A dam, an angry letter, and a Chicago borax millionaire. The story of how forty years of scattered national parks became one agency on 25 August 1916.
On 25 August 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act. The parks themselves are older: Yellowstone was designated in 1872, forty-four years before there was an agency to run it.
Stephen Mather, a Chicago businessman and Sierra Club mountaineer, who served from 1917 until 1929. His assistant Horace Albright succeeded him and led the agency until 1933.
The 1916 law that created the agency and gave it its mandate: conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife, while providing for public enjoyment in a way that leaves them unimpaired for future generations. That double instruction is still called the dual mandate.
The damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite, approved by Congress in 1913, showed that a park designation alone protected nothing. Conservationists concluded they needed a permanent federal bureau, not just individual designations.
Yellowstone, established in 1872. It was managed by the Army for much of its early history because no civilian agency existed to do the job.
