History
Local citizens, concerned about plans to turn the hammock into farmland, acquired the property in 1931 and promoted it as a candidate for national park status, an early example of grass-roots public support for environmental preservation. One of the prime movers behind the effort was Mrs. Margaret Roebling, daughter-in-law of Washington Augustus Roebling.
Though it never reached national park status, it became one of the four original Florida State Parks when the state park system was created in 1935. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established during the Great Depression, built a camp at Highlands Hammock as a headquarters, and developed additional park facilities and the beginnings of a botanical garden.
Read more about this topic: Highlands Hammock State Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)