History of The National Park Service - Growth, 1933-1966

Growth, 1933-1966

The long period between 1933 and 1964, began with the need to assimilate 71 diverse areas into the System. Among many other measures in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted a broad program of natural resource conservation implemented in large part through the newly created Civilian Conservation Corps. At the program's peak in 1935, the Service had 600 CCC camps, 118 of them assigned to National Park System areas and 482 to State Parks, employing approximately 120,000 enrollees and 6,000 professionally trained supervisors.

By mid-century, a great and growing backlog of deferred park maintenance and development projects, posed vast new problems for the Service and System. It was an era marked by the dramatic inauguration and prosecution of Mission 66, the emergence of a national "crisis in outdoor recreation," creation of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, and mounting national concern for better preservation of America's vanishing wilderness.

Between the Reorganization of 1933 and the Reorganization of 1964, 1 102 areas were added to the System as defined today, increasing the total number from 137 to 239 The distribution of the new areas among categories is significant. Of the new additions, 11 were "Natural Areas", increasing their number from 58 to 69 or 19%. Seventy-five were "Historical Areas", increasing their number from 77 to 152 or 96%. Fifteen were "Recreation Areas", increasing their number from one to 16, or 1500%. It is clear that during this period the growth rate for Natural Areas noticeably diminished from previous levels and by comparison with the rate for other categories, even though very important additions of natural lands were still being made. On the other hand the growth rates for Historical and Recreation Areas accelerated sharply. It took the Service a generation, from 1933 to 1964, to assimilate these 102 diverse new areas and the 71 areas added by the Reorganization of 1933 and incorporate them securely into one National Park System.