of Wannalancit Mill.The red brick mill – now partly University of Massachusettsconference center, partly NPS museum – functions like muchof Lowell National Historical Park, as a great civic collabora-tion. For its second meeting, the Second Century Commissionhas come to the historical park and nearby Essex NationalHeritage Area to look more closely at the broad universe of

partnerships. We gather in the Wannalancit Mill to hear Lowellsuperintendent Michael Creasey and partners from Universityof Massachusetts Lowell and Middlesex Community Collegediscuss their deep long-term relationship, a relationship thatis not only changing Lowell but also changing the way nation-al parks are perceived. The establishment of the park in the1970s, they explain, was a crucial step not only in the environ-mental, social, and economic renaissance of Lowell but also inthe transformation of the municipality into what they call an“educative city,” built on an ambitious program of park/collegecivic learning and community service projects.

Each partner in the collaboration brings something differ-ent to the table, and these relationships are often based onyears of mutual effort and personal trust. Creasey describesthe park as the hub of a much larger network of communityand regional partners. He defines his success by how effectivethe NPS is in enabling the success of key partners. But wewere also reminded that afternoon in the Wannalancit Millthat partnerships, even those that appear most successful, onlyremain strong and durable if the partners can work throughthe inevitable leadership and organizational transitions thatoccur. This is not easy, particularly for the government part-ner.

Back in the early 1990s, I spent a year at Lowell NationalHistorical Park as acting superintendent, and I still havefriends among the staff there. But I quickly sense that the parkis in some way fundamentally different, and the shift becomesa little clearer that evening after dinner when the commissionis entertained by the Angkor Dance Troupe. Lowell has thesecond largest Southeast Asian population in America, and theAngkor Dance Troupe, an intergenerational organization basedat the park’s Patrick Mogan Cultural Center, is performing intraditional Cambodian dress.The troupe’s director is DueyKol, a capable and efferves-cent young Cambodian-American woman who alsohappens to be, in her dayjob, a national park ranger.The NPS in Lowell has takenits relationship with theCambodian community and

other underserved populations to a deeper level. The nationalpark is accomplishing this by engaging young people, firstwith programs and then with jobs. Former NPS director RogerKennedy once said, “Resource protection has to walk out ofthe park in the heart of the visitor.” The values of the park areenhanced when they are also perceived as being part of a larg-er set of cultural and community values. Park constituenciesare created and strengthened not only from visits and recre-ational experiences but also through community cooperation,service, and reciprocity.

Mammoth Hot Springs It is January and deep winter in Yellowstone National Park.The function room in the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel ispacked for the third meeting of the Second Century Commis-sion. It is warm inside, but outside the temperature is tenbelow and it is snowing. For those of us who work in smallernational parks, Yellowstone seems like a country unto itself.Stealing a glance out the historic hotel’s windows is a quickreminder of the scale of this landscape.

Our venue is particularly fitting, because this commissionmeeting will be largely focused on landscape-scale conserva-tion. The relative isolation of national parks in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, a characteristic of their original ruralsettings, is over. An invited panel of scientists, academics, andresource managers reminds the commission that even largenational parks such as Yellowstone cannot adequately protectand manage wildlife that crosses boundaries with regularity.National parks, small and large, are only a part of much largerecosystems.

The panel members describe how landscape fragmentationand habitat encroachment are accelerating throughout the

American West. In thegreater Yellowstone ecosys-tem, the statistics are partic-ularly alarming. From 1990to 2007, there was a 62%population increase and acorresponding 350% increasein developed land. Manylarge tracts of private openland, farmed and ranched for generations, are beingbroken up into rural subdi-visions and “ranchettes.” Theimpact of these trends onbiodiversity is all too clear.

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Minerva terrace and springs,

Mammoth Hot Springs.

Photograph courtesy of the

National Park Service.

In recent years, parks have lost up to 40% of their wildlife. While consensus is relatively easy to reach on defining the

challenges, agreeing on the right approach to landscape-scaleconservation is more elusive. The panelists stress the impor-tance of using sound science and research in planning andpolicy development. Several urge the commission to recom-mend stronger federal interagency coordination and moreconsistency – particularly in a region like the Greater Yellow-stone ecosystem where the national park is part of a mosaic of federal lands. Others make the case that, given the vastnessof these larger landscapes surrounding parks and preserves,conservation has to become a shared objective for stakeholdersthroughout the region. They encourage the commission tostrengthen the capacity of the NPS and partners to work coop-eratively with land trusts, private landowners, and local gov-ernments. Stephanie Meeks, a former executive of The NatureConservancy, summed it up this way: “We have learned that wecannot do conservation around these communities or forthem; conservation will be successful only when consideredand undertaken with them.”

We have a guided field trip out to Norris Geyser Basin andthe Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in a couple of snowcoaches that the park owns and operates. When we enter theNorris overlook, one of our coaches throws a track. We file outof our disabled vehicle, trying to ignore the freezing tempera-tures, and a park interpreter gamely tries to redirect our atten-tion to the magnificent geyser field before us. It’s a long wayback to Mammoth, and we keep glancing over our shoulders atour NPS drivers, who are examining the damage. As it turnsout, our drivers not only operate these complex machines butalso know how to repair them, even in the field. So with some ingenuity, they do just that – while we are treated to anextended talk on Yellowstone geology. As we gratefully climbback on board the repaired coach, I am reminded how muchwe depend on experienced, professional NPS staff who know alot – about a lot of things. On the return trip, I sit next to ourdriver and learn that he is not only a snow coach driver andmechanic but also a plow and a backhoe operator, backcountrycarpenter, and forest firefighter. Not a job I would outsource.

Little Round TopThe fourth meeting of the Second Century Commission takesus to the rolling Pennsylvania countryside of GettysburgNational Military Park. We follow commissioner James

McPherson, Princeton professor and preeminent Civil Warscholar, to the summit of Little Round Top. On this earlyspring day in March, we look over hallowed ground as far asthe eye can see. Jim has given this tour countless times, but hisgreat passion for this place and its many stories has each oneof us transfixed.

The day before, the commissioners reflected on their expe-riences with the national parks. Like McPherson on LittleRound Top, each had an emotional connection to the nationalparks they knew. One commissioner said that the nationalpark system represents “an uncommon commitment to agreater public good,” and the “immersion in something funda-mentally important to being a human being.” They all seemedto agree that as the nation’s portfolio of parks has expanded insize, diversity, and complexity, the imprint of parks on thepublic life of the nation has been expanded as well. Thenational park system has become a much larger civic endeavor,assuming a higher public purpose than envisioned by itsfounders in 1916.

