Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction [Paperback]

Professor Linda Flint McClelland (Author), Professor John S. Reynolds (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 18, 1997

Since its founding in 1916, the National Park Service has been charged with two equally important and often conflicting missions: to preserve our country's natural wonders for future generations and to develop national parks for the appreciation and enjoyment of visitors. Recalling the era of the great lodges at Yellowstone and Yosemite, Building the National Parks tells the story of how the new bureau's landscape designers, architects, and engineers met each of these challenges, forging a rich legacy of buildings, roads, and trails that both harmonized with the natural scenery and accommodated visitors to the parks. Their achievements -- detailed for the first time here -- have greatly influenced the design of state and local parks and other recreational areas across the United States.

Planners realized the twin goals of accessibility and preservation by developing a distinctive style of naturalistic design. Rooted in the nineteenth-century rustic gardening tradition popularized in the United States by Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing, this style emphasized scenic views, variations in topography, and natural features such as vegetation, streams, and rock outcroppings. During the formative years of the National Park Service -- from 1916 to 1942 and particularly through the public works projects of the New Deal -- dozens of projects were completed in such parks as the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, Mount Ranier, Acadia, Carlsbad Cavern, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Yosemite in the style that became inseparable from the natural identity of each park.

Landscape architects and civil engineers provided safe and convenient access on roads that followed nature's contours and afforded stunning scenic vistas. Carefully planned networks of trails and overlooks aided the service in protecting the parks and also gave visitors access to otherwise hidden wonders. Lodging facilities and sites for camping and picnicking, as well as ranger stations and park museums, were fashioned from local materials with naturalistic or pioneer building techniques.

McClelland's story of these early years, illustrated with 118 rare, archival photographs, is one of remarkable feats of engineering and consistently responsible stewardship. Concluding with a description of national park development since 1942, Building the National Parks records the lasting contributions of the National Park Service's designers and engineers.

Editorial Reviews

Review

""In an era in which the National Park Service spends $600,000 to build a comfort station, this book attempts to explain the rationale for the agency's decisions on what structures to put where. As with almost every facet of park-making in the United States, the hand of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted can be seen in the built environment of the national parks." -- Washington Post

"Building the National Parks is a detailed, descriptive chronicle of the efforts of the nascent National Park Service to develop the parks in a harmonious fashion... The author provides useful and interesting sections on some of the landscape architects and designers who worked in the national parks." -- Robert Pavlik, California History Action

Book Description

Recalling the era of the great lodges at Yellowstone and Yosemite -- the story of the landscape designers, architects, and engineers who built America's scenic national parks.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (November 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801855837
• ISBN-13: 978-0801855832
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,325,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too many facts, not enough analysis, November 5, 2004

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Ranger Reub (Cedar City, UT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Paperback)

The National Park Service's (NPS) 1918 statement of policy says that "in the construction of roads, trails, buildings and other improvements, particular attention must be devoted always to the harmonizing of these improvements with the landscape" (123). Linda Flint McLelland's Building the National Parks explains how this was done in the early days of the NPS. Over and over again, the book reminds readers that such improvements, especially those in the Civilian Conservation Corps era, were built so that the landscape was not injured and so they would, as much as they could, blend in to the natural environment.

The volume's explanation of the early construction of campgrounds is one of the more interesting examples of how early NPS landscaping attempted to lessen the impact on the environment. Plant pathologist E.P. Meinecke, known as the father of the modern campground, discovered that human activity caused a myriad of ecological problems and therefore applied his understanding of plant ecology to campground planning and design (279). Meinecke chose campground sites by type of soil, density of vegetation and then "divided up into individual campsites of legitimate sizes, each one offering approximately as much privacy, shade, and other advantages as the other (278). Environmentally conscious readers will hopefully think twice before camping somewhere outside an established campground.

The book presents facts and statistics well, but doesn't tell an engaging story. For instance, the volume lists the overall park visitation statistics from 1914 to 1918, which demonstrates a significant rise, but never offers any analysis on why those numbers augmented. Many journalism professors tell their students to "show, don't tell." McLelland's text tells, but doesn't show. Many pages feel like an organized list of particulars in paragraph form, offering little or no analysis. The pictures and their accompanying captions tell the best story. When investigating landscapes and landscape elements, visual presentation shows more and leaves a more lasting impression than any page of text.

Building the National Parks' title is somewhat misleading. The book also discusses landscaping in numerous state parks across the country. "Building Yosemite and Other Selected National Parks" would not be a far-fetched title as McLelland chronicles nearly every landscape decision at Yosemite and doesn't give other deserving national parks equal share. Perhaps 1916-1940 should be placed in the title after "construction," since that period is the book's focus. The last chapter covers the history of landscaping since 1940 and proves itself as a fascinating portion of the volume, explaining that the "naturalistic harmonies" in NPS landscape design once strictly adhered to have been thrown by the wayside with emphasis on functionality and safety rather than aesthetics (462-467). It goes to show that the period of 1916-1940 was truly the golden age of the national parks.