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Presenting Nature
MENU
Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)
Design Policy & Process
(1916-1927)
Western Field Office
(1927-1932)
Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)
State Parks
(1933-1942)
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Presenting Nature:
The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942 |
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VII. A NEW DEAL FOR STATE PARKS, 1933 — 1942 (continued)
SUBMARGINAL LANDS AND RECREATIONAL DEMONSTRATION AREAS
While a number of federal programs provided funds and labor for the development of state and county parks, few provided funds for the acquisition of land to create the parks. State parks were developed in areas already owned by the state or in the process of being acquired by the state. President Roosevelt, who had become interested in land-use issues, saw submarginal lands that had limited agricultural value as having great potential as future public parks and recreational facilities. In 1934, as a preliminary step toward affecting land use, the Federal Surplus Relief Administration provided $25 million for the purchase of low-productivity or poorly used lands, called submarginal lands; $5 million of the total allocation was for the acquisition of lands to be converted to recreational use. Later that year, the funds were transferred to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), directed by Harry Hopkins. Conrad Wirth, designated as coordinator for the Interior Department's participation, immediately developed a program for acquiring submarginal land suitable for park development and recreational activities. The Civilian Conservation Corps and other forms of relief labor could be used to restore these areas to a natural condition and develop recreational facilities for hiking, boating, swimming, skating, skiing, picnicking, and camping. [35]
On May 1, 1935, the land program was transferred to the Land Utilization Division of the newly designated Resettlement Administration headed by Rex Tugwell. On November 14, 1936, however, responsibility for the recreational development area program was returned to the National Park Service. By the end of 1936, the park service had drawn up general development plans for many of the projects and was developing the areas with labor and funds provided by the Emergency Conservation Work program, the Works Progress Administration, and the Resettlement Administration. [36]
Beyond the primary goal of reclaiming submarginal lands, the program had two additional purposes. It was both an effort to meet the need for increased recreational facilities, particularly among lower-income groups, and a demonstration of how recreational facilities could be planned and developed. Each project was considered an experiment, and the resulting park, wayside, or park extension was viewed as a model for recreational development having important social and humanitarian value for the nation as a whole. The experience of the National Park Service in comprehensive planning, in building park roads and trails, in constructing rustic buildings and structures, and in naturalizing and reforesting the landscape was put to use for the first time, on a massive scale, in developing parks from submarginal lands for primarily recreational purposes. From the beginning, the intention was to turn most of the areas over to state park or highway departments after development and to encourage state and local governments to develop similar kinds of park areas.
The program identified four kinds of recreational demonstration areas: (1) vacation areas 1,500 to 2,000 acres in size located near major population centers and providing a variety of facilities for daytime recreation and overnight camping; (2) waysides 20 to 50 acres in size along principal highways where motorists could rest, picnic, play sports, and enjoy the outdoors; (3) extensions to national parks and monuments developed for recreational activities such as camping, picnicking, and swimming; and (4) areas adjoining state scenic areas that could be redeveloped for recreational uses. [37]
In the first year of the program, over 400 areas of land were investigated and twenty-five projects approved. By 1936, forty-six projects had begun in twenty-four states. By 1941, the forty-six recreational demonstration projects covered approximately 400,000 acres and consisted of sixty-two separate areas. Most popular were the thirty-one vacation areas, which included children's camps, family camps, and industrial and social organization camps—all of which offered opportunities for low-income groups, public and semipublic organizations, and others to enjoy low cost vacations in the out-of-doors. These areas also provided facilities for picnicking and daytime use. In addition, thirteen waysides were developed along highways in Virginia and South Carolina. Approximately 77,294 acres in eleven separate areas were added to national park areas, including the Manassas National Battlefield, Kings Mountain National Military Park, Badlands National Monument, and White Sands National Monument. Approximately 41,841 acres were added to five existing state parks: Alex H. Stephens State Park and Pine Mountain State Park in Georgia, Custer State Park in South Dakota, Fall Creek Falls State Park in Tennessee, and Lake Guernsey State Park in Wyoming. The program made possible the development of recreational areas along the Blue Ridge Parkway and the acquisition of land authorized but not yet acquired in Acadia National Park and Shenandoah National Park. The newly acquired land in these parks was developed for recreational purposes: waysides for picnicking and camping were built along Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway, and campgrounds, scenic viewpoints, picnic areas, bathing beaches, and boating facilities were developed at Acadia. [38]
Vacation areas were designed to supplement existing state parks, which most commonly had been set aside and developed for their scenic features. They were modeled closely on state parks, with particular emphasis on the development of organization camps, particularly the Harriman section of the Palisades Interstate Park, which had begun a program of organization camps in the 1910s. The requirements for vacation areas stipulated that they were to be from 2,000 to 10,000 acres in size and located within approximately fifty miles of a major center of population. In Pennsylvania, which had five such areas—the most of any state—these areas were accessible to seven urban centers: Reading, Philadelphia, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Altoona, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh. The acreage was to be adequate to provide separate sections for day and overnight uses and to accommodate several organization or group camps that would be separated from each other and from the public camping and day-use areas. Because swimming was the most popular sport, it was desirable for each demonstration area to have a natural or artificial body of water. Camps were often located out of sight among the trees bordering the shoreline. The park service promoted as a model the 15,000-acre Chopawamsic RDA outside Washington, D.C., in Virginia's Prince William County, one of the first areas opened for public use. In 1936, the service published Recreational Demonstration Areas, as Illustrated by Chopawamsic, Virginia as a basis for the development of other RDAs, state parks, and metropolitan parks, partially fulfilling the objective that the RDAs be demonstrations of public recreational areas. [39]