This change is evident in the new visitor center, a partner-ship project of the national park and the private GettysburgFoundation. For the first time, the stories of postwar reconcili-ation and battlefield reunions are told in the larger context ofreconstruction, segregation, and African-American disenfran-chisement. The visitor center exhibits, together with NPS edu-cational programming, represent a seismic shift in the way theNPS interprets the Civil War. What we see at Gettysburg is theculmination of a concerted system-wide initiative begun in1997, when superintendents of Civil War sites decided toembrace the very best current scholarship and introduce thecauses and consequences of the war into their interpretativeprograms. In a larger sense, what we are seeing at work atGettysburg is the national park system’s potential in its nextcentury to help people find broader context and meaning inthe world around them.

From my vantage point on Little Round Top I have started toreflect on a few of the lessons I have gleaned so far in myNational Parks journey from California to Pennsylvania:

• National parks serve all Americans. We have seen in parks,such as Santa Monica and Lowell, a vigorous commitment tobroadening engagement with diverse communities and demo-graphic groups who have not been traditional park users.Ultimately these efforts can make our parks increasingly acces-sible, welcoming, and relevant. In this regard, I rememberfilmmaker Ken Burns describing the national parks to thecommissioners as a “regenerative force” in the twenty-firstcentury. In a similar vein, the author Barry Lopez has written

of national parks in the context of helping people live “decentand dignified lives.”• People’s connections with their national parks are changingin fundamental ways. Traditional patterns of use, from episod-ic school field trips to annual family vacations, are being aug-mented by a higher level of sustained engagement. There aremore youth service learning programs, like Santa Monica’sEcoHelpers initiative; more park and school collaborations,such as the All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventories at Great SmokyMountains and the Civic Collaborative at Lowell; more public-private alliances, like the Greater Yellowstone Coalition; morefriends groups serving individual parks; and a growing uni-verse of community and philanthropic partnerships – theGettysburg Foundation, for example.• This journey has reinvigorated my appreciation for beingpart of a system. People suggest that the NPS often behaveslike a loose confederation. We have seen, however, what can beachieved when the NPS and its partners act cohesively. Thecoordinated efforts of Civil War park superintendents is anotable example. There is great power in sharing ideas, inno-vations, and experiences. There is a particularly urgent need toreinvigorate international park exchange programs at a time ofgreat global environmental stress on protected areas.• Horace Albright, the legendary NPS director, when he wasnearing retirement, cautioned his staff: “Do not let the Servicebecome just another government bureau.” Today, the effects ofgrowing centralized control, standardization, and privatizationare threatening to bring about precisely what Albright warnedagainst. It would be ironic if, in the name of efficiency, compe-tition, and risk avoidance, we undermine the very relation-ships with long-term private-sector partners so vital to thesuccess of each park the commission visited.

As the National Parks Second Century Commission headsinto its final meeting at Great Smokey Mountains NationalPark and prepares its recommendations to the American peo-ple, the “national-park idea” is once again being reinterpretedand reinvigorated for the times we live in, as it should be.Commissioner Milton Chen, early in this journey, made theobservation that “national parks build human capital.” My ownhope is that national parks will continue to appeal to our bestinstincts: love for the American landscape; respect for natureand the lessons of history; and the possibility that, throughacts of intentional conservation and stewardship, we mightraise the bar on our responsibilities to each other and theworld around us. – Rolf Diamant

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Acadia National Park

Like the vast deserts of the West, the mountainouscoast of Maine was viewed in the nineteenth centuryas an untouched wilderness, even though it had beenwell trodden and physically altered by native Indianpopulations. Scattered travelers and government

expeditions were overwhelmed by the ruggedness and aus-terity of the landscape, and their appreciation for what wemight call the American Picturesque ultimately led to thecreation of the national parks. Artists found these coastalviews particularly uplifting when they were enhanced by thedramatic rhythms of rough surf and spectacular sunsets.

Landscapes painted by pioneer artists visiting Maine’sMount Desert Island as early as the 1830s attracted urbandwellers to these regions. The summer colonies grew tosuch proportions later in the century that they threatenedidyllic views, and wealthy, established summer residentstook measures to preserve the landscape. The eventualresult, the 35,000-acre Acadia National Park, incorporatesmost of the landmark mountains that sweep down to the sea(the “sleeping giants” recorded by artists), as well as the tipof Schoodic Peninsula across Frenchman Bay and some off-shore islands, including Isle au Haut, in the Atlantic Ocean.

The park’s name also recalls the earlier French claim onthis region as a colony extending from Maine into thecoastal regions of Eastern Canada – the “Acadian land” withthe “forest primeval” made famous by Longfellow’s poem“Evangeline.” The Portuguese explorer Esteban Gomez wasthe earliest European to enter Mount Desert’s Somes Sound,sailing from Spain in 1525 in search of the Northwest Pas-sage to the Pacific. But in 1604 the French navigator Samuelde Champlain became the first to chart the island, acting onbehalf of Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Monts, who had a royalland grant from Henry IV for “La Cadie,” the Indian namemeaning “The Place.” Champlain named the island l’Isle desMonts Desert, the island of barren mountains. Their silhou-ettes form an undulating landmark when seen from the sea.

A decade ago, Pamela J. Belanger, Curator of Nineteenth-Century American Art at the Farnsworth Art Museum inRockland, Maine, mounted an engaging exhibition entitled“Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert.” Inthe catalogue, Belanger and other essayists documented themigration of the Hudson River school painters to coastalMaine and placed their work in the social, cultural, and aes-thetic context that explained the popularity of their exhibi-tions in cities, where they were viewed as vicarious voyagesinto seemingly uncharted territories.

Artists often manipulated scenes by adding symbolic tracesof human settlement – deserted houses or abandoned boats –that further enticed viewers by placing them psychologicallywithin the frame. On the whole, though, the painters accurate-ly portrayed the lone lighthouses, scattered islands, and rockyheadlands under violet-streaked skies. Then, as now, a patientgaze was required to capture the subtle and transitory atmos-pheric changes that altered one’s perception of the Mainelandscape.

Thomas Cole and his student Frederic E. Church wereprominent among the artists who made expeditions to theisland. The two often painted the same scenes – images thathave since become iconic views of Acadia. Both Cole’s SandyBeach, Mount Desert Island, Me. of 1844 and Church’s Coast atMount Desert Island (Sand Beach) of about 1850 capture the con-trast between jutting boulders of pink granite and the onlysmooth sand on the island. Cole’s 1845 scenes of waves crash-ing against rocks in Frenchman Bay and Church’s sunsetpaintings of the 1950s are testaments to the extraordinaryartistic response inspired by Mount Desert Island.

Cadillac Mountain, the highest on the island, figured fre-quently among the painters’ subjects, and Sanford RobinsonGifford even places an artist sketching on a rocky perch at itssummit, looking out toward the horizon. In 1896, ChildeHassam portrayed the mountain in an Impressionistic hazefrom the vantage of Frenchman Bay.

