Park America history

Facing a park system with a deteriorating infrastructure overwhelmed by the postwar travel boom, he responded with Mission 66, a ten-year, billion-dollar program to upgrade facilities, staffing, and resource management by the bureau's fiftieth anniversary in 1966.

NPF was established in 1967 by a Congressional charter as a way for private citizens to directly support our parks – be it through financial contributions, land donation, or other means – so that NPS could have direct support for the expansion and further protection of our national parks.

Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City and Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, both established in 1972, were precedents for other national recreation areas serving metropolitan Cleveland, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.

On July 4, 1976, President Gerald R. Ford, once a seasonal ranger at Yellowstone, spoke at Independence Hall and signed legislation making Valley Forge a national historical park.

The Reagan administration and the Congress that took office with it in 1981 were of like mind.

William Penn Mott, Jr., a landscape architect who had directed California's state parks when Ronald Reagan was governor, followed Dickenson in 1985.

In 1990 the Richard King Mellon Foundation made the largest single park donation yet: $10.5 million for additional lands at the Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg Civil War battlefields, Pecos National Historical Park, and Shenandoah National Park.

In 1997 Robert Stanton became the first career Park Service employee since Dickenson to head the bureau.

And the threats haven’t just been financial: in late 2017, Congress’s Natural Resources Committee passed an act that makes it harder to create new National Monuments.

In 2020, NPF provided funding and support for the construction of a new visitor center at the iconic Pullman Administration Clock Tower Building at Pullman National Monument.