Organization camps were one of the most significant features of these areas. The U.S. government constructed facilities for several separate camps in each recreation area for use and management by private and semiprivate social, educational, and welfare organizations, such as the Campfire Girls or a local board of education. Such camps provided an experience in nature and the outdoors for youth and families from nearby cities and rural areas. Each camp was divided into an administrative center and small outlying units, each housing twenty-four campers. Central dining and recreation halls, an infirmary, a director's quarters, and other administrative buildings were located in the administrative center. Radiating out from the center were the various camping units, located so that each was out of sight and hearing of other areas of the camp. Each unit consisted of sleeping cabins for campers and leaders, a washhouse and latrine, and a lodge with an outdoor attached kitchen. The arrangement of the camp made it possible for each unit of cabins to operate independently of the larger camp. The design of the lodges, with fireplaces and ample space, made it possible to house groups for winter activities. [40]
The educational and recreational value of such camps had long been recognized, but until 1934, only a few state parks provided such facilities. One highly acclaimed program was in the Harriman section of the Palisades Interstate Park in New York, which had begun in the 1910s and by the 1930s had more than ninety camps providing low-cost vacations annually to more than six hundred children. On the West Coast, several cities had developed similar camps for children and families in nearby public forests. [41]
The success of the RDA program was measured immediately in the accessibility of the areas to population centers and the popularity of the areas themselves. In 1936, it was projected that the forty-six demonstration areas would serve an estimated 30 million people. In 1937 alone, the completed areas received one hundred thousand days of use by overnight campers and one million days of use by daytime visitors. The project employed significant numbers of men through the CCC and Emergency Relief Administration. By 1938, eight thousand relief workers and twenty-three hundred CCC enrollees had been put to work developing a total of 352,874 acres of land for recreational purposes. [42]
Acquisition called for the purchase of land possessing some degree of scenic character and topographic qualities that made it possible to develop a body of water, a system of roads and trails, and several separate areas for daytime use, overnight camping, and organization camps. The National Park Service directed all planning and development of the new parks, while the Resettlement Administration moved the displaced residents to areas outside the parks. The social and administrative aspects of organized camping had been the subject of state park meetings in the 1920s, and a substantial amount of information on them therefore existed. The National Park Service drew from the experience and knowledge of the nation's leaders in the fields of camping and organized camping, such as Fay Welch, who headed the camping program at the Palisades Interstate Park.
Developing an RDA posed planning and design problems that called for use of the principles and practices formulated by the landscape architects of the National Park Service. Since these areas were not primarily scenic in nature, they provided the opportunity to use techniques for landscape naturalization, from cleanup to replanting. The task of redeveloping the land for its scenic and recreational potential was not unlike that encountered by the state of Virginia and the National Park Service in developing Shenandoah National Park from former fields and pastures. This work had called for the removal of structures and buildings, the planting of road traces, the clearing of dead and down timber and old stone walls, and the recovery of natural vegetation. RDAs, however, called for the blending of recreational development with naturalistic gardening on a scale not encountered by park designers previously. Wildlife and forest protection studies and measurements were made, and each area was carefully planned before development. Emphasis was placed on the development of all-year recreational facilities, especially the creation of lakes and ponds for swimming, fishing, boating, and skating. Within this context, Frank Waugh wrote Landscape Conservation for the park service in 1935, emphasizing the importance of studying and reproducing natural conditions when creating artificial landscape features. Waugh's instructions for naturalizing the shores of newly created lakes by recreating naturally occurring zones of vegetation and by locating cabins, lodges, and buildings other than boat houses away from the water's edge had important applications.
The development of RDAs challenged park service designers to expand their repertoire of park facilities to accommodate a full range of recreational activities from boating to winter sports and new kinds of structures called for by the organization camps. Although the actual number of areas developed by the National Park Service was limited, the resulting design ideas had widespread applications for state and metropolitan parks in general.
RDAs had a lasting impact on public recreation and the design of state and metropolitan parks. Organization camps and artificial bodies of water were developed for recreational purposes throughout the nation's state parks and forests during the CCC era. Moreover, other federal agencies called upon the National Park Service to develop recreational areas. These agencies included the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had incorporated several large parks in its plans for the region, and the Bureau of Reclamation, which controlled Lake Mead, the largest artificial lake in existence at the time and the result of the construction of Boulder Dam on the Colorado River. Recreation took on broad meaning, and a definite shift in emphasis occurred from the conservation-minded goals of those who had advocated scenic areas as state parks in the 1910s to the creation of multipurpose recreational parks in a natural setting. The experience of the National Park Service—in master planning, landscape preservation and naturalization, and rustic architectural design— was coupled with a philosophy that called for creativity and diversity of expression based on harmonization with natural conditions and adherence to common principles and practices.
The New Deal programs allowed the National Park Service to take a leading role in the development of state and local parks and to help fulfill the broad vision for the use of natural resources for public outdoor recreation that had been emerging among state park advocates and public officials since the 1920s. As new and improved state parks opened their gates to increasing numbers of Americans in the 1930s, the idea that outdoor recreation should be affordable and accessible to every American became firmly ingrained in the national conscience. Organization camps, more than any other facility built during the New Deal, embodied the new park ideal. Those built as RDAs and those modeled after the RDAs have continued to fulfill their social, educational, and recreational purposes.
Although the National Park Service took leadership in promoting organized camping and developing model camps, such camps were developed only in areas to be turned over to state park systems. The issue of building organization camps in national parks was debated in the late 1930s, but such camps were viewed as conflicting with the official park service policy forbidding special uses by certain groups. National Park Service policy determined that all camping areas within national parks should be open to the general public and that no special privileges should be granted to private or semiprivate organizations to operate camps on national parklands. As a result, organized camps were not developed in national parks, including the RDAs that were extensions to national parks and provided campgrounds, picnic areas, bathing beaches, and other recreational facilities for the general public.
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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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