While most artists worked on land, Fitz Hugh Lane paintedand sketched on ship deck, capturing statuesque masts andsails and luminous effects on water. His 1852 Entrance of SomesSound from Southwest Harbor depicts the deep channel of waterformed during the ice age there, the only fjord on the EastCoast and the location in the 1770s of the first permanentcolonial settlement on the island. Very little had changedwhen Richard Estes painted “A View of Somes Sound” in 1995,more than one hundred and forty years later, and that was theprincipal point of the show – the scenic experience of Mainehas been preserved.

Once a wilderness area is engaged by man, it ceases to be in anatural state. Its future hangs between those who fight to pro-tect it for its beauty and the encroachments of civilization. By1900, fearing the consequences of the latter, Charles W. Eliot,president of Harvard University and a summer resident ofNortheast Harbor, took his case for conservation to local vil-lage improvement societies. These societies, which still existtoday, were already establishing and protecting Maine’s wood-

land and mountain trails. Realizing that his mission requiredan entity with funds to purchase land, he followed the adviceof his landscape architect son, Charles Eliot Jr. and in 1901formed the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations(HCTPR) with himself as president and his Boston friendGeorge D. Dorr as director. Dorr was a fortunate selection;until his death in 1944, he devoted his entire life and financialresources to establishing and maintaining the park.

When the Maine legislature withdrew the charter of theHCTPR in 1913, Dorr, with undimmed determination, soughtgovernment protection in Washington. Although he made hisapproach at a difficult stage of World War I, on July 8, 1916,President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation establishingthe Sieur de Monts National Monument. Only weeks later, onAugust 25, the National Park Service was founded, and Dorrgrasped the opportunity to designate Mount Desert’s conser-vation areas a national park. With political savvy, he supportedthe name Lafayette National Park for a country currentlydefending France, and the park was established by an act ofCongress on February 26, 1919. The name was changed toAcadia National Park in 1929.

This story is well told by Ann Rockefeller Roberts in herbook Mr. Rockefeller’s Roads: The Untold Story of Acadia’sCarriage Roads & Their Creator. In 1908 her grandfather John D. Rockefeller Jr., then in his twenties, first came to MountDesert with his young family. Eventually he would donate11,000 acres to the park, almost one-third of its territory.“Between 1913 and 1940, a period of twenty-seven years,”Roberts writes, “my grandfather designed and constructedfifty-seven miles of carriage roads on Mount Desert Island,Maine, as part of his effort to offer the public a way to experi-ence nature.” He was undoubtedly inspired by his father, whohad built carriage roads on his New York and Ohio properties.

A major feat of landscape architecture, engineering, andconstruction, the carriage roads also opened possibilities forarchitecture that complemented the natural settings. In therustic stone bridges – no two alike – that pass over vehicularroads and span streams and deep ravines, Roberts sees a con-nection to a European countryside of the past. Even the gate-houses at the carriage road entrances were designed toresemble French hunting lodges by the New York architectGrosvenor Atterbury, who had already built a barn complex onRockefeller’s estate in Tarrytown, New York, in the style of eighteenth-century French nobility.

For advice on landscaping the carriage roads, Rockefellerturned to landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand, who lived atReef Point in Bar Harbor and was also designing “The Eyrie,”the Rockefeller’s garden at their home in Seal Harbor. In thelate 1920s Rockefeller and Farrand would drive through the

16

park in a four-wheeled buckboard carriage to inspect theplantings. Farrand responded to these outings with closelytyped “Road Notes,” offering advice in her usual direct lan-guage and listing her suggestions for appropriate trees andplants – sweet fern, wild roses, sumac, goldenrod, and bushblueberry – along with directions for how and where to plantthem. In a note of November 4, 1930, she wrote:

On the south and west sides of the road opposite the viewyoung spruce should be used, and later on, as pitch pine isavailable. The north slope of the hill could be graduallyplanted with these giving a splendid Chinese effect to thissuperb northern prospect. These pitch pine will neverintrude on the view any more than they do on the ShoreDrive where they add a great picturesqueness to the posi-tion.

Throughout these notes, she urged Rockefeller “to vary theroad planting in height and quality and type of material, as these varieties are usually shown in natural growth.” Whenher directions were not followed, she expressed displeasure, particularly when trees were planted in straight lines. Suchmoments, however, were infrequent. She wrote to Rockefellerin 1933, “Again I want to thank you for the way in which you are so consistently upholding my judgments and helping withthe ease of carrying on the work to which I look forward asone of the great pleasures ofthe Island days.” Certainly hetook pleasure in the results:“For the first time [I] couldunderstand why you are sopartial to wild cherries andpear trees. The blossoms cer-tainly are lovely.”

Every six months, Mrs.Farrand forwarded a detailedaccounting of the number of drives, days in the field,office consultations, andstenography hours. With a few exceptions, the amountowed was always the same:“No charge.” Rockefeller, ofcourse, was deeply apprecia-tive and enjoyed their team-work “in the public interest”

for the “beautification of Acadia National Park.” “I do not knowwhen I have spent an entire half day in so carefree and enjoy-able a manner as last Sunday afternoon,” he wrote in May 1929,early on in their long road correspondence. “To feel that Icould talk as frankly as I did about park matters, with the per-fect assurance that nothing that was said would go further,added much to my satisfaction and sense of freedom in thetalk.”

The collaboration was a close and dedicated one. In 1941, atthe season’s end, the two tried unsuccessfully to make a ren-dezvous for a final carriage ride up Day Mountain. Rockefellerresponded with the courtly congeniality that characterizedtheir rapport. “Whatever happens to the world,” he wrote, “DayMountain will be standing next summer and I much hope wecan drive up it then.” Throughout their long association, how-ever, neither abandoned a formality and reserve instinctive tothem both. One August, Mrs. Farrand wrote: “It was only withwhat I thought great self-control that I passed you the otherday on your way homeward from an evidently brisk walk. Iwanted to stop and say how do you do to you and to tell youwhat a pleasure it has been to work over the lodges and theirsurroundings.” Horticulturists on the Island have observedwhat may still be traces of her handiwork in such selections asthe American bittersweet (Celastrus scandens) around thebridges that serve as overpasses for the carriage roads.

Today, no sooner does a visitor drive over the causeway con-necting the mainland to the twelve- by fourteen-mile islandthan cedar signs appear with directions for entering parkroads. During my summers in Maine, I always begin with thesweep of the Ocean Drive, a segment of the circular park roadthat begins just outside the town of Bar Harbor and offersimmediate access to the landscapes made famous by nine-teenth-century artists.

The sand beach of Cole and Church may be densely popu-lated with bathers on a good day, but one can still appreciateits curved outcropping of granite and the nearby rock chasmsthat invite the crashing waves. The road passes by Otter Creek,where Church painted a lone figure on a rocky beach, and pro-ceeds along coves and inlets, the view opening out to the glit-tering sea with bobbing lobster buoys before coming undercover of woodland. In one of Beatrix Farrand’s letters to JohnD. Rockefeller Jr. she wrote, “May I add that the Ocean Driveseems to me to be a real masterpiece.” (The best view ofFrenchman Bay and the Porcupine Islands is, in fact, fromShore Path, the public walkway along the coast just behindFarrand’s Reef Point property back in Bar Harbor.)

