"To Ensure Permanency": Expanding and Protecting Hiking Opportunities in Twentieth-Century Pennsylvania

In November 1938, a headline buried deep inside the " Resorts-Travel" section of the New York Times read, "Horseshoe Trail Open: Bridle-and-Foot Path in Pennsylvania Passes Historic Places." The article described the character of the new foot and equestrian trail blazed by the Horse Shoe Trail Club of Philadelphia. "Instead of succumbing to the temptation to make the trail easy," the 116-mile trail followed the "highest ridges" through five southeastern Pennsylvania counties, connecting Valley Forge with the Appalachian Trail at Manada Gap, just outside of Harrisburg. Although reportedly "one of the 'cleanest' paths of its type in the country," the Horse Shoe Trail was "shorter than many another American trail"—a reference to the recently completed Appalachian Trail—and, therefore, "must base its claim to recognition . . . on the variety of terrain through which it [ran]" and the great number of historic sites it passed. Finally—if natural beauty and historical relevance were not enough—the trail offered good terrain for "enjoying the Southern sport of coon hunting."¹ Although the article probably did not stand out to readers amid the advertisements for "Vacationlands" and reports that New England was rapidly recovering from a severe gale that had taken 682 lives, the announced opening of the Horse Shoe Trail represented the culminating effort of a diverse coalition of outdoor groups and social organizations from southeastern Pennsylvania, led by an aggressive hiking club committed to building a trail and, according to the club's president, waging a campaign "to ensure permanency."²

The Horseshoe Trail Club was part of a Pennsylvania hiking community that began in 1916, when a group of conservative businessmen from Reading founded the Blue Mountain Eagle Climbing Club. The next year, newspaper publisher and well-known folklorist, Henry W. Shoemaker, created the Pennsylvania Alpine Club, a statewide organization with chapters in Harrisburg and several other cities. The clubs were the product of decades of growing, middle-class interest in hiking and nature walking that began with the rural cemetery and urban park movements of the mid-nineteenth century. That interest benefited from increases in leisure and affluence brought by industrialization and the expanded recreational geography offered by extended transportation networks connecting urban populations to rural areas. Finally, the fresh air, back-to-nature, and arts-and-crafts movements invested hiking and time spent in natural settings with widely-recognized meaning in the final decades of the nineteenth century.³

As early as the 1860s, small groups of New Englanders and residents of New York City had come together to formalize their interest in walking, climbing, and hiking. A result of nineteenth-century public enthusiasm for associations coupled with a need for organization, these clubs planned hikes, natural history lectures, and, in some cases, helped build the nascent trail networks of the Northeast. Many of the clubs existed for only a short time, merging with others or simply disbanding when enthusiasm ran low. This was not the case for the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC). Founded in Boston in 1876, the AMC immediately embarked on a strategy of recruiting well-known veterans of surveying expeditions and trail projects, extending membership to women, and planning a diverse agenda of scientific and recreational pursuits that saw membership grow from ninety-two in 1876 to over one thousand by 1898.⁴ Those successes were matched by a number of outdoor organizations that modeled themselves on the AMC, such as the Sierra Club (1892), the Green Mountain Club (1910), and the Adirondack Mountain Club (1922), all of which maintained membership levels in the thousands throughout the twentieth century.

Although large-scale organization of hikers came late to Pennsylvania, the proliferation of clubs during the first-third of the twentieth century matched or exceeded trends in New England and the Middle Atlantic. Between 1916 and 1930, Pennsylvania's two original clubs were joined by nearly a dozen large clubs, located in Philadelphia, Allentown, Williamsport, York, State College, and cities across the eastern half of the state. Membership in some clubs swelled above 500; the Pennsylvania Alpine Club and Batona Club of...