The National Park Service Is Established (1916)
On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act, creating a federal agency dedicated to preserving America's most treasured landscapes and historic sites. The new bureau, housed within the Department of the Interior, was tasked with a dual mission: conserving natural and cultural resources while making them accessible for public enjoyment. This single piece of legislation reshaped how the United States would protect its wilderness and heritage for the next century and beyond.
A Patchwork System in Need of Direction
Before 1916, the United States already had national parks—Yellowstone had been designated in 1872, followed by Yosemite, Sequoia, and Mount Rainier—but no single agency managed them. Individual parks were overseen haphazardly by the Army, the Interior Department, or local caretakers, with wildly inconsistent rules and inadequate funding. Poachers, vandals, and commercial developers often exploited weak enforcement. Stephen Mather, a wealthy businessman and passionate conservationist, toured these parks in the early 1910s and was appalled by the mismanagement he witnessed. Working with journalist Robert Sterling Yard, Mather launched a publicity campaign, funded largely out of his own pocket, to convince Congress and the public that America's natural wonders deserved unified, professional stewardship. Interior Secretary Franklin Lane recruited Mather in 1915 to help draft legislation and lobby lawmakers. Their efforts culminated in the National Park Service Organic Act, which Congress passed and President Wilson signed into law on August 25, 1916, formally establishing the National Park Service as a distinct bureau within the Interior Department.
Did You Know?
Stephen Mather, the National Park Service's first director, personally spent large sums of his own fortune promoting national parks and even paid some early NPS employees' salaries himself when Congress failed to provide adequate funding.
The Organic Act's Enduring Mandate
The 1916 Organic Act gave the new agency a mission statement that remains its guiding principle today: to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife within park boundaries while providing for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. This balance between preservation and public access has proven both the agency's greatest strength and its most persistent challenge. Stephen Mather became the Service's first director in 1917, serving until 1929, and he set an ambitious tone—building roads, lodges, and trails to draw visitors while simultaneously fighting to expand protected acreage. His successor, Horace Albright, continued this work, and the agency steadily absorbed additional national monuments, battlefields, and historic sites, expanding its scope far beyond scenic wilderness alone. By the 1930s, the Service had become the central authority for preserving both natural landscapes and the nation's historical memory, a scope no other country's park system quite matched.
Growth Into a National Institution
Over the following century, the National Park Service grew from managing a handful of scenic reserves into overseeing more than 400 individual units spanning over 84 million acres, including national parks, monuments, seashores, historic sites, and memorials such as the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. The Civilian Conservation Corps, active during the Great Depression under Franklin Roosevelt, built much of the infrastructure still used in parks today, from stone lodges to hiking trails. The Mission 66 program of the 1950s and 1960s modernized visitor facilities ahead of the Service's 50th anniversary. Today the agency employs roughly 20,000 people and welcomes over 300 million visitors annually, making it one of the most visible and beloved federal agencies in American life. Its headquarters remains in Washington, D.C., inside the Interior Department's main building, close to the political center that gave it birth in 1916.