At the heart of the park, the Abbe Museum, filled with localIndian artifacts, maintains its original Spanish ColonialRevival building, now complemented by larger premises in BarHarbor. The Sieur de Monts Spring covered with a Florentine-style canopy near the museum in the park was dedicated byDorr to the man who established “New France” in NorthAmerica. Further on, the Wild Gardens of Acadia bring anassortment of native plants to the public eye in a very straight-forward arrangement.

Driving across the island, one observes clusters of carsparked here and there; their owners have taken to the trailsthroughout the park. These paths are beautifully maintainedand clearly marked, making it difficult to lose one’s way. All ofthe park roads lead to Mount Cadillac. From its heights, onecan see expansive views of the sea, the distant hills, and theisland’s unusual rock formations, which derive from its com-plex geological origins.

There is nothing more suggestive of future possibilitiesthan a Maine sunrise seen from the peak of Mount Cadillac,when the first gleam of light pours over a watery horizon andturns the world into a blush of pink. In that quiet momentunder a streaked sky, time appears to expand into timeless-ness. It was moments like this that inspired a generation ofpainters to make palpable the wonders of the Maine landscapeand benefactors to preserve the experience for future genera-tions. – Paula Deitz

Parts of this essay are based on earlier ones by the author that have appeared elsewhere. 17

Otter Cliff, Acadia National Park.

Photograph courtesy of the

National Park Service Digital Image

Archives.

Place Maker

Henriette Granville Suhr, Garden Creator

It is the last day of April, and my friend Marge Sullivan andI are trying to keep up with Henriette Granville Suhr, theenergetic proprietor of Rocky Hills, who has offered to giveus a personal tour of the thirteen-acre garden she and herlate husband created on the steep declivities of their prop-

erty in Westchester County. As she describes the bramblyovergrowth that covered the site when they bought it in the1960s, she points with her walking cane to first one area andthen another. Carpeting the ground is a pale blue wash offorget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvaticus). “They spread everywhere,and we like that, so we don’t try to contain them in one spot,”Suhr explains. Their unchecked abundance puts me in mindof what another gardening friend of mine, Lynden Miller,calls such happy horticultur-al riotousness: “careless rapture.”

Our progress through thegarden is punctuated by sev-eral pauses. Each one is fol-lowed by a comment: thatgroup of tulips did well lastyear but doesn’t look quiteright this time around; theferns declined here after aparticular tree fell down andhad to be replaced by a moresun-loving species; overthere are some new irisesbut she is still trying todecide what to plant nextyear just beyond them. Myeye travels up the sharply rising slopes to the edges of thegarden. There are great embankments of huge old rhododen-drons and numerous kinds of azaleas. Above are some verytall conifers that loosely enclose the property while screeningthe road and neighboring houses.

Within the garden are several botanical rarities, gifts toSuhr from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) when itclosed its Westchester County research center twenty years

ago. Among them are a group of magnolias developed to thrive in this climate zone. Like other hybrid botanical speci-mens, the magnolias have honorific variety names as well asspecies names. “That one is Elizabeth, and over there is Judy,”Suhr says, referring to Elizabeth Scholtz and Judy Zuk, twowidely-esteemed former presidents of the BBG. At Rocky Hillssuch arboretum specimens are never merely showcased; theyare planted in logical groupings that meld into an overalllandscape composition. After we have passed through themagnolia grove, Suhr’s cane rises a few feet off the ground asshe points out how small a particular tree was when it was firstplanted. It now towers overhead. Life and death, growth anddecay – these themes are the subtext of this garden story.

Suhr’s own story is as remarkable as the garden’s, and onethat has demanded the same kind of innate resilience andability to turn radical change into opportunity and good for-tune. Born in Vienna, she moved with her parents and sister toParis in 1938 and then in 1941 to the United States. In Paris she

attended Parsons Paris Schoolof Design, and she credits theschool’s American affiliationwith her ability to land a job atMacy’s upon her arrival in this country. Because furniturestyles were often sketchedrather than photographed inthose days, I am curious toknow whether her drawingability was an advantage inplanning the garden at RockyHills. “No,” she says emphati-cally, “I never designed anypart of the garden on paperbecause I think in three dimen-sions. Instead I walk aroundand ask myself what needs to

be planted and what needs to be removed to make it interest-ing – both in a horticultural sense and as a whole landscape.”

Suhr’s job at Macy’s was followed by a brief stint at Lord &Taylor, and then in 1949 she was hired by Bloomingdale’schairman Jed Davidson to run the department store’s decorat-

ing department, serve as a fashion coordinator, and – in whatturned out to be the most important part of her job descrip-tion – design model rooms to display furniture. BecauseDavidson was more interested in furniture retailing than fash-ion merchandising, Suhr’s imagination was given free rein.With his support she went on to do nothing less than revolu-tionize the way Americans went about decorating their homes.

Suhr suggested that Bloomingdale’s display its towelsaccording to colors rather than brands, a change that led man-ufacturers to offer what she calls a rainbow array. This allowedcustomers a wider range of choice and thus more creativity intheir bathroom decor. It perhaps sounds trivial today, but thiswas at the time a merchandising revolution. Yet, Suhr’s greatercontribution to home style was the design of model roomsthat were changed four times a year. So popular did thesebecome with shoppers – whether they were planning to buyfurniture or not – that each season’s new display was greetedwith the same anticipation as the opening of a play onBroadway.

It is hard now to remember that in those days, long beforecraft items from countries around the world were being soldby mass-market retailers, shawls and throw pillows from Indiaor a mirror frame from Provence would have been novelties increating the ambience of a room. Her contract with Bloom-ingdale’s allowed Suhr to travel two months out of the year;during these forays – usually in the company of her husbandWilliam, a noted art conservator known to one and all as Billy – she quickly developed an eye for spotting just the rightaccents for her upcoming display rooms.

More important than these inspired touches, however, wasSuhr’s embrace of the new when modern art, architecture, andfurnishings were just coming into their own in the postwarera. Bloomingdale’s became the first place in America to sellthe furniture of Finn Juhl, the distinguished Danish designer.Suhr’s “At Home with Scandinavian Design” display room in1957 was one of the harbingers of the more relaxed style ofcontemporary living long championed by industrial designerRussel Wright and textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen. (LikeSuhr, both Wright and Larsen allowed their genius as moderndesigners to spill over into the garden [see Site/Lines, vol. 1, no. 1].) Today Larsen, her friend for over fifty years, says, “Hen-riette had such a light, deft hand in creating change withimagination and authority. She was illustrating an easier newlifestyle and at the same time teaching us connoisseurship.”

