The State Parks That Almost Became National Parks
A lumber company once tried to hand a mountain in Arkansas to the federal government, and the answer was no. Oregon's largest state park failed its review because loggers had already been through it. Texas lost a canyon to a rival site the investigator liked better. Federal reviewers examined all seven of these places, and not one of the bids succeeded. They are public land today anyway, secured by a state, a town, or a private donor.
Petit Jean State Park, Arkansas
Petit Jean Mountain belonged to the Fort Smith Lumber Company in 1907, and the company physician argued for leaving the trees standing. Thomas William Hardison traveled with company officers through their roughest holdings that spring. At Seven Hollows the party decided the terrain was not worth logging. Hardison suggested the trees "might as well be left to live out their lifespan." The mill nearby closed two years later.
Hardison then spent 14 years trying to place the mountain in federal hands. By 1921 the company would donate more than 1,000 acres, and Representative H. M. Jacoway introduced a bill in Congress to create Petit Jean National Park. Hardison carried photographs to Washington and met Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service. Mather judged the parcel too small and, for all its beauty, probably not one of a kind. He told Hardison to try the state legislature instead.
Arkansas accepted a smaller version. Businessmen in Morrilton and Pine Bluff donated 80 acres around Cedar Falls, and Act 276 of 1923 recognized the tract as the state's first park. Mather Lodge, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) between 1933 and 1935, was renamed for the man who had pointed him toward the legislature.
Highlands Hammock State Park, Florida
Highlands Hammock reached public notice through a letter to a local newspaper. In March 1928 F. H. Newell of the Department of the Interior wrote to the Sebring American. He urged residents to see that the place was preserved and made known to their winter visitors. A movement for federal designation followed late the next year.
Federal officials inspected the acreage in February 1930 and judged it too small. That refusal changed who paid rather than whether anyone would. Margaret Shippen Roebling gave $25,000 toward the purchase. She then added a second $25,000 on the condition that the community raise $5,000 of its own. Donations ran from $1 to $1,000 in the worst years of the Depression. Roebling died that October, and her husband John A. Roebling II completed the park as a memorial to her.
The purchase closed in 1930 and covered 550 acres of hammock plus 1,500 acres around it. The site opened to the public in March 1931. CCC crews arrived in 1934 and stayed until the camp closed in November 1941. The men were building a botanical garden and arboretum. The tropical gardens never became a reality.
Silver Falls State Park, Oregon
Silver Creek ran through cut-over country when federal reviewers came to look at it in the 1920s. Fires and farming had followed the loggers, and the flow of water itself had declined. June Drake, a photographer in Silverton, had been arguing for the falls since the early 1900s. He paid men to cut trails so he could get clear views for his camera, and his pictures traveled as far as members of Congress. Drake Falls carries his name.
Rejection came in 1926. The land was judged too heavily cut over and farmed, and the recommendation was that Oregon develop the site itself. Drake identified three federal objections: the condition of the land, the divided parcels, and the insufficient size. He decided a state government could raise none of them, and he kept working.
Oregon adopted the site in 1931 and bought the South Falls property from an owner who had charged admission to watch him send derelict automobiles over the waterfall. Oregon opened the park in July 1933, and it covers just over 9,000 acres. Its named falls range from a drop of 27 feet to one of 178 feet.
Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Texas
Palo Duro Canyon drew a federal investigator over the winter of 1933 and 1934, along with five rivals. The Park Service was weighing six areas in Texas. The list ran to the Davis Mountains, the Guadalupe Mountains, and Palo Duro. Big Bend, Padre Island, and Alto Frio Canyon completed the list. Roger Toll, the superintendent of Yellowstone, went to examine each one.
Toll spent four days in the canyon. Big Bend impressed him most. Palo Duro he found "picturesque and interesting." One official thought the canyon too similar to the Grand Canyon, which had carried the designation since 1919. The land also cost more than the alternative.
The idea outlived the verdict. The agency liked the notion of an ecosystem park on the model of the Everglades. It drew a map for a million-acre plains park around the canyon, taking in prairie along the rim. Pronghorn could range there, and bison could be returned. Texas had already bought canyon land in 1933, and CCC crews cut the road down to the floor. A second federal review in 1938 and 1939 weighed monument status, and the cost defeated that as well.
Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Michigan
The Porcupine Mountains escaped the saw, and by the early 1940s the reprieve was ending. Two companies that did no logging themselves held most of the timber across the 46,000 acres under discussion. Operators had bought the stands next door. A Wisconsin firm had laid its logging railroad to the Presque Isle River and bridged it near the mouth.
Washington was willing, on terms. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes favored dedicating the area as a monument or a park. His condition was that the land be acquired first and handed over free of charge. The Park Service confirmed it would recommend the area, and it even drew the boundaries of a tentative purchase tract covering the mountains and the lower Presque Isle.
Michigan declined the terms. Opinion at a regional meeting favored buying the tract outright and managing it through the state conservation department. The legislature funded the purchase in 1944, and the park followed a year later. Construction on the logging railroad had been suspended while the purchase was under discussion.
Indiana Dunes State Park, Indiana
The Indiana Dunes became the first new area the Park Service ever considered. In October 1916 its director held hearings in a federal courtroom. The question was whether to back a Sand Dunes National Park along three counties of Lake Michigan shoreline. Four hundred people attended and 42 spoke in favor. No one spoke in opposition.
Congress appropriated nothing for the study. Preservation groups covered Mather's expenses, including his week in the dunes, and he paid out of his own pocket to print and distribute the report. What the report asked for was the unusual part. It proposed that the government buy a strip 25 miles long and a mile wide from private owners, which Congress had not done for a park before.
Three blows landed in the months that followed. The senator carrying the resolution lost his seat. Mather suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1917 and could not lobby. On April 6 the country entered the war, and the campaign slogan changed to saving the country first.
No dunes park bill was ever introduced. Indiana authorized its own park in 1923 and opened 2,182 acres of it three years later. Mather passed the cause to Richard Lieber, who was building the state's park system.
Ricketts Glen State Park, Pennsylvania
Ricketts Glen cleared the federal test. The area was approved as a national park site in the 1930s, and the Second World War ended the plan before anything came of it. In 1942 the Ricketts heirs sold 1,261 acres, the falls and glens area, to Pennsylvania instead.
The land had been bought to be logged. Robert Bruce Ricketts acquired the tract in 1868 for its timber, and fishermen working the lower reaches of Kitchen Creek found the waterfalls. Two branches of the creek cut through deep gorges and join at Waters Meet. Ricketts built the trails and named many of the falls after American Indian tribes, and others after his friends and family. The park counts 22 named waterfalls, and 94-foot Ganoga Falls is the highest. Purchases from his son in 1943 and 1949 brought the holding to roughly 10,000 acres. The first recreational facilities opened in 1944. The Glens Natural Area became a registered National Natural Landmark in 1969 and a state park natural area in 1993.
What The Refusals Built
The standard these places were measured against was "scenery of supreme and distinctive quality," and the reviewers applied it. Petit Jean is small. The Silver Creek watershed had been logged. What the refusals produced instead was a second system. Legislatures built it, along with photographers, lumber companies, and towns that passed the hat. Seven state parks now protect ground that Washington measured and let go.
