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68 Chapter 3 Federalizing America’s Foot Trails When several hikers from Chattanooga came to enjoy a refreshing weekend getaway along the Appalachian Trail in Georgia in 1955, their plans were soured by a pungent, black ooze that coated the trail. The area, located near Mount Oglethorpe—the trail’s southern terminus at the time and the one section of the trail in Georgia that lay outside the national forest boundary—had been turned into a “dumping ground for manure” from a large chicken farm nearby. The Chattanoogans could find no way around the mess and had been forced to “wade through the filth . . . of thousands of chickens.”1 In an irate letter to the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC), the leader of the group, Mrs. Leon Cross, reported that the trail was “so slimy that one of our group fell flat on her face in the stuff.”2 Several years earlier, local volunteers with the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club had found small mountains of rotting lumber, scattered brush, tar paper, and approximately fifty thousand beer and oil cans.3 They also discovered that extensive logging operations had “ravaged” the last eleven miles of the trail near its southern terminus.4 The conditions in the Mount Oglethorpe area ultimately led the Georgia club and the ATC to relocate the southern terminus to Springer Mountain, where it would be protected within the boundaries of the Chattahoochee National Forest.5 The chickens’ filth not only offered an “indelicate olfactory salute” to hikers, as one local volunteer put it; the situation at the trail’s southern terminus also revealed broader economic and environmental changes that occurred during the decades that followed World War II.6 When the trail volunteers of the 1920s and 1930s returned to the Appalachian Trail after the Federalizing America's Foot Trails 69 war, they discovered that many sections had been obliterated by the expansion of forestry and agricultural operations, new housing developments, road construction, and hurricane damage. At the same time, Americans began flocking to the countryside for recreation and outdoor adventure. Between 1940 and 1965 visits to national parks and national forests doubled, and the Appalachian Trail became one of America’s premier gateways for getting back to nature.7 Simultaneous growth in the outdoor recreation, housing, and extractive resource industries led to new tensions over how to manage America’s hinterlands.8 The movement to protect the aesthetic value of the countryside that had started in the early twentieth century with wilderness advocates like Benton MacKaye gained momentum during the postwar era, and new strategies and justifications for land conservation took root. As environmental awareness spread, with notable publications such as Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, public support for stronger federal environmental laws and policies also grew. Hiking trails, most famously the Appalachian Trail, served as key conduits for shaping Americans ’ relationship with the natural world and for galvanizing public support for federal conservation policies. When outdoor enthusiasts headed for the hills, they confronted the environmental consequences of a growing consumer economy. Like the Chattanoogans, many Americans became increasingly distressed by what they discovered, and they began to seek new institutional mechanisms—both public and private—to protect land from the ooze and sprawl of postwar industries. Although the first attempt to create a national system of trails in 1945 failed, by 1968, the political climate was ripe for creating federal footpaths.9 Environmental and cultural changes in the postwar era led to changing ideas about the purpose of land conservation and shaped decisions about the trail’s future. The Appalachian Trail’s path toward federal protection was guided by broader national debates about wilderness preservation, park development, and multiple-use management. Navigating this tortuous political route required the negotiation of authority between a large number of private and public agents who held different views about the federal government’s role in controlling land and protecting natural resources. The movement to federalize America’s footpaths—from the first failed attempt to create a national system of footpaths in 1945 to Congress’s passage of the National Trails Act in 1968—demonstrates how a growing number of outdoor enthusiasts worked to transform a largely grassroots project into a new 70 Federalizing America's Foot Trails two-thousand-mile unit of the national park system. The process helped to establish new ideas about the purpose of American’s national parks and forests, and embodied new strategies for achieving large-scale conservation goals...

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