This combination of a casual, unpretentious, modernlifestyle with connoisseurship was revelatory to those who

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were invited to the Suhrs’ dinner parties in their simple, plain(except for accents of color, craft objects, and some works of art), eminently livable country house. No one else back thenserved smoked salmon, European cheeses, and fine wines from Bordeaux. But the luncheons and dinners at Rocky Hills were given not to impress but to educate. The guests wereoften the conservators who worked with Billy Suhr at the FrickCollection or people like Larsen who were part of Henriette’sworld of interior design. “What we were really learning therewas civilization,” Larsen recalls.

If Rocky Hills is a living work of art, Henriette Suhr’s pas-sion is fired by the garden’s continual change, with all theopportunities for reconfiguration that this implies. Suhr saysthat if there were such a thing as unalterable perfection, shewould probably stop being a gardener. Always in a state oftransformation, Rocky Hills is for her a reservoir of memory,an ongoing activity, and a challenging area for future horticul-tural creativity and experimentation.

Fortunately, Suhr has found a way to extend the garden’slife beyond her own. The Garden Conservancy has made Rocky Hills one of its preservation projects, meaning that theconservancy is working closely with Suhr and the WestchesterCounty Department of Parks, Recreation and Conservation(the garden’s future proprietor) to ensure that it will be a placeto educate garden enthusiasts in years to come. In this way itwill follow the paradigm of Wave Hill, the remarkable gardenin Riverdale created by Suhr’s friend and mentor Marco PoloStufano on the twenty-eight-acre estate that the Perkins-Freeman family deeded to the New York City Department ofParks in 1960. It goes without saying that those charged withtaking care of Rocky Hills will have to cope with increased vis-itation and raise operational funds to staff and support thegarden, if they are to maintain the level of horticultural excel-lence that Suhr and Timothy Tilghman, her talented head gardener, now provide. Something impossible to provide willbe Suhr’s own gardening taste and creative genius. As withLongHouse, Jack Larsen’s East Hampton garden, which is nowoperated by its own not-for-profit corporation, the hope mustlie in a future gardener having the imagination and willing-ness to experiment with new ideas. As Larsen says, “Gardensare not still lifes. They are never static arrangements butalways changing.” – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

The National Parks,America’s Best Idea (PBS, 2009)A Film by Ken Burns

Ken Burns refers to himselfas “an emotional archaeolo-gist,” and for the past sixyears he has wielded his cin-ematic spade to excavate thehistory of America’s nationalparks. The result is a six-pro-gram, twelve-hour epic, TheNational Parks, America’s BestIdea, scheduled to air thisfall on PBS. As is the casewith many of Burns’s docu-mentaries, it will be accom-panied by a book, DVD, andextensive educational web-site.

This new series is Burns’smost engaging work sincehis remarkable The Civil War,broadcast nineteen years agoon public television, whichattracted 14 million viewerson the first night and 40million total by the end ofthe five-part series – thelargest audience ever for thePBS network at that time.The National Parks showsBurns at his best, reflectinghis thirty years’ experienceproducing documentaries asdiverse as Frank Lloyd Wright(1998) and The War (2007). Intypical fashion, he drawsupon the expertise of a dis-

tinguished group of advisors,including historians WilliamLeuchtenburg, Alfred Runte,Paul Schullery, and WilliamCronon, to explore the roleof the national parks inshaping American identity.

American identity hasbeen Burns’s principal pre-occupation throughout hiscareer. In this new series, hepresents the creation of thenational parks as an expres-sion of democratic values as radical as the Declarationof Independence, pointingout that our country’s mostremarkable natural land-scapes and significant his-toric sites are owned not byroyalty or the rich but by theAmerican people. As he didin his American trilogy, TheCivil War, Baseball, and Jazz,Burns focuses on the valuesand experiences that uniteus rather than on those thatdivide us. He once remarkedin an interview, “there ismore Unum than Pluribus inmy work.”

Burns’s previous docu-mentaries do not avoid thedark shadows of Americanhistory, however, and in TheNational Parks he returns to

these realities again andagain: the eviction of NativeAmericans from their lands,the wanton slaughter ofwildlife, the destruction ofnatural resources for short-term profit, the indifferenceof Congress towards thesenational treasures, and thedegradation of the parks’beauty by concessionairesand visitors. Yet his overalltreatment of 150 years of thehistory of the parks is anoptimistic celebration of thefundamental democratic val-ues embodied in the nation-al parks’ vision. The series’subtitle, America’s Best Idea isa bit of hyperbole (I wouldvote for the Constitution),but it expresses the tenor ofthe series.

Burns has not departedfrom the basic film styleunveiled for PBS viewers inhis 1982 program on theBrooklyn Bridge and refinedin his later documentaries.He blends the classicHollywood narrative style of a John Ford, whom heacknowledges as an influ-ence, with incisive voice-overs. Numerous archivalphotos, which are skillfullypanned, zoomed, or tilted,are intercut with newsreelsand home movies andaccompanied by emotionallycharged music, from popularsongs to hymns. Burns alsoincludes readings from the letters, diaries, and con-temporary publications of

historical figures, but heavoids docudrama’s gim-micky use of actors to depictthem on screen. Skillful edit-ing creates a well-paced nar-rative that keeps us engagedthrough abrupt contrasts,foreshadowing, flashbacks,and informed expert and laycommentary.

Filmmaking is teamwork,and for The National ParksBurns has assembled agroup of individuals whohave worked with him togreat advantage on earlierprojects. The excellent scriptof historian and filmmakerDayton Duncan, Burns’scoproducer, skillfully com-plements the artistry of chiefeditor Paul Barnes and theexquisite 16-mm cinematog-raphy of Buddy Squires. Thisensemble of talent has pro-duced a masterful, carefullyresearched popular historyof the parks, employing thepower of film to stir emo-tions and to enliven historythrough narrative suspenseand resolution. The film’suse of broad themes andpersonal narratives enables itto reach a wider audiencethan the more analytical andcomprehensive scholarshipof professional academics,who often emphasizeabstract economic or socialtrends. Burns has correctly

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Television Review

characterized himself as akind of Homeric bard tellingstories around an electroniccampfire of millions of indi-vidual television sets.

The sweep of Burns’schronological narrativeencompasses the early parkmovement of the mid- tolater-nineteenth centuryunder the leadership ofFrederick Law Olmsted Sr.and, later, John Muir; thesetting aside of state andfederal land for scenic parksin the late-nineteenth andearly-twentieth centuries; the establishment of theNational Park Service in 1916to manage the emerging system; and the rapid expan-sion of the system underFranklin Roosevelt’s admin-istration to include addi-tional historic sites andmonuments. The documen-tary continues with the post-World War II increase andupgrading of the parks sys-tem under the Mission 66initiative; the postwaremphasis on including morenotable historic sites; theapplication of rigorous sci-entific knowledge to parkmanagement policies in thelatter part of the twentiethcentury; and the extension ofthe system into urban areas.It concludes with the lastmajor expansion of the sys-tem, the incorporation offederal lands in Alaska dur-ing the Carter administra-

tion. This last initiative, end-ing in 1980, more than dou-bled the park system’sacreage to a grand total ofabout 83 million acres, com-prising 54 national parks and291 additional “units,”including national historicsites, national monuments,and national seashores.

