This is an interesting bit of history that might give us a break from the history in the making that we are living in.

By HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

08/26/2024

I miss writing history, and have started to play with fun little historical reflections that jump off from the regular letters, usually with an on-this-day-in-the-past orientation. Figured I should share them with you all in case I’m not the only one who would like an occasional break from all the political heat. They are not copyedited or anything. They’re just for fun.

Here is what I wrote to go along with yesterday’s post:

As private industry boomed after the Civil War, Americans worried that men were so intent on stripping the nation’s lands of their resources that they were degrading the country’s natural wonders: places they felt should belong to everyone. In 1872, Congress established the first national park– Yellowstone– in Wyoming and Montana, and ordered the Secretary of the Interior to take control of it.

In 1891, Congress gave the president power to put land into forest reserves and in 1906, Congress passed the Antiquities Act to stop the looting and sale of Indigenous objects and sites. Over the following years, presidents of both parties added national parks and monuments to protect public lands, heritage, and culture. There was, as yet, no one agency to oversee these various sites. The Interior Department oversaw some of them, the Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture oversaw others, the War Department oversaw still others.

During the Progressive Era, the public demanded Congress bring order to various agencies across the government. In keeping with that drive, Congress passed a law to establish one bureau in the Interior Department to oversee the 35 national monuments and parks the department oversaw. The measure established the National Park Service. On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law.

The mission of the National Park Service was to “promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments and reservations…by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved the sites and monuments managed by the War Department and the Forest Service into the National Park Service, a move that further strengthened the idea of a system of truly national parks.

Now the National Park Service employs about 20,000 people to oversee more than 84 million acres in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Saipan, and the Virgin Islands. New National Parks are designated by Congress. The president has the power under the Antiquities Act to establish national monuments on federal land.

While those parks are gems in preserving our natural and cultural heritage, they also nurture the economy. In 2022, for example, Congress appropriated $3.3 billion for the National Park Service, while nearly 312 million visitors to those parks spent $23.9 billion in towns within 60 miles of parks.