A surprising history of failed national parks

When Mar-a-Lago belonged to the Park Service, and when Steve Mather belonged to the nation

California’s Burney Falls: a failed national park? Or something more? (Saxena ashes photo courtesy Wikimedia)

In 1919, when National Park Service founder Steve Mather first encountered Burney Falls, he found it “a waterfall that ranks with California’s best.” It was situated “in the midst of an untouched forest, and in a region with other attractions from the scenic standpoint.”

Furthermore, it was threatened by a dam. The newly formed Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) had been buying up area land and water rights. Alarmed residents feared a dammed lake would drown the falls. The family that owned the land around the falls asked Mather if they could donate it for preservation as a national park.

The story is relevant today because in a proposal earlier this month to eviscerate National Park Service budgets, the Trump administration cited “a large number of sites… which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized as State-level parks." It suggested “an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park System." Might Burney Falls—now a state park—have some relevance here?

In this essay I’ll try to do two things. First, I’ll give a political “take” in the fashion that today’s media ecosystems seem to require. Then I’ll dig into the interesting and substantive issue: some history of this idea, and the way Mather handled Burney Falls.

As I noted last week, Congress traditionally alters Presidential budget proposals, often substantially. But I’m still writing about the budget proposal because a) today’s Congressional Republicans seem especially interested in following President Trump’s lead, and b) Trump has asserted (though courts are expected to disagree) that the Executive Branch can spend money in ways that differ from what Congress mandates. Thus, although much attention focuses on a Congressional proposal to sell federal land in Utah and Nevada, I think the President’s priorities deserve at least equal scrutiny.

Indeed, those priorities appear disingenuous: states are not clamoring to expand their park systems. Trump’s opponents thus fear that decommissioned sites would end up being privatized; privatization of federal lands has been a long-held goal of some conservatives, as demonstrated by the Utah-Nevada proposal.

But if the endgame is privatization, this Park Service gambit strikes me as a surprising and counterproductive way to go about it. Privatizing some of the vast acreages of lands now run by the US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would potentially unlock growth in the form of natural resource development: mining, logging, drilling, grazing, or even construction of housing. (To be clear: although I understand this argument, I personally don’t think this potential growth is worth the loss of public lands.) By contrast, privatizing not-very-popular tourist sites would yield fewer benefits while also infuriating the Park Service’s many fans.

The proposal didn’t identify any park units to be targeted. Political speculation might thus suggest that the target is Utah’s Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument. It was established in 1996, shrunk (by Trump) in 2017, and re-expanded in 2021, with discussion of each action stirred by a potential coal mine within its boundaries. But this Monument is administered by the BLM, not the Park Service, so political speculation isn't getting us very far.

Instead, let’s dig into history. National Parks Traveler has a terrific list of 26 “sites or areas with independent national park-authorized identities” that were later delisted, abolished, or transferred outside the system. And one unit really stands out.

Mar-a-Lago! The club where Trump likes to entertain heads of state was constructed as a 115-room mansion by billionaire Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1927. She too used it to entertain heads of state. It was her winter retreat until she died in 1973. Her will donated it to the federal government, where the National Park Service would administer it as a place for diplomats and Presidents to entertain heads of state. But maintenance and security costs proved prohibitive, so it was delisted and returned to Post’s foundation in 1980. Trump bought it in 1985.

In short, the President has personal experience with a Park Service unit being decommissioned and transferred to the private sector. And whatever you think about Trump or his activities at Mar-a-Lago, there’s a kernel of truth to his crusade: Mar-a-Lago didn’t work as a unit of the national park system.

However, I’d like to suggest that the unheralded Burney Falls story is more relevant here. Because when Mather saw the 129-foot waterfall, he immediately concluded that, although scenic, it lacked the “supreme and distinctive quality” that he always looked for in national parks. Referring to one of the owners, Mather wrote, “We told him that we thought this area should be made a state park, because it hardly possessed the qualifications for national park status. He agreed.”

The problem: California then had scattered state parks but no official system, and thus no easy way to create new state parks. (The situation resembled that of national parks before 1916 when Mather founded the Park Service.) A group called the Save the Redwoods League, which hoped to buy coastal redwood forests for preservation, was lobbying to create the state park system, but was still several years away from success.

Similar problems existed nationwide. “Every year,” Mather wrote, “we have a score or more areas brought to the attention of the National Park Service with the pleas that they should be made national parks.” He mentioned 4,000 acres of native timberland in Vermont, a stretch of Iowa on the Mississippi River, and a “splendid tract of land” in Florida with historical and scientific value. Landowners wanted them preserved, and were offering them for free.

Mather didn’t want these lands—he didn’t have the budget to manage them and feared diluting the Park Service brand. In other words, he faced a dilemma similar to that of the Trump administration today. But he solved it very differently.

“We heartily believe in municipal parks, county parks, and state parks,” Mather announced at the National Conference on Parks in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 1921. “We believe in parks of every kind because they are good for the people… [I]n this time of enormous growth of cities, parks and recreation are becoming absolutely necessary in the proper development of child life, and in preserving the health of adults, as well as affording amusement, education, inspiration, and other development of mind and body that comes with contact with nature.”

Mather had conceived and planned this conference, which sought to stimulate the movement for state parks. He’d paid an organizer to spend two months in Des Moines setting it up. He’d used his private fortune to fund the Save the Redwoods League. In other words, Mather led with support.

In the conference’s keynote speech, Mather laid out the challenges facing the potential nationwide network of different kinds of parks. He encouraged attendees to collaborate in solving those challenges. Then he announced that he intended to offer resources, including his agency’s publicity and development standards, surplus wildlife, and donations from his private wealth.

In a world where people wait up to an hour for a parking space at Burney Falls, we sometimes take state parks for granted. But they arose from a moment much like today’s—and a different set of choices. Trump sees a zero-sum world, where an underperforming park, like foreign trade, is somehow “stealing” from Americans and must be disposed.

But Mather saw an abundant, positive-sum world. Some places deserved to be national parks, others state or county or municipal parks. But the point was to have abundant parks for everyone. And the mark of a leader was to find in himself, and facilitate for others, the generosity to make all those parks happen.

Discussion:

• I quote Mather from “The United States of America and its Parks,” Iowa Conservation, Vol. 5 No. 1, Jan–Mar 1921, p. 11, a reprint of his lecture at the conference. More background at Rebecca Conard, “The National Conference on State Parks: Reflections on Organizational Genealogy,” The George Wright Forum, 1997, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1997), p. 30.

• The “supreme and distinctive” phrase, which Mather often repeated, is from a letter known as the Park Service’s creed, Franklin K. Lane to Stephen T. Mather, May 13, 1918, in Lary M. Dilsaver, ed., America’s National Park System: the Critical Documents (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 51.

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