The spine of this far-ranging narrative consists ofthe stories of the creation of the individual places ofthe park system – its large scenic wonders likeYosemite,Yellowstone, and CraterLake, and smaller historicsites like Mesa Verde and theLincoln Memorial. Thesestories often highlight rela-tively little known individu-als who played a major partin establishing or protectingthe parks, such as GeorgeMasa, a Japanese immigrantwhose photographs were animportant aid in the struggleto protect Great SmokyMountains National Parkfrom the timber industry;Marjory Stoneman Douglas,a journalist and author whocrusaded for the establish-ment of the Florida Ever-glades as a national park;and George MelendezWright, a park ranger whoadvocated for the protectionand scientific managementof wildlife throughout the

park system, including thereintroduction of wolves.

Perhaps the most power-ful contributor to the docu-mentary, however, is thelandscape itself, which is cap-tured here with by far thebest cinematography of anyof Burns’s works. In a fewshots, especially those of themagnificent Grand Canyonof the Yellowstone River, thecolor correction is a bit exag-gerated, but this is a minorflaw. Burns and his produc-tion team have gone to extra-ordinary lengths to filmlandscapes and animals at all seasons, under the mostfavorablelighting con-ditions.Often thecameraremainsfixed on abeautifullycomposedscene, allow-ing us thefreedom toscan andabsorb itsdetails.

Individualcommenta-tors supple-ment thishistory withinsightfulobservations,often sharingtheir ownexperience ofthe parks.

Their words give the docu-mentary a welcome intimacy.Park ranger Shelton John-son’s descriptions of hisexperiences of nature inYellowstone and Yosemiteare especially powerful.Historian William Crononprovides nuanced commen-tary on such issues as policydisagreements betweenpreservationists who wouldset aside the parks as sacredspaces (John Muir, for exam-ple) and conservationists (forinstance, Gifford Pinchot),who advocate for intelligentmanagement of their naturalresources. Environmentalist

Terry Tempest Williamsreminds us of the restorativepower of scenic beauty, andDayton Duncan illuminatesthe development of the parkidea over time.

Burns studiously avoidssimplistic partisanship whenpresenting controversialissues and invites us to makeup our own minds. Was itright to dam Yosemite’sHetch Hetchy Valley to pro-vide San Francisco with amuch-needed water supply?Did Theodore Rooseveltoverstep the bounds of exec-utive privilege when heinvoked the Antiquities Act

to dramatically enlarge thepark system withoutCongressional approval? Thescroll of issues constantlyunrolls.

A series of recurringthemes also unifies thistwelve-hour epic. Theseinclude the role of dedicatedand visionary individuals increating and protecting theparks, the constant threat tothe parks of rapacious com-mercial interests, the effectof different modes of trans-portation in providing accessto the parks, the reformula-tion of the park idea by vari-ous generations, and thechallenges of dealing with anever-expanding park system.Additional themes includethe controversies over theacquisition of parklandbetween local or state inter-ests and the federal govern-ment and the paradoxicalmission of the National ParkService to make the parksreadily accessible while alsopreserving them for futuregenerations. ThroughoutBurns reminds us that theway we treat our parks hasserved as a mirror of our-selves as a people, reflectingus as both sensitive stewardsof the landscape and short-sighted despoilers of ourpriceless heritage.

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A man and woman lounge on Eagle

Rock in Yosemite National Park,

circa 1902. Photo courtesy of

Library of Congress, Prints and

Photographs Division.

Burns’s first four pro-grams emphasize the historyof the parks to 1933, leavingonly the last two programs todeal with the complex periodfrom Roosevelt’s New Deal tothe Carter administration.Without a doubt much ofthe most engaging personalnarrative material is in theearly history – John Muir’snature mysticism and hiscomplex relationship withTheodore Roosevelt; the fas-cinating arc of Roosevelt’sdevelopment from colorfulhunter sportsman into a pas-sionate parks advocate; thepathos of Steven T. Mather,the Park Service’s dynamicfirst director, who cured hisbouts of deep depression byimmersing himself in thepark landscapes he was striv-ing so ardently to acquireand preserve. However, withonly two programs to coverthe period from 1933 to 1980,Burns is forced to touch a bit lightly on key issues ofthe Carter administration,especially the question ofwhether the rapid growth ofthe park system during the1970s and ’80s should becontinued or slowed.

A more extended treat-ment of recent thinking onthe role of parks in thetwenty-first century wouldalso have been a valuableaddition. Near the end of thelast program, Terry TempestWilliams introduces the sub-

ject by suggesting that atpresent we should attend torestoring our existing parksto their former excellence.True to his approach, Burnsleaves it to us to reflect onthis issue. However, a fewmore opinions from some oftoday’s creative thinkers on the subject, such as ParkService veteran Jon Jarvis,recently nominated byPresident Obama to be thenew director, and Dwight T.Pitcaithley, retired chief his-torian of the Park Service,would serve as a useful cata-lyst.

Coincidentally, on the dayI completed this review, twostories in the New York Timeswere devoted to our nationalparks. One report highlight-ed a recent controversy overelk hunting in TheodoreRoosevelt National Park inNorth Dakota; the otherfocused on the stealing ofrocks by tourists in AcadiaNational Park as a seriousproblem marring the land-scape. It is to be hoped thatsome of the individualsinvolved as well as membersof Congress will gatheraround the electronic cam-pfire this fall to partake ofBurns’s outstanding epichistory of our remarkablenational parks. – Reuben Rainey

Memorial

Hal Rothman and National Park HistoryHal Rothman, who died in 2007 at the age offorty-eight, was one of the best known envi-ronmental historians in the field. He was atrenchant analyst of the cultural effects oftourism (Devil’s Bargains, 1998), and hebecame a national expert on the history ofLas Vegas, a city he had made his own aftermoving there in the 1990s (see NeonMetropolis, 2002). Reporters and commenta-tors frequently sought him out when per-plexed by the quirky complexities of thatcity. But Rothman began his career writingnational park histories – some paid for bythe National Park Service – and invigoratedthe field in the process, raising the academicand critical standards of such work even ashe became better known for his other books.

