History Pod Video… A precedent for setting aside areas of outstanding natural beauty and historic importance in America began with the Yosemite Grant in 1864. This ceded the area to the state of California for both preservation and public use. Eight years later, in 1872, Wyoming’s Yellowstone became the world’s first official national park.
By 1916 almost 40 separate national parks and dozens of monuments and historic sites had been designated across the United States. Nevertheless, the management of the sites was haphazard with most being administered individually rather than by a national organization.
In Yellowstone, for example, the first superintendent had lacked any financial means to protect the park as he had no salary, funding or staff. Consequently, by the second decade of the twentieth century, there was growing public support for a federal service to properly manage the parks and protect them against poachers and vandals.
Inspired by the influential naturalist John Muir, industrialist Stephen Mather was a major force for lobbying in Washington in favour of legislation to create a federal bureau to oversee the national parks. Eventually, forty-four years after the establishment of Yellowstone, the service was created when President Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act on 25 August, 1916. The Act established the service within the United States Department of the Interior.
As the first Director of the National Parks Service, Mather oversaw the introduction of park rangers and developments such as concessions and roads that continue to bring millions of people to marvel at the splendour of the natural world.
