The State Park Movement in America: A Critical Review

1.“Parks Americana”

“Parks Americana” The Genesis America is truly a land of parks. Look anywhere across this vast, sprawling continent—from the city centers to the suburban neighborhoods to the remotest hinterlands—and you will find those special places where Americans like to roam, romp, or relax. As different as these sundry properties may otherwise be, they are all still affectionately known by the people as their “parks.” While the idea did not originate here, it most certainly achieved the pinnacle of its expression in the myriad forms of parklands that grace our countrysides from one ocean to the other. In numbers and variety, the parks of America put this country in a class by itself. Not only have they helped shape our landscapes and preserve our national heritage, but, as an exciting and universally popular concept, parks have become permanently ingrained in the American psyche and helped mold us as a people. Almost from the time European settlers established themselves on these shores, they began setting aside various plots of land for their common use and enjoyment . Dictated at first by practicality, the preservation of public spaces in time became a form of aesthetic expression as towns and cities continued to grow and develop. Most of these early efforts evidenced a strong European influence, of course, following the ideas and models that had been brought over from the Old World countries; but adaptation to new and challenging conditions on this continent soon brought about distinctly American variations. Such modest beginnings hardly constituted a foundation for an American parks legacy, but they did establish valuable precedents for public open space preservation that have served us well to this day. 3 1 America’s parks as we now know them, however, were not entirely—not even primarily—an inherited idea. But neither were they envisioned during their formative years as the quintessential part of our national character they were destined to become. Springing up randomly here and there, America’s parks were at first merely part of a slowly coalescing idea—an obscure concept that had yet to be nurtured and nourished by a succession of visionaries for another two centuries in order to attain its present state of refinement. Today, we take great pride, and justly so, in America’s magnificent national parks—over 125 thousand square miles of forest and mountains, wetlands and desert, along with sites containing the most important shrines from our nation ’s dramatic past. It was “the best idea America ever had,” opined the British Ambassador James Lord Brice in 1912.“Absolutely American, absolutely democratic , [the national parks] reflect us at our best rather than our worst,” concurred the writer Wallace Stegner decades later. While probably no area of government endeavor has been able to escape controversy altogether, our national parks seem to have been unanimously applauded and admired almost from the very beginning. As important as they are, however, the national parks are only one component of America’s vast public park estate. Probably best known and certainly most widely used of all parks are those countless areas, large and small, provided by local and regional governments. These close-to-home playgrounds and green spaces cater to millions of users every day, wherever people have clustered, from the tiny hamlet to the huge metropolis. Impressive, too, in their own right are the thousands of state parks—some of them older than the first national park— which collectively comprise almost twenty thousand square miles of scenic landscapes and cultural treasures. Sharing characteristics of both the national and the local parks, state parks nevertheless occupy their own special niche and have their own devoted clientele. Whatever their identity—national, state, or local— among this smorgasbord of parklands there are special places to satisfy the needs and desires of every American. For a park-loving people, we are indeed abundantly blessed. But what happened along the way to make the United States of America the preeminent land of parks—the world’s leading exponent of the modern parks concept? What social forces came into play to motivate the settlers, planners, and developers of this new land to create our unique “Parks Americana”? It is a long, involved, but eminently gratifying, story—a fascinating drama in several acts— and well worth a quick review. 4 The State Park Movement in America “Parks Americana” 5 Yellowstone National Park, created by act of Congress in 1872, not only inaugurated America...