THE EDITORS PAGE

Visitation figures for the travel year just ended reveal a national tendency which concerns directly the Service areas of Region One. Visitors to national parks decreased slightly as compared to 1937 totals, but attendance at all areas of the national system moved upward from 15,133,432 to 16,233,688. The gain is accounted for almost entirely through the increase of 1,185,218 (more than 70 per cent) recorded by the national military parks and cemeteries, all of which lie east of the Mississippi.

Gettysburg, with 1,554,234, received more visitors than any other of the 144 areas of the Service. Shiloh was second among the military parks with 346,069, and Vicksburg and Chickamauga-Chattanooga followed closely. Meanwhile, Shenandoah continued to hold first place among the national parks with the Great Smokies second. Acadia was surpassed by only three of the western parks. Tabulations comparing the 1937 and 1938 figures for all reporting areas of Region One will be found on page 26.

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Superintendent Tillotson, the newly designated Director of Region One, confides to The Review that "both at high school and in college I was a school mate of our Chief of Engineering, O. G. Taylor; also that Mr. Taylor and I were roommates in college and that I worked for him while serving as transitman in Yosemite in 1921." On second thought he adds: "Perhaps though, it would be just as well not to mention this since he would probably not be as proud of the association as I am." Mr. Tillotson's confessed hobby, by the way, is football.

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Field employees of the Service often find imposed upon them the not unpleasant task of delving into the remote repositories of history's lesser facts. And, often enough, they emerge from musty archives bearing those little finds which give them "the common touch" with the life of long ago. So it was with C. L. Johnson, Senior Foreman (Historian) assigned to Tchefuncte State Park, Mandeville, Louisiana, who now footnotes the Revolutionary War with an observation that the struggle for liberty apparently was won, not by those whose polite palates called for claret and other refined beverages, but by those whose untutored throats craved more bracing potions. Mr. Johnson, studying the famous Marigny family, proprietors of old Fontainebleau Plantation, has unearthed a political speech delivered in 1834 by Bernard Marigny, State Senate candidate, who was right roundly cheered when, in the peroration of an address which sided squarely with the "people" against the "aristocrats," declared:

"In the great contest between Great Britain and the United States, who was it that triumphed? the drinkers of Bordeaux and Chateau Margaux, or the drinkers of Whiskey? When the Bostonians repulsed John Bull, was claret or whiskey drank [sic]? Fellow citizens, let us be united for the good cause and we are assured of success!" (Applause).