A lift behind the scenes helped bring the National Park Service into being.
From the April 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
In February 1916, the American Society of Landscape Architects met in Boston for its annual meeting. Among the reports entered into the proceedings was one of the Committee on National Parks. The committee was made up of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harris Reynolds, Stephen Child, Percival Gallagher, and Warren H. Manning, and it had been formed on the recommendation of ASLA President James Sturgis Pray in 1915, part of a groundswell of unease that had been brewing for several years over the fractured administration of the national parks.
The passage of the National Park Service Organic Act on August 25, 1916, established the park service and its mission, and though it has been amended many times, and threatened many more times than that, it remains, 100 years hence, our primary apparatus for preserving and interpreting the national parks. Ethan Carr, FASLA, the landscape historian and author of Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture & the National Park Service, writes that the act itself was drafted in a series of meetings that included Olmsted, Representative William Kent of California, Robert Sterling Yard, J. Horace McFarland, Robert B. Marshall, and Horace M. Albright, but it is to Olmsted that the well-known wording in the act?s opening section is attributed. ?The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use ...