Opinionated and brilliant, Rothmanshook up the staid world of military andadministrative historians he encountered at the National ParkService in the 1980s. He had little patience for the shibbolethsand platitudes that characterized much writing on the parksbefore then, and his first book, Preserving Different Pasts: TheAmerican National Monuments (1989), set a standard and some-thing of a pattern for his approach. The national monumentswere a particularly apt subject for Rothman in this regard.While Congress legislated parks into existence, presidentsestablished national monuments by executive action, as autho-rized through the 1906 Antiquities Act. The early nationalmonuments were created to protect archeological ruins,unique geological features, and other sites of “scientific value”in the western public domain. Devil’s Tower in Wyoming,declared a national monument in 1906, is prototypical.

But Rothman also argued that the untold story of thenational monuments revealed “the story of federal preserva-tion from inside the government.” He maintained that, sincethey were the products of executive rather than legislativeaction, government intentions for this “inside” form of preser-vation were more plainly discernable than in national parks.Accordingly, he argued that the monuments “became a dream-land for those with preservation-oriented agendas.” Rothman’scompelling thesis would become typical of much of his writ-ing: iconoclastic, original, and scrupulously researched.

Some future national parks were initiated as national mon-uments by executive order so as to protect sites while thelengthy advocacy campaigns for park legislation were orga-

nized. Theodore Roosevelt declared theGrand Canyon a monument in 1908, forexample, and Franklin Roosevelt declaredthe Grand Tetons a monument in 1943. Bothbecame parks later after the more lengthylegislative process. The ease with whichthese national monuments were designated,however, did not guarantee later appro-priations for their management. Rothmanobserved that after the creation of theNational Park Service in 1916, the agencyconcentrated on its scenic parks to the detriment of the less-visited monuments,establishing what he characterized as “sec-ond-class sites” within the national park sys-tem. Perhaps Congress was less inclined to provide money for the operation of thosesites that it had not created through the leg-islative process. In any case, only with theemergency spending programs of the NewDeal, when the government was actively

looking for public works projects, were some of these imbal-ances addressed with extensive restorations and remarkablefacilities, such as the complex of Pueblo Revival buildings atBandelier National Monument in New Mexico. And it was notuntil the National Park Service’s “Mission 66” developmentprogram of the 1950s and 1960s that all the “units” of thenational park system were brought up to a minimal level ofservice, with utilities, housing, and the requisite visitor center.

Rothman reveled not only in the personalities and conflictsthat swirled around the parks’ creation but also in the humanstories that determined their management and meanings. Onecentral character of Preserving Different Pasts was Frank “Boss”Pinkly, who became the first superintendent of the CasaGrande National Monument in Arizona in 1918. By 1923 heheaded the Southwest National Monuments Office of theNational Park Service, overseeing a dozen others. Pinklyearned his nickname; he was a pugnacious and successfuladvocate for the underfunded but numerous archeologicalsites under his care. He advocated for better protection, moreresearch, and adequate visitor services for the dispersed sys-tem of monuments. He organized a capable staff on shoestringbudgets and fought for attention for his sites, which werebecoming increasingly popular among the first generation of

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automotive tourists. In Pinkly, “an intense, assertive man, whoprided himself on his candor” – Rothman discovered a kin-dred spirit, and he brought his accomplishments back to lifefor all of us.

In later books as well Rothman found a neglected topic andexploited its potential with energetic and critical purpose. TheNew Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and CivicEnvironmentalism (2004) examined this particular park’s historywhile also extracting original conclusions about the evolutionof the national-park idea as a whole.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Franciscoand Marin County was established in 1972 together with itscounterpart, the Gateway National Recreation Area in NewYork and New Jersey. Other urban national parks, such asIndependence National Historical Park in Philadelphia or theJefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, had beenfounded decades earlier, and were historic sites dedicated tothe interpretation of the founding and westward growth of thenation. But the urban recreation areas of the 1970s had comeabout through very different political motivations and forother purposes. With the slogan “parks for the people, wherethe people are,” the urban national parks of the 1970s originat-ed in the idealism of the Great Society. Their founding sug-gested that a profound change was taking place in theinstitutional culture of the National Park Service, which hadbeen associated chiefly with the preservation of outstandingscenic areas and the nation’s historical shrines.

Rothman analyzed in detail the convoluted local and con-gressional politics of the 1960s and early 1970s that broughtfederal parks to urban centers. The growth of neighborhoodactivism – in this instance mainly the People for a GoldenGate National Recreation Area – and the political strength ofBay Area environmental groups led to a new level of influencein Congress for park supporters. During the Progressive Era,the Bay Area had produced many of the most passionate advo-cates of the national park movement. Rothman argued that in the 1970s a new generation of regional advocates achievednational leadership and reinvented the national park idea.Originally about 34,000 acres, the Golden Gate NationalRecreation Area now encompasses spectacular parkland on thecity’s waterfront, many significant historic sites, and regionalreservations in Marin County, as well as the Presidio, a formermilitary base. It became a prescient model of a twenty-firstcentury national park, one characterized by complex partner-ships of governments, organizations, and the private sector.

In this case, the extraordinary personality central to thestory was Democratic representative Phil Burton fromCalifornia, the author and political force behind the 1972 legis-

lation establishing the park. Burton was neither an outdoors-man nor was he previously known as a park advocate; instead,he rose to power as a champion of organized labor and iden-tified himself with the needs of his urban, blue-collar con-stituents. But once Burton was convinced of the overallpurpose of expanding the national park system, his legislativeacumen and deal-making ability forever changed the politicsof federal park-making.

Following the political success of the 1972 act, Burton wasresponsible for other national park legislation, culminating inthe Omnibus Bill of 1978, which included over 100 individualpark projects. In a classic case of logrolling (later derided as“park-barrel” politics), Burton secured the votes of a diversearray of legislators by locating parks in their districts. Muchgood came out of the act: three new national parks, nine his-toric areas, many park expansions, national trails, wild andscenic river designations. Together this accounts for nearly atripling of the acreage under federal wilderness protection.Burton then pushed through the 1980 National Parks andRecreation Act, which added Channel Islands National Parkand the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site to thesystem, to name just two of the many vital projects funded. Anunlikely and relatively little known champion of nationalparks, Burton left a personal legislative record that has no par-allel. He died in 1983 at the age of fifty-six, just as the era thatallowed for such sweeping environmental reform ended.

Grounded in the analysis of specific places, events, and per-sonalities, Rothman’s books about our national parks andmonuments demanded that the reader reconsider comfortablecertainties. They also raised expectations substantially for gov-ernment-sponsored histories of this type. As a professor ofhistory at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Rothman wasresponsible for mentoring a generation of scholars who con-tinue to contribute to this field. Many of their reports are pub-lished by academic presses, generating further interest, newdissertation topics, and in-depth studies that, like Rothman’s,expand our understanding of the multilayered significance ofthe national park system.

In a January 2007 interview with the editors of Environmen-tal History, Rothman stated: “National parks have never beenpreservationist vehicles; they have always been political cre-ations, products of the politics of Washington, D.C., and itsinteractions with the local level. Casting national park histo-ries in this light has been my greatest contribution to thefield.” Although this was but one aspect of his intellectualachievement, in this special issue of Site/Lines it is appropriateto acknowledge that Hal Rothman’s challenging reinterpreta-tions gave the study of national park history a contentious rel-evance it very much needed. – Ethan Carr

Awards

The Foundation for Land-scape Studies is proud toannounce the recipients ofthe 2009 David R. CoffinPublication Grant, given forresearch and publication of abook that advances scholar-ship in the fields of gardenhistory and landscape studies, and the 2009 JohnBrinkerhoff Jackson BookPrize, awarded to recentlypublished books that havemade significant contribu-tions to the study andunderstanding of gardenhistory and landscape studies.

2009 David R. CoffinPublication Grant

Lawrence HalprinA Life Spent Changing Places Publisher: University ofPennsylvania Press

An autobiography by one ofthe world’s leading land-scape architects, environ-mental planners, and urbandesign innovators.

John Dixon HuntThe Venetian City Garden:Place, Typology, andPerception Publisher: Birkhäuser

A history of the Venetiangarden as a representation ofthe city’s unique cultural andenvironmental conditions.

Judith K. MajorThe Evolution of aLandscape Critic: MarianaGriswold Van Rensselaer Publisher: University ofVirginia Press

The first full-length study of the artist, architect, critic,historian, and journalistMariana Griswold VanRensselaer and her writingson landscape gardening.

Janet Mendelsohn andChristopher Wilson, EditorsMy Kind of AmericanLandscape: J. B. JacksonSpeaks Publisher: Center forAmerican Places

A multimedia compilation of the teachings, writings,drawings, and photographsof the cultural geographerJohn Brinckerhoff Jackson.

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2009 John BrinckerhoffJackson Book Prize

A Genius for Place: American Landscapes of the Country Place EraBy Robin KarsonUniversity of MassachusettsPress, 2007

Islamic Gardens andLandscapesBy D. Fairchild RugglesPenn Studies in LandscapeArchitecture, 2007

Daring to Look: DorotheaLange’s Photographs and Reports from the FieldBy Anne Whiston SpirnUniversity of Chicago Press,2008

The Master List of DesignProjects of the OlmstedFirm, 1857-1979By Lucy Lawliss, CarolineLoughlin, and Lauren MeierNational Association forOlmsted Parks, 2008

Contributors

Charles Beveridge, Ph.D.,Hon. ASLA, is series editor ofThe Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, sponsored bythe National Association forOlmsted Parks and pub-lished by the Johns HopkinsUniversity Press. He is theauthor, with photographerPaul Rocheleau, of FrederickLaw Olmsted: Designing theAmerican Landscape (Rizzoli,1995).

Ethan Carr, Ph.D., FASLA, isthe Reuben M. RaineyProfessor of the History ofLandscape Architecture atthe University of Virginia.He has written two books onthe history of American park planning and design:Wilderness by Design (Univer-sity of Nebraska Press, 1998)and Mission 66: Modernismand the National ParkDilemma (Library of Ameri-can Landscape History,2007). He is currently editingthe eighth volume of ThePapers of Frederick LawOlmsted, which covers theperiod from 1882 to 1890,during which time Olmsted’soffice, called Fairsted, wasestablished in Brookline,Massachusetts.

Rolf Diamant is superinten-dent of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NationalHistorical Park. He writesabout conservation history,parks, and protected areas,and is a contributing authorof The Conservation ofCultural Landscapes (CABInternational, 2006), Recon-structing Conservation: FindingCommon Ground (IslandPress, 2003), Wilderness Comes Home: Re-wilding theNortheast (University Press of New England, 2001), andTwentieth-Century NewEngland Land Conservation: AHeritage of Civic Engagement(Harvard University Press,2008).

Paula Deitz is editor of TheHudson Review, a magazineof literature and the artspublished in New York City.As a cultural critic, shewrites about art, architecture,and landscape design fornewspapers and magazineshere and abroad. Of Gardens,a collection of her essays,will be published in the nearfuture by the University ofPennsylvania Press.

Reuben Rainey, Ph.D., isWilliam Stone WeedonProfessor Emeritus in theSchool of Architecture

at the University of Virginia.He is a former chair of theDepartment of LandscapeArchitecture and the authorof a wide range of studies onnineteenth- and twentieth-century American landscapearchitecture. His most recentbook, coauthored with J. C.Miller, is Modern PublicGardens: Robert Royston andthe Suburban Park (2006). Heis also coexecutive producerof GardenStory, a ten-episodedocumentary for public tele-vision.

Lee Whittlesey is park histo-rian for the National ParkService at Yellowstone. He isthe author, co-author, or edi-tor of ten books and morethan twenty-five journal arti-cles, including: Storytelling in Yellowstone: Horse andBuggy Tour Guides (2007); A Yellowstone Album: Photo-graphic Celebration of the FirstNational Park (1997); Death in Yellowstone: Accidents andFoolhardiness in the FirstNational Park (1995); Lost inthe Yellowstone: TrumanEverts’s Thirty Seven Days ofPeril (1995); Yellowstone Place

Names (1988); WonderlandNomenclature: Myth andHistory in the Creation ofYellowstone National Park(with Paul Schullery, 2003);and Ho! for Wonderland:Travelers’ Accounts of Yellow-stone, 1872-1914 (2009). AHistory of Large Mammals ofthe Yellowstone Region, 1806-1885 (with Paul Schullery)will be published in 2010.

Anne Mitchell Whisnant is ahistorian and author ofSuper-Scenic Motorway: A BlueRidge Parkway History (UNCPress, 2006). She is currentlydirector of research, com-munications, and programsfor the Office of FacultyGovernance at the Universityof North Carolina at ChapelHill, where she holdsadjunct faculty appointmentsin history and Americanstudies. With her husband,David Whisnant, she alsoconducts contract historicalresearch and writing for the National Park Servicethrough their small consult-ing firm, Primary SourceHistory Services. Their mostrecent project (in process) is a historic resource studyfor Cape Lookout NationalSeashore.

23

Volume v, Number iFall 2009

Publisher:Foundation for Landscape Studies

Board of Directors:Vincent BuonannoKenneth I. HelphandRobin KarsonNancy NewcombTherese O’MalleyJohn A. PintoReuben M. RaineyFrederic Rich, ChairmanElizabeth Barlow RogersMargaret Sullivan

Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Guest Editor: Ethan Carr

Associate Editor: Alice Truax

Assistant Editor: Margaret Sullivan

Copy-editor:Margaret Oppenheimer

Designer: Skeggs Design

Contributors:Charles E. BeveridgeEthan CarrRolf DiamantPaula DeitzReuben RaineyAnne Mitchell WhisnantLee H. Whittlesey

For more information about theFoundation for LandscapeStudies, visit www.foundationforlandscapestudies.org.

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