Key takeaways
- President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in 1864, and Yellowstone became the world's first national park in 1872.
- As president, Theodore Roosevelt protected roughly 230 million acres of public land, including 150 national forests, 18 national monuments, and five national parks.
- The National Park Service was created when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act on August 25, 1916.
- The system now spans 433 sites and more than 85 million acres, from the 91-acre Gateway Arch to 13.2-million-acre Wrangell–St. Elias.
On a May morning in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt woke up under a fresh layer of snow in Yosemite's high country, the granite domes vanishing into clouds around his bedroll. The sitting president had slipped away from his cook, his aides, and the ceremony of the office to spend three nights in the backcountry with a wiry, Scottish-born naturalist named John Muir. "I do not want anyone with me but you, and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you," Roosevelt had written to Muir two months earlier, according to the National Park Service. When roughly five inches of snow fell overnight, Roosevelt was delighted rather than miserable. "This is bullier yet," he said. For three days the most powerful man in the country slept on pine boughs, talked forests late into the night, and let Muir work on him.
That camping trip is one of the reasons Americans tend to credit Roosevelt with inventing the national parks. By the time he and Muir stood among the giant sequoias — "a temple greater than any human architect could by any possibility build," in Roosevelt's phrase — the idea of setting land aside for the public was already four decades old. What Roosevelt did was take a fragile precedent and make it permanent. The country he helped shape now protects 63 national parks and 433 sites in all, ranging from a 91-acre arch on a city riverfront to a roadless wilderness above the Arctic Circle.
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Did Teddy Roosevelt start the national parks?
The first move to formally protect natural areas came from Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of the Civil War, on June 30, 1864, Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, handing Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to California to be preserved. It was, the Park Service calls it, "the birth of the national park concept, since this was the first time in history that land was set aside purely for preservation and recreation for all people." Eight years later, Congress went further. “On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law. The world's first national park was born," the Park Service records.
Roosevelt inherited that idea and poured a presidency into it: In 1906 he signed the Antiquities Act, which let presidents protect land by proclamation, and he used it within months to declare Wyoming's Devils Tower the country's first national monument. All told, between 1901 and 1909 he safeguarded some 230 million acres of public land, establishing 150 national forests, 18 national monuments, five national parks, and 55 federal bird reservations and game preserves, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Muir had spent those Yosemite evenings making his case around the campfire. "I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves, and the destructive work of lumbermen and other spoilers of the forest," Muir later wrote. Decades later, Roosevelt's distant cousin Franklin would extend the work, sending Civilian Conservation Corps crews into the parks to build trails and plant trees through the Great Depression.
How the National Park Service was born
For all that protected acreage, no single agency ran it. Parks were managed piecemeal by the Army and the Interior Department, and the weakness of that arrangement became clear over Hetch Hetchy, a glacial valley inside Yosemite that San Francisco wanted to dam for drinking water. Muir and his allies fought the plan for years, but in 1913 Congress permitted the dam anyway. The loss convinced conservationists that the parks needed a unified guardian.
They got one on August 25, 1916, when Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act. The law charged the new service to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." A borax-mining executive named Stephen Mather became its first director, and he ran the parks like a showman, courting the press, wooing railroads, and pushing a network of roads so ordinary families could reach the places Roosevelt and Muir had reached on horseback. Mather understood something that still rings true: a park system survives only if enough people have actually spent time inside one, taking in its natural beauty.
From the smallest to the biggest to the most remote park
A century of that work produced a system with almost comic range. The smallest of the 63 national parks sits in the middle of a downtown. Gateway Arch National Park covers just 91 acres on the St. Louis riverfront, renamed from the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 2018, and you can walk its full length in an afternoon.
Fly northwest and the scale inverts entirely. Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska is "the largest national park in the United States," spreading across 13.2 million acres — an expanse the Park Service likes to point out equals Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Switzerland combined. Between those two poles lie glaciers and deserts, swamps and reefs, cave systems and old-growth groves, a portfolio of American landscapes assembled one law and one proclamation at a time. Keep going to the edges of the map and you find the parks almost no one sees. Gates of the Arctic lies north of the Arctic Circle, a landscape so untouched that "no roads enter the park, nor do any trails mark the landscape," which leaves it one of the least-visited and least-developed corners of the entire system. Farther still, some 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii, the National Park of American Samoa protects tropical rainforest and coral reef below the equator and counts itself one of the most remote parks in the country.
The threats facing the national parks
The National Park Service has lost 24 percent of its permanent staff since January 2025, even as visitation climbs to new highs, leaving fewer rangers to maintain trails, staff visitor centers, and respond to emergencies across all those millions of acres. "National parks cannot properly function at the staffing levels this administration has reduced them to," Theresa Pierno, president and chief executive of the National Parks Conservation Association, said. It is a similar tension to what Muir named around a campfire more than a century ago, between the country's appetite for its wild places and its willingness to protect them.
But despite the strains, Americans keep showing up. In 2024 the parks logged more than 300 million recreation visits — a record — and that traffic is an economic engine as much as a cultural one. Visitor spending near the parks reached $29 billion and rippled out to $56.3 billion in economic output and $18.8 billion in labor income across the country, with lodging and restaurants in gateway towns drawing the largest share. "National parks deliver a clear economic return, supporting communities, driving tourism, and strengthening local economies in every state," Kevin J. Lilly, acting assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, said in a statement.
The pride runs deeper than the receipts. "There is nothing so American as our national parks," Franklin Roosevelt told the country in a 1934 radio address from Glacier National Park. "The scenery and wild life are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native." The writer Wallace Stegner put it more plainly still, calling the parks "the best idea we ever had," a phrase Ken Burns borrowed for his 2009 PBS documentary series.
National parks, national forests, and how to help
Parks are only part of the picture. National forests, managed by the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, rather than the Park Service, cover even more ground and answer to a different mandate, balancing recreation and wildlife habitat with timber, grazing, and clean water. It’s where One Tree Planted focuses much of its restoration work in the U.S., partnering with the Forest Service to replant fire-scarred and degraded national forests so their watersheds and wildlife hold up for the next century. Roosevelt underscored the stakes in Yosemite in 1903, urging that the sequoias and valleys be preserved “for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred." Keeping that promise is still, mostly, a matter of showing up.
