CONSERVATION HALL OF FAME - From His Energy and Creativity, America's National Park System Evolved

National Wildlife, Oct-Nov, 2000

Yellowstone's grizzlies gained a powerful ally in 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed Stephen T. Mather as the first director of the National Park Service. Over the next 12 years, Mather not only improved conditions and management practices at the existing parks and monuments, but also greatly increased the size of the agency's holdings. In recognition of his efforts, Mather was inducted into the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame in 1969.

Unlike many of the early twentieth-century conservationists who became leaders in America's budding natural-resource agencies, Stephen T. Mather came from neither a government nor a science background. Born in San Francisco in 1867, he went on to attend the University of California before becoming a journalist. But after working for five years as a reporter for The New York Sun, he quit to join his father in the borax business.

The younger Mather soon earned a reputation as an advertising and promotions wiz, creating the famous 20-mule-team-borax logo for the company. An aggressive businessman, he became wealthy within a decade and by the time he was in his mid-forties, he had retired from the company to pursue other interests.

Among those interests were wildlife and the outdoors. During a 1914 backpacking trip with his wife and daughter in Yosemite, Mather was upset by the conditions of the California national park. Upon returning home, he wrote to Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane. The secretary quickly challenged the businessman to come to Washington, D.C., and do something about his concerns.

Moving to the nation's capital, Mather assumed office as park administrator on January 21, 1915, intending to serve for only one year. Instead, he stayed until a stroke in 1928 forced his retirement a year before he died in January 1930.

Mather's first task at the Interior Department was to create an agency that would oversee the national parks and monuments, which in most cases were plagued with problems. But not everyone shared his views about the best way to use public lands. Some powerful government leaders wanted to use such lands only for economic purposes.

To fight these adversaries, Mather aligned with politically savvy park advocates such as California representative William Kent, who in 1908 had given the federal government the land that became Muir Woods National Monument, and Gilbert Grosvenor, founder of the National Geographic Society. They and others helped Mather draft the law that President Wilson signed in August 1916, creating the National Park Service.

Mather believed that for the park system to work, he needed to get people into the parks. As the agency's first director, he initiated efforts to build comfortable lodges and good roads in the parks to attract the increasing number of automobile drivers who took to the highways after World War I. Mather also made personal loans to concessioners for improvements to facilities. The plans began to pay off as park visitation increased.

Mather's personal financing of the agency's operations was not limited to concessions. For a number of years, he also paid nearly half the salaries of upper-level staff and bought additional parklands out of money from his own pocket in an era when the agency's annual budget was only $20,000.

Park expansion was another of Mather's priorities and he proved a success in this endeavor, too, bringing into the system such crown jewels as Zion, Grand Canyon and Acadia National Parks (Acadia was the first eastern U.S. park, originally called Lafayette). He also won congressional authorization for the Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks. During his years as director, the acreage managed by the park service almost doubled, from 4,751,992 acres to 8,275,835 acres.

Mather's programs set the stage for future park management. Today, as a tribute to his legacy, every national park and monument bears a plaque that reads: "He laid the foundation of the National Park Service, defining and establishing the policies under which its areas shall be developed and conserved unimpaired for future generations. There will never come an end to the good that he has done."-